The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, Volume I: Classical Social Theorists (Blackwell Companions to Sociology)

the wiley-blackwell companion to ma jor social theorists

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WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Sociology provide introductions to emerging topics and theoretical orientations in sociology as well as presenting the scope and quality of the discipline as it is currently configured. Essays in the Companions tackle broad themes or central puzzles within the field and are authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research and reflection on the questions and controversies that have activated interest in their area. This authoritative series will interest those studying sociology at advanced undergraduate or graduate level as well as scholars in the social sciences and informed readers in applied disciplines. The Blackwell Companion to Major Classical Social Theorists Edited by George Ritzer The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists Edited by George Ritzer The Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology Edited by Kate Nash and Alan Scott The Blackwell Companion to Sociology Edited by Judith R. Blau The Blackwell Companion to Criminology Edited by Colin Sumner The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements Edited by David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Families Edited by Jacqueline Scott, Judith Treas, and Martin Richards The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society Edited by Austin Sarat The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture Edited by Mark Jacobs and Nancy Hanrahan The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities Edited by Mary Romero and Eric Margolis The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory Edited by Bryan S. Turner The New Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology Edited by William C. Cockerham The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion Edited by Bryan S. Turner The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky

Also available: The Blackwell Companion to Globalization Edited by George Ritzer The New Blackwell Companion to the City Edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson

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the wiley-blackwell companion to

Major Social Theorists Volume I Classical Social Theorists

edited by

george ritzer and jeffrey stepnisky

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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This edition first published 2011 © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Wiley-Blackwell companion to major social theorists / edited by George Ritzer, Jeffrey Stepnisky. p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to sociology; 27) Published in 2000 under title: The Blackwell companion to major social theorists. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4443-3078-6 (hardback) 1. Sociologists–Biography. 2. Social sciences–Philosophy. I. Ritzer, George. II. Stepnisky, Jeffrey. III. Blackwell companion to major social theorists. IV. Title: Major social theorists. HM478.B583 2011 301.092′2–dc22 [B] 2011003987 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 10/12.5pt Sabon by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

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Contents

List of Contributors Preface Introduction Jeffrey Stepnisky

vii xiii 1

1 Ibn Khaldu-n Syed Farid Alatas

12

2 Auguste Comte Mary Pickering

30

3 Harriet Martineau Susan Hoecker-Drysdale

61

4 Alexis de Tocqueville Laura Janara

96

5 Karl Marx Robert J. Antonio

115

6 Herbert Spencer Mark Francis

165

7 Thorstein Veblen Ken McCormick

185

8 Georg Simmel Lawrence A. Scaff

205

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vi 9

contents Émile Durkheim Tara Milbrandt and Frank Pearce

236

10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Judith A. Allen

283

11 Max Weber Stephen Kalberg

305

12 George Herbert Mead Dmitri N. Shalin

373

13 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois Paul C. Taylor

426

14 Joseph A. Schumpeter Harry F. Dahms

448

15 Karl Mannheim Colin Loader

469

16 Alfred Schutz Jochen Dreher

489

17 Talcott Parsons Victor Lidz

511

18 Theodor W. Adorno Harry F. Dahms

559

Index

582

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Contributors

Syed Farid Alatas, a Malaysian national, is Head of the Department of Malay Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore where he has been since 1992. He obtained his PhD in sociology from the Johns Hopkins University in 1991. He lectured at the University of Malaya in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies prior to his appointment at Singapore. His books include Democracy and Authoritarianism: The Rise of the Post-Colonial State in Indonesia and Malaysia (1997) and Alternative Discourse in Asian Social Science: Responses to Eurocentrism (2006). He has also edited Asian Inter-Faith Dialogue: Perspectives on Religion, Education and Social Cohesion (2003) and Asian Anthropology, with Jan van Bremen and Eyal Ben-Ari (2005). He is currently in the final stages of preparing a book manuscript for publication on the thought of Ibn Khaldu- n and is also working on another book on the Ba‘alawi Sufi order. Judith A. Allen is a cultural and social historian and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her research centers on intersections between historical forms of feminism, sexualities, and knowledge formations. In addition to articles and book chapters on feminist theory, abortion, sexology, masculinities, and interdisciplinary gender studies research, her books include: Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880 (1990), Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism 1880–1925 (1994), and The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, and Progressivism (2009). Currently, she is preparing a study of late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century British heteroerotics and birth control. Robert J. Antonio teaches sociology at the University of Kansas. He is the editor of Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Commentary (Blackwell, 2003). He has written widely on classical, contemporary, and critical theory. He has also done work on various facets of globalization, frequently collaborating on that topic with Alessandro Bonanno. Harry F. Dahms is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Social Justice at the University of

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Tennessee, Knoxville, where he was Associate Head and Director of Graduate Studies (2006–10). He is also affiliated to the Faculty at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He received his PhD from the New School for Social Research in 1993. He is the editor of the book series Current Perspectives in Social Theory: No Social Science Without Critical Theory (2008); Nature, Knowledge, and Negation (2009); and Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes (with L. Hazelrigg, 2010). His publications include: Transformations of Capitalism: Economy, Society, and the State in Modern Times (editor, 2000); and articles (in Sociological Theory, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Soziale Welt, Soundings, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society), and book chapters and encyclopedia entries relating to critical theory, democracy, alienation, and modernity. Jochen Dreher (Dr. rer. soc.) is chief executive officer of the Social Science Archive (Alfred Schutz Memorial Archive) of the University of Konstanz, Germany, and a lecturer in sociology at the University of Konstanz as well as the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. His scientific research concentrates on sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture, phenomenology, social theory, qualitative social research, sociology of organization, intercultural communication and the sociological theory of the symbol. He co-edited volume 4 of the German edition of Alfred Schutz’s works, Alfred Schütz Werkausgabe (ASW). Zur Methodologie der Sozialwissenschaften (2010), and is currently co-editing volume 8, Schriften zur Literatur (2011). His most significant publications related to Schutzian thought are: The Symbol and the Theory of the Life-World: “The Transcendences of the Life-World and their Overcoming by Signs and Symbols” (2003) and Phenomenology of Friendship: Construction and Constitution of an Existential Social Relationship (2009). Mark Francis is Professor of Political Science in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand where he teaches social and political theory. He was educated at UBC, Toronto and Cambridge, and was the Jules and Gabrielle Léger Fellow in Canada and the Fowler Hamilton Senior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. His publications include: Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (2007); “Social Darwinism and the Construction of Institutionalized Racism in Australia,” Journal of Australian Studies (1996); and Governors and Settlers: Images of Authority in the British Colonies, 1820–60 (1992). He is currently engaged in research projects on the political and social uses of civilization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Susan Hoecker-Drysdale has been a Research Professor-in-Residence, Sociology, at American University, Washington DC, since 2007, and previously was Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Iowa, 2002–5. She is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. She has been a Visiting Fellow, School of Advanced Study, and Visiting Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, at the University of London. Her publications include: Harriet Martineau: Studies of America, 1831–1868 (eight edited volumes, 2004); Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives (co-edited with Michael R. Hill, 2002); Harriet Martineau: First Woman Sociologist (1992); and recent articles: “Political Economy and Journalism” (2009), “Witch Hunts and Enlightenment: Harriet Martineau’s

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Critical Reflections on Salem” (2008); “The History of Sociology: The North American Perspective” (with John P. Drysdale, 2007); “The Nobleness of Labor and the Instinct of Workmanship: Nature, Work, Gender and Politics in Harriet Martineau and Thorstein Veblen” (2007). Her areas of interest include sociological theory, feminist theory, the history of sociology, and gender. She is a founding member of the British Martineau Society and the Harriet Martineau Sociological Society. She is currently working on The Feminist Tradition in Sociology (Wiley-Blackwell). Laura Janara is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. In 2003 her book, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy and Passion in Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (2002), won the Best First Book prize from the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. In 2004 it was shortlisted by the Canadian Political Science Association for the C.B. Macpherson Prize for Best Book in Political Philosophy, 2002–4. Professor Janara has also written on Machiavelli, and continues to work on the problem of familial thinking in modern democratic political thought and discourse. In addition, she is engaged with the question of nonhuman life and how it is situated in political theory and public life. Stephen Kalberg teaches classical and contemporary theory, political sociology, and comparative-historical sociology at Boston University. He is the author of Max Weber’s Comparative-Historical Sociology (1996), translator of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2001, 2010), and editor of Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity (2005) and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West (2009). His introduction to Max Weber, which draws heavily upon his chapter in this volume, has been published in German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Turkish. He is also the author of Les Idées, les Valeurs et les Intérêts: Introduction à la Sociologie de Max Weber (2010), Max Weber’s Sociology of Civilizations (forthcoming), and numerous studies that compare German and American societies. His articles on Weber include, most recently, “Max Weber’s Analysis of the Unique American Civic Sphere” (2009). Victor Lidz received his BA cum laude in government in 1962 and his PhD in sociology in 1976 from Harvard University. As a graduate student, he studied with Talcott Parsons, Robert N. Bellah, Erik Erikson, David Maybury-Lewis, and Ezra Vogel among others and served as research assistant to Talcott Parsons from 1963 to 1968. He has held faculty appointments at the University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania, and co-taught seminars with Talcott Parsons when the latter served as visiting professor at both of those institutions. Lidz has served as a visiting faculty member at St. Joseph’s University and at Haverford College, the latter on several occasions over 25 years. He is presently Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Director of its Division of Substance Abuse Treatment and Research at the Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. He has published extensively on the writings of Talcott Parsons and on the theory of social action. Colin Loader is Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His primary area of research is the history of German sociology from 1890 to 1933.

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In addition to being the author or co-author of three books about Karl Mannheim, he has co-edited a volume of Mannheim’s writings. He has written articles on Max Weber and Werner Sombart, and he is currently working on a book-length study of Alfred Weber. Ken McCormick has been a faculty member at the University of Northern Iowa since graduating in 1982 from Iowa State University. His book, Veblen in Plain English: A Complete Introduction to Thorstein Veblen’s Economics (2006), has been very well received and led to an appearance on The Bob Edwards Show. One of his journal articles on Veblen has been twice reprinted in books, and another of his articles on Veblen has also been reprinted. He has published over 30 articles in outlets such as the Review of Social Economy, Eastern Economic Journal, Pacific Economic Review, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Applied Economics, and Journal of Economics. He has been awarded three grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. McCormick has received the Regent’s Award for Faculty Excellence as well as UNI’s university-wide teaching award. Tara Milbrandt received her PhD in sociology from York University in Toronto in 2006. Her dissertation, “Public Space, Collective Desire and the Contested City,” explored conceptions of social order and collective vitality underpinning everyday/ night relations to public space in the city. She now works as Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta’s liberal arts campus of Augustana, where she teaches core courses in classical and contemporary sociological theory as well as courses in community, culture, and media. Drawing upon classical and interpretive sociological theory, her ongoing research explores the negotiated order of public spaces in contemporary society, including forms of social connectivity that correspond with the newly pervasive presence of visual recording technologies. Inspired by the Durkheimian endeavor to analyze the social world on its own terms, she is currently writing a book that explores the constitutive power of the visual “record” in twenty-first-century Canadian public life. Frank Pearce is a Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where he teaches classical and contemporary social theory and the sociology of crime and law. He has also worked at other universities in Canada, the United States, and Britain. His publications are in the area of social theory (particularly Foucault, Marx, and Durkheim) and on corporate crime. In his book The Radical Durkheim (2nd edn., 2001) and in other writing he has provided a rigorous account of the conceptual structures of both the dominant and subordinate discourses in Durkheim’s work and developed these in fruitful and innovative directions. His most recent book is Critical Realism and the Social Sciences: Heterodox Elaborations (with Jon Frauley, 2007), and other books include Toxic Capitalism: Corporate Crime and the Chemical Industry (with Steve Tombs, 1998). He is currently writing a book on human sacrifice. Mary Pickering is Professor of Modern European History at San Jose State University, specializing in cultural/intellectual history, social history, and women’s history. She received her BA, MA, and PhD from Harvard University and holds an advanced

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graduate degree (DEA) from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (“Sciences Po”) in Paris. She has written articles for the Journal of the History of Ideas, French Historical Studies, Journal of Women’s History, Historical Reflections, Revue philosophique, and Revue internationale de philosophie. The first volume of her book Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography was published in 1993. The second and third volumes appeared in 2009. George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. Among his awards: Honorary Doctorate from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia; Honorary Patron, University Philosophical Society, Trinity College, Dublin; the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contribution to Teaching Award. He has chaired the American Sociological Association’s Section on Theoretical Sociology, as well as the Section on Organizations and Occupations, and is currently the first Chair of the section-in-formation on Global and Transnational Sociology. His books include: The McDonaldization of Society (5th edn., 2008), Enchanting a Disenchanted World (3rd edn., 2010), and The Globalization of Nothing (2nd edn., 2007). His most recent book is Globalization: A Basic Text (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and he edited The Blackwell Companion to Globalization (2008). He is currently working on The Outsourcing of Everything (with Craig Lair, forthcoming). He was founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture. He also edited the eleven-volume Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007) and the two-volume Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2005) and is currently editing the Encyclopedia of Globalization (forthcoming). Current essays deal with the “prosumer” (one who simultaneously produces and consumes), especially on Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia and Facebook, and he is editing a special double-issue of the American Behavioral Scientist on that topic. His books have been translated into over 20 languages, with over a dozen translations of The McDonaldization of Society alone. Lawrence A. Scaff is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Wayne State University, Detroit. He has published extensively in social theory, and he is the author of Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (1991), and of the forthcoming book, Max Weber in America. Dmitri N. Shalin is Professor of Sociology, Chair of the Sociology Department, Director of the UNLV Center for Democratic Culture, Coordinator of the Justice & Democracy Forum series, and Co-Director of the International Biography Initiative, Erving Goffman Archives and Yuri Levada Archives. His research interests and publications are in the areas of pragmatism, social theory, emotional intelligence, biocritical studies, democratic culture, and Russian society. He is the author of Pragmatism and Democracy: Studies in History, Social Theory and Progressive Politics, and editor of Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of Postcommunist Consciousness, The Social Health of Nevada: Leading Indicators and Quality of Life in the Silver State, and Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives. Jeffrey Stepnisky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He teaches courses in social theory, social psychology, and the sociology of mental illness. His research interests are in the area of self

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and subjectivity with particular attention to the impact of contemporary biotechnologies, such as antidepressants, on self-understanding. He has published papers on this topic in Social Theory & Health and The Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. He also has an ongoing interest in the work and writing of Canadian philosopher and social theorist Charles Taylor. Paul C. Taylor is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, where he also serves as the founding director of the Program on Philosophy After Apartheid at the Rock Ethics Institute. Professor Taylor received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Morehouse College and his PhD in philosophy from Rutgers University. He writes on aesthetics, race theory, Africana philosophy, pragmatism, and social philosophy, and is the author of the book Race: A Philosophical Introduction (2004). His recent work includes a study of video model Vida Guerra, and keynote lectures to the Philosophical Society of South Africa, the Alain Locke Society, and the Philosophy of Education Society. He is currently at work on a book called Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).

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Preface

This volume of The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists is a significant expansion and revision of The Blackwell Companion to Major Classical Social Theorists originally published in 2000 and in slightly modified form in 2003. While the first edition featured chapters on twelve classical social theorists, this version includes eighteen essays. Eleven of the eighteen chapters are written by authors new to this edition. The authors of essays that appeared in the previous edition have thoroughly revised their pieces by re-writing parts of the original essays, adding new sections and ideas, commenting on the relevance of theory in the present moment, and updating the list of secondary sources. In addition, all essays include a feature new to this volume – a Reader’s Guide. Located at the end of each essay, this short guide gives readers a quick summary of the most important entry points into a theorist’s work. Ultimately, this companion comes together as a fresh piece of scholarship that enlarges our understanding of the major classical social theorists. The addition of six new chapters on classical theorists has allowed us to include a broader set of social theoretical perspectives. These theorists were chosen not only for their historical significance but also for their contemporary relevance. Ibn Khaldu- n offers a non-Western perspective on social theory thus addressing a need for the development of a global social theory; Tocqueville helps us to think about democracy; Schumpeter offers a unique perspective on capitalism; Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge resonates with current interests in knowledge production, particularly in the field of science and technology studies; Veblen gives yet another perspective on the economy but also articulates some of the first ideas about consumerism; and Adorno adds the neo-Marxian critical theory that was missing from the original edition and is now particularly influential in the field of cultural theory. This companion also includes a new introduction that discusses classical social theory within the context of what social theorist Charles Taylor has called “modern social imaginaries.” All of the chapters in this volume are written by contemporary theorists who are experts on the classical theorist discussed in their chapter. However, even for experts there is a great deal of work that goes into researching and writing one of these

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essays. One of the strengths of this volume is that the essays are quite deep and extensive, including not simply a rehearsal of the major features of each theorist’s ideas, but also the biographical and historical contexts that framed each theorist’s work. The editors are grateful, then, not only for the expertise of the contributors but also for the time commitment involved in writing such essays. The dedication of each contributor shows in the quality of the essays produced. The editors would also like to thank the team at Wiley-Blackwell for their efforts in bringing these volumes together. In particular, we thank Justin Vaughan who first approached us to expand and revise the volumes. Throughout the writing, editing and production process Ben Thatcher has been an invaluable resource and helpful guide. At various points, Barbara Duke, Sally Cooper, and Joanna Pyke provided helpful feedback. We are also grateful for Sarah Pearsall’s work as copy-editor. These volumes also owe something to Douglas Goodman and Todd Stillman, both of whom helped George Ritzer to edit and develop the first edition of this companion. Finally, Jeff Stepnisky would like to thank Michelle Meagher for her support and feedback throughout the editorial process. George Ritzer and Jeff Stepnisky

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Introduction JEFFREY STEPNISKY

This volume of The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists offers a comprehensive engagement with the work of 18 of the most important classical social theorists. The essays not only are intended as descriptions of the mechanics of specific theories, but also endeavor to place the work in broad social, intellectual and biographical contexts. The volume begins with a theorist writing in fourteenthcentury North Africa: Ibn Khaldu¯n. Often noted, but rarely examined on his own terms, Ibn Khaldu¯n gives us a social theory that originates in an Islamic context. We have included this essay to highlight the importance of developing a global social theory – that is a social theory that finds its roots not only in Western traditions but in a diversity of sources. That said, though a number of the other essays in this volume address global and civilizational themes (see Kalberg on Weber’s sociology of civilizations as well as Tocqueville, Martineau, Spencer, Gilman, Du Bois, and Parsons), they are largely situated in the issues and problems of European and American societies. Starting with theorists writing in the nineteenth century, this includes historical events such as the development of Enlightenment and counterEnlightenment thought, colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, the American and French revolutions, the development of socialism, as well as numerous other European revolutions. In America, key issues include those arising from the Gilded and Progressive eras as well as the suffrage movement and the first wave of feminism. Theorists working in the early twentieth century were shaped by the Communist Revolution in Russia, the Great Depression, World War I, the rise of National Socialism in Germany, and World War II. In fact, this volume ends here (at the close of World War II) with a pair of theorists – Talcott Parsons and Theodor Adorno – whose grand scope of analysis signals the end of an era in social theory. Parsons offered a style of large-scale theory building in tune with the social scientific and social democratic ambitions of post-World War II America. Adorno represented the The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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jeffrey stepnisky

counterpoint to Parsons’s approach – a critical take on extant European and North American societies, a challenge to what he called the “totally administered society.” Despite these differences each sought to grasp society as a totality; Parsons for its systemic coherence, Adorno for its irreconcilable contradictions. While Volume 1 ends with these theorists Volume 2 of this companion picks up with the theoretical positions that develop in the latter half of the twentieth century. By way of introduction to this volume, a helpful framing device is Charles Taylor’s (2004) concept of modern social imaginaries. The theorists and theories described here grow out of and contribute to the formation of modern social imaginaries. In their first instance social imaginaries are well-developed theoretical formulations. They are ideas about how the social world operates. In line with this, each of the theorists in this volume defines the nature of the social and offers a theory about how that social world operates. However, a theory only becomes a part of the social imaginary when it is incorporated into everyday life and practice. That is, the social imaginaries describe ideas that have been taken up by entire societies to shape the way they view themselves and thereby act in the world. They are taken-for-granted preconditions that influence thought, perception, action, and the material and institutional make-up of everyday life. Given this volume’s focus on the context surrounding the development of social theory, the social imaginary concept is very helpful. To a varying extent, the social theorists described in these volumes have contributed to the overall understanding of society. Many of these ideas continue to inform our lives. Even when the ideas have not been explicitly incorporated into everyday practice, most have sought to engage the world around them, some to bolster the existing imaginary, others to challenge dominant imaginaries. At a minimum, these theories are central to the composition of what we might call modern social theoretical imaginaries. That is, even though not every theorist writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is covered in this volume, the theorists chosen for this volume offer a fairly comprehensive description of the social imaginaries of the time. At this point, introductions to collections such as this one usually talk about the canon – the set of authors and works deemed central to a field of scholarship. The term social imaginaries moves us beyond that. Despite efforts to rework the canon in recent years, the term still tends to invoke a relatively staid and stuffy history of the voices that mattered. But to use the term social imaginaries emphasizes the dialogue of social theory – to see the theorists in conversation with their social conditions, their personal backgrounds, their fellow social theorists, and even the present. As for preconditions, Taylor argues that the modern West is distinct because it conceives the social as a realm separate from and prior to the political realm. Before this, people imagined themselves in relationship to religious hierarchies or elite political groupings. Obviously, the political and the religious continue to exist into the modern period, but the social is introduced as a realm that grounds these other spheres of organization. Taylor has some ideas about the character of this modern social imaginary. Most generally, it is a sphere in which people start to imagine one another in terms of mutually beneficial interactions. The organization and prosperity of society do not depend upon some extra-human force, but the kinds of relations into which people enter with one another. Though most of the theorists in this volume take the social as a separate and foundational space, what is remarkable is the struggles to get the concept right – to properly define the social and to argue on

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its behalf. Comte recognized the priority of the social when in 1839 he coined the term sociology. As Pickering shows, he resists efforts to reduce the social to other sciences such as political economy or biology and asserts that sociology is the most complex and therefore most fundamental science. Martineau draws attention to the priority and self-constituting nature of the social when she describes it as an immanent form. Durkheim clearly recognizes the priority of the social when he founds the discipline of sociology and designates its object of study the social fact. And even though Marx challenges the form that social relations take within the capitalist system, ultimately his entire theory depends upon a rejection of religious and political hierarchy and the idea that people in productive cooperation can create a society for the good of all its members. Indeed, Antonio draws attention to the primacy of the social in Marx’s thought when he, provocatively, describes Marx’s theory not as historical materialism but rather as sociological materialism. Simmel, as Scaff argues, builds his sociology out of the study of interpersonal interactions, and Mead, as Shalin shows, grounds his concept of the social in symbolic interactions. Similarly, the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, as described by Dreher, grounds his sociology of the life-world in the study of everyday life. These theorists give expression to, and then elaborate, the important modern idea that “everyday life” is a sphere of sociality in and of itself. The important point is that the modern imaginary highlights the social, in the variety of forms mentioned above, as a foundational sphere of activity. This is what makes social theory a viable topic of study and sociology a discipline in itself. But Taylor goes on to argue that the social manifests itself in three particular institutions: the economy, the public sphere, and the sovereign people. The economy, especially the free market economy imagined by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers, is a pre-political self-organizing sphere of mutually beneficial exchange. The public sphere is a space for debate that is, again, not reducible or confined to the political sphere – it is the public, broadly conceived. And the sovereign people come into being with the concept of the nation – a self-constituting group that defines itself in social and affiliative, rather than religious, terms. Though these are the most important, there are other elements of the social imaginary. Reading the following essays we see the classical social theorists contributing to our understanding of these various social imaginaries as well as introducing imaginaries not discussed by Taylor. The remainder of this introduction is organized around brief discussions of the various aspects of the social imaginary highlighted in this volume. Though these discussions resonate with Taylor’s characterization, they don’t perfectly match his breakdown because they are intended to capture themes found in the contributions to this volume.

ECONOMY The importance of the economy in modern social life is clear from the fact that almost all theorists covered in this volume discuss it, even if they do not fully theorize it. In terms of understanding the origin of this component of the social imaginary, the starting point is Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Smith conceptualizes the economy as an autonomous realm of social activity that, if properly organized, will

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bring prosperity. Smith’s attention to political economy signals the beginning of a larger intellectual process in which the economy is singled out as an important force in social life and the nature of that relation detailed. Spencer and Martineau, for example, each allocate political economy a central role in the formulation of their social theories. Furthermore, they both developed their ideas about political economy, and sociology more generally, in the public sphere. Spencer, as Francis shows us, was a well-regarded, internationally recognized, public intellectual. Martineau, as Hoecker-Drysdale discusses, published stories in pamphlets and wrote essays in widely read publications, including the 25-volume Illustrations in Political Economy. Here work and production, the impact of machinery, the division of labor, the growth of middle classes, and spreading social inequalities were treated as significant factors in the make-up of social life. Common to both Spencer and Martineau was the idea that modern capitalism is a complex organism and hence vulnerable to disruptions and instabilities. Given this complexity, it was, as Hoecker-Drysdale shows in a nicely chosen quotation from the Illustrations, the responsibility of all society’s members to understand the principles of political economy – in other words, to hold in view a clear image of the way that the economy shapes social well-being. Of course, Karl Marx also worked to bring the machinations of political economy to wider public attention, most famously in the Communist Manifesto but with greater technical detail in Capital. In both accounts the vision of economy provided by classical political economy is treated as a sham – a reification that hides the social relations, in particular the relations of inequality, that sustain the sphere of production. Even though the economy and material forces are central to Marx’s work, it is ultimately a conceptualization of the social that informs Marx’s imaginary. Humans, as Antonio emphasizes in his piece on Marx, exist in cooperative relationship with one another. Under the conditions of capitalism this cooperation continues to operate but is distorted. Antonio not only shows how this makes sense of Marx’s world, but how this view offers a compelling alternative to the current neoliberal vision. In light of recent financial collapses and clear problems with the global capitalist economy it seems that the economy cannot operate (and never really has operated) as a sphere unto itself. Instead, it is influenced and interpenetrated by various social, political, and cultural forces. Indeed, though different in many important ways, this opposition to neoclassical economics is also central to Weber’s analysis in his opus Economy and Society. Even though, as Kalberg points out, Economy and Society takes the economic domain as its analytic centerpiece, this is really an opportunity to demonstrate the autonomy and interrelationship of a number of social domains. Here, then, economy is just one piece of the puzzle in what Kalberg describes as Weber’s larger project of explaining the emergence of modern western rationality. Thorstein Veblen, presented by Ken McCormick, gives us yet another vision of the economy. Not as well known as the neoclassicists, Marxists or Weberians, Veblen nevertheless presents a welcome, socially nuanced, theory of economic action. The theory is both Darwinian and cultural. In particular, people are driven by what Veblen calls an instinct of emulation which, under the conditions of capitalism, manifests itself as conspicuous consumption – the purchase and display of commodities that demonstrate one’s social status. Even though Veblen’s broader economic theory is, as McCormick points out, under-appreciated, conspicuous consumption is a term that has entered popular discourse, and shaped the writing of theorists like Jean

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Baudrillard and Pierre Bourdieu. Veblen, then, gives us an early vision of the consumer society – a system in which individuals are swept up, almost uncontrollably, by culturally mediated consumer desires. Here Georg Simmel should also be given brief mention as he too emphasizes the cultural and psychological foundations of the economy and in particular the role that they play in establishing the value of money. Scaff captures this point when, quoting Simmel, he describes the Philosophy of Money as an effort to “construct a new storey beneath historical materialism.” Like Weber, Simmel argues that this emerging cultural foundation is based in the spirit of calculative reason. Simmel is of two minds about this foundation – on the one hand it offers freedom, on the other hand it tends toward the objectification of cultural and psychological life. The larger point though is that for Simmel money is not merely a commodity, but it is also expressive of a larger cultural ethos. Finally, Schumpeter’s work, described here by Dahms, gives us one last look at the variety of forms the economy has assumed in the modern social imaginary. Schumpeter was an interdisciplinary thinker who had an appreciation for the social, political, and cultural contexts in which economic activity was undertaken. Indeed, detailing his contributions to social theory, Dahms emphasizes Schumpeter’s reliance on neoclassical economics but also describes him as a Marxian Weberian. In particular Schumpeter relies upon these thinkers to delineate the dynamic character of early modern capitalism, described as entrepreneurial capitalism, and its eventual transformation into managerial or corporate capitalism. Unlike strict neoclassical economic theory which ultimately imagines the capitalist economy as, to use Dahms’s words, “a stationary state characterized best as a circular flow,” Schumpeter treats capitalism as an entity driven by the ever creative activities of entrepreneurs. Ironically this dynamism also entails a process of “creative destruction” – the dismantling of the structures and institutions that constitute prior forms of capitalism. In the end, while giving us a rich characterization of the various ways that capitalism has been and could be imagined, Schumpeter also gives us a picture of capitalism as an entity in a constant state of flux and flow. Indeed, this is a characterization quite close to that imagined in current discussions of globalization.

POLITICS The political is another pervasive theme in classical social theory. Again, what is important is the way that this domain is connected to the concept of society. With the modern imaginary, Taylor argues, the political becomes an expression of what are increasingly seen to be general social concerns. Politics is, as Weber defines it, the realm of power, but this is power as exercised for the so-called people rather than for a select political elite. In this context, a number of the essays in this volume offer discussions of democracy, imperialism, colonialism, and the state – all spheres in which we see the concentration and deployment of power. Janara’s essay on Tocqueville is particularly helpful in thinking about the various benefits and dangers of democracy. The concept of democracy establishes the notion of the people as a general social and political category, but the modern period has yet to work out how “people” is to be constituted, and who is to count as the people (indeed this remains a contemporary problem). In general, Tocqueville saw democracy

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as a break from older social hierarchies. In principle it offers greater social equality but this does not always amount to political liberty – an ideal prized by Tocqueville. He suggests that the loss of aristocratic bonds threatens social order and stability. America, in particular, favors the authority of the individual. This focus on the individual tends toward materialism and envy, but most fearfully leaves persons isolated and fragmented, without a common focus or voice. This in turn leads to what Tocqueville called “democratic despotism,” a condition in which, ironically, the majority rules over the individual. In her description of the various forms of this despotism Janara gives us a snapshot of New England social life but also takes the opportunity to discuss how these democratic dynamics intersect with, and sustain, inequalities around race and gender. This is where we also find a useful comparison to Harriet Martineau. In fact, in her essay, Hoecker-Drysdale draws attention to the growing literature comparing the work of Tocqueville and Martineau on their travels in America. In short, while for Tocqueville equality and liberty are incompatible, for Martineau equality of women and equality of people of color are central to the successful establishment of democracy. Here then are two different ways of imagining the political collective. Tocqueville, then, is worried about the unregulated practice of democracy and in particular its affiliation with individualism. His solution is a democratic politics modeled on older republican forms of association. This tension between the individual and the social order is a more general problem picked up by early social theorists. Here we see a legacy of complicated efforts to harmonize the ideals of individualism, equality, and liberty with social order. Comte develops his positivism, Pickering shows, not merely as a research program but as a vision of social order that combines ideals of liberty and self-expression with religious institutional foundations. Durkheim’s entire sociology is an effort to develop a socially mediated moral grounding to combat the malaise and anomie of modernity. In their essay, Milbrandt and Pearce explain these elements of Durkheim’s thought but also, quite uniquely, write about his political sociology and in particular his engagement with socialism. They acknowledge that Durkheim is often “technocratic and authoritarian,” but a closer look also shows sympathy for socialist and democratic visions of social order. In short, while Durkheim did not endorse state control of the economy, he did think that the state and occupational associations should remain in constant contact with one another. While recognizing Durkheim’s ambivalence on these matters, Milbrandt and Pearce push for a radical reading of Durkheim’s social theory, something also exemplified in their discussion of imperialism and sacrifice in Durkheim’s work. Yet another take on this set of tensions is found in Colin Loader’s essay on Karl Mannheim. Loader describes Mannheim’s familiar sociology of knowledge, but he places that work, and in fact Mannheim’s entire career, within the context of the problem of public knowledge. For Mannheim the question always was: How can a social scientist best prepare the public to engage the changing world around them? Here, alongside the idea of a “public,” is indicated yet another component of the social imaginary – the intellectual whose task it is to educate the public. Writing in the context of the early twentieth century, Mannheim, not unlike the aforementioned thinkers, fears the disappearance of the “organic public” which could mediate and educate citizens in the exercise of democracy. Classical liberal democracy gives way to mass democracy and the potential emergence of dictatorships like that

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in Germany. Here, then, the goal of Mannheim’s work is to instill a sociological attitude that could serve as political education for citizens. This discussion of the political has focused largely on the self-composing imaginary – the way that nations, intellectuals, and political elites imagined themselves and their immediate societies. But of course this was also a period of colonial and imperial expansion during which Western nations imagined the “others” who existed outside, or even inside, their borders. Thus, alongside the image of the “people” we also have an image of those others who are not the people. This becomes a basis for conquest and governance abroad. Tocqueville and Martineau, as previously noted, differed in their thinking on inclusion. Janara further describes Tocqueville’s writing on colonialism in both America and French Algeria. Tocqueville is not willing to extend democracy to Algeria – to treat the Algerians as equal to the French – but rather encourages imperial domination. Other thinkers challenge the imperialist imaginary, even though they adopt racialist views. Comte condemned the French take-over of Algeria and hated racism and imperialism, opting instead for an allembracing religion of humanity. Spencer condemned imperialism largely because it was grounded in outmoded forms of patriotism not appropriate to advanced industrial societies – economy and society had moved on, so, too, should politics. Here, Alatas’s essay on Ibn Khaldu¯n can serve as a counterpoint to the Western social imaginary. It is a place in which we can imagine what Taylor, following Eisenstadt (2000), calls “multiple modernities” – the many different pathways into the modern world. Indeed, the entire point of developing a concept of modern social imaginary is to show the variety of imaginaries and cultural repertoires through which a society composes itself and its relations with others. In contrast, then, to the generally Western, linear account of state and social formation in which religion is replaced by a secular state, Ibn Khaldu¯n gives us a cyclical theory of state formation. Urban centers of state power exist in relation to, and in fact gain their stability from, tribal religious powers. The two need each other. This, Alatas suggests, does not merely describe the composition of the state in fourteenth-century North Africa, but can also explain historical societies such as Safavid Iran, as well as modern societies such as Syria and the Arab world in general.

CULTURE Culture is another component of the modern social imaginary. The meaning of the term culture is varied, but in this volume there are two general, though related, uses – two ways of imagining culture. First, culture refers to the identity and practices of a people – ethnicity, nation, or, in Du Bois’s work, race. In one sense this version of culture is what Taylor has in mind when he describes the “sovereign people,” where it also overlaps with the political dimension of the social imaginary. Second, culture refers to collective expressions as in art or religion. Increasingly in the modern world, religion, art, and other cultural forms are not viewed as ontological givens, but as human creations that constitute and express the unique cultural forms. Again, culture is ubiquitous in these essays. Durkheim, especially in his later work on religion, treats culture as a foundational force – it holds society together. Weber of course gave culture – in particular the Protestant ethic – an important explanatory function

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in accounting for the emergence of Western capitalism. Parsons, as Lidz argues, gives culture a central place in his social system, and much like Durkheim treats it as the glue that holds everything together. In particular, though, Simmel’s focus on the aesthetic dimensions of social life has given his sociology pride of place in early conceptualizations of culture. As Scaff tells us, Simmel’s early development was shaped by his immersion in the nineteenthcentury fin-de-siècle “culture of feeling.” This influenced both his style of writing and his choice of subject matter. Among other topics, he wrote on religion, art, and fashion, but most importantly he regularly returned to the conflict between what he called subjective and objective culture. Here Simmel captures a more general trend in which the nineteenth century is caught up in a battle between two forms of sociality – that which is grounded in Enlightenment values of reason, utility, and objectivity, and that which is grounded in the romantic values of emotion, feeling, and subjective expression. Simmel was never so crude as to directly oppose these two forces – he is a nuanced and tricky thinker – but he nevertheless feared for the future of subjective culture. Here Mead should also be mentioned. Though Mead didn’t make culture per se a focal point of his work, Shalin does a wonderful job of demonstrating how Mead’s work, like that of other American pragmatists, was animated by the romantic spirit. We encounter similar themes in Paul Taylor’s essay on W. E. B. Du Bois. Also an American pragmatist, Du Bois incorporates both elements of culture described above in his work. For one, his early work is grounded in a version of German historicism that treats race as a cultural form. Here Du Bois’s work also shows us how culture can be defined as the essence of a people, and that well-being depends upon the full realization of the cultural essence. This is also where Du Bois’s work includes the second meaning of culture – it is the cultural expressions of the subjugated races that allow for their full realization as a people. Later, as Du Bois moves from what Taylor calls “critical empiricism” to “anticolonial materialism,” his view is modified by Marxist arguments. Here Du Bois develops the important contemporary idea that culture is not only a source of meaning and identity, but also a contested battleground. By drawing attention to the later, materialist, aspects of Du Bois’s work, Taylor suggests that culture is not just a given social and historical force but it is socially produced. Indeed, in a number of the following essays there are descriptions of the mechanisms by which culture is produced. Here we come across another more recent meaning of culture, namely that culture is constituted through language and symbols; these are the media through which the more specific cultural forms already described are created. Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge describes the social and political context behind the production of knowledge, itself a particular form of culture. This attention to the social and cultural character of knowledge is also found in the work of Alfred Schutz. Indeed, Dreher draws attention to the role that signs and symbols play in constituting the “internal meaningfulness of the life-world.” Though for Schutz the life-world is a pre-theoretical domain, access to, and understanding of, the life-world depends upon signs and symbols, i.e. culturally circumscribed knowledge. Furthermore symbols serve an integrative function that allows for the harmonization of individual perspectives and hence the creation of collectives. In the terms used in this introduction, symbols are central to the construction

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of social imaginaries. This work feeds into the later social constructionism of Berger and Luckmann (1967), and also falls into line with a whole set of French structuralist and poststructuralist theories that treat language as a foundational cultural space with its own, analyzable, structures and properties. Finally, in his second essay for this volume, Dahms reviews the life and work of Theodor Adorno. The essay spends some time with Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous essay on the “culture industry”: in mid-twentieth-century capitalism, culture becomes a commodity and thereby loses its authenticity and critical edge. However, this analysis is only an example of Adorno’s larger project which is to develop a critical social theory. Like anything else in modern society the meaning and significance of culture is obfuscated through the contradictory processes of modernity; the very institutions that are supposed to provide clarity and enlightenment contribute to confusion and misunderstanding. In particular, as described in what Dahms calls Adorno’s most important book, Negative Dialectics, Adorno develops the concept of identity thinking – a form of reductionism that is unable to think outside of its own self-sustaining ideologies. Negative dialectics then is an attempt to develop a form of thought and life that is never self-contained, but always able to move beyond its own forms of self-representation. In the end, though it would be incorrect to say that negative dialectics has been taken up into the cultural imaginary, in it we nevertheless find an important component of the social imaginary: a suspicion of culture; the idea that culture is not only an expressive, but also a deceptive, social form.

NATURE AND SCIENCE In his depiction of modern social imaginaries Taylor does not explicitly address the themes of nature and more broadly science, but these topics are so pervasive in classical social theory that a separate section is required for their discussion. In the most general sense, science refers to the scientific method and in particular the idea, first expressed by Comte, but then carried through Spencer, Martineau, Durkheim, Du Bois, Parsons, and others, that society could be studied using a positivist method. Here society becomes like nature, either a machine or an organism whose structures and functions can be discerned through objective scrutiny. What is also striking is the variety of ways in which each of these theorists conceived positivism – a review of the above theorists shows that there is no one simple version. In addition, classical social theory, growing up under the influence of Newtonian physics, Darwinian evolutionary theory, and at its tail end Einsteinian physics, shows an ongoing concern for the relationship between nature, science, and society. Moreover, like the themes of economy, politics, and culture, nature and science are of central relevance to contemporary social theory and social life. In order to think through these relations today, it is important to understand how social theorists have understood them in the past. As Francis shows in his essay on Herbert Spencer, these relationships are complex. He warns us against simplistic and reductionist understandings of the relationship between biology and society. To this end, Francis’s essay offers details on the various forms of evolutionary theory on offer in the nineteenth century – in particular he shows the complexities of Darwinian and Lamarckian accounts and their various

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uses in social theory. The surprising twist in Francis’s essay is when he argues that Spencer was neither a Social Darwinist nor a Lamarckian (both common interpretations of Spencer’s work). Moreover, Spencer never advocated a “survival of the fittest” theory of society or political program. Instead Francis says that Spencer relied more heavily on the findings of neurophysiology. In the end, this provides a more contemporary and nuanced Spencer than most readers have come to expect. Gilman, on the other hand, aligns herself with Darwin when she develops what Allen calls a “reform Darwinist feminist account of sexual oppression.” Allen not only describes Gilman’s role as a theorist and public intellectual but also provides a nice feel for the language and tone of feminist scholarship of the time. One of the premier feminists of turn-of-the-century America, Gilman reflected deeply on the relation between nature and culture. In particular, she argued that the “androcentric culture” (patriarchal, gendered culture) had perverted evolution, giving men economic control over sexual relations and undermining women’s development. Through a quasi-Darwinian view of the universe, then, Gilman imagines creating a social order that better lines up with the biological capacities of men and women. This, ultimately, is the grounds for equality and happiness. Perhaps most surprisingly, George Herbert Mead offers a social imaginary connected to the natural world. Usually presented as a micro-social theorist and social psychologist, Shalin gives us a Mead who, at least in his later work, generates a pragmatic cosmology inspired by Albert Einstein’s relativist physics. In the human world relativity emerges as the capacity to take different perspectives, and operate within a variety of frames. In fact, Mead reads these characteristics of sociality back into nature, suggesting that in its relativity the natural world possesses a protosociality. Here then Mead develops a cosmology – a view of the universe in all its parts – through the concept of sociality. This pragmatist cosmology, Shalin argues, is the grounds through which we should understand Mead’s varied writings, whether they be on the topic of social psychology or democratic politics. In all of this there is a mingling of the categories of nature and society – humans are on the one hand part of nature, biological and physical organisms whose conduct and social organization are grounded in natural processes. Thus, the social is imagined as nature. Even though Spencer does not reduce social evolution to Darwinian processes, he insists that all organisms operate on the same “general organic principles.” Society is no longer modeled on human beings (a Leviathan) but rather stands alongside all other biological processes. Mead does something similar. By locating human behaviors within a larger cosmology, he treats them as instantiations of more general relativistic processes. At the same time, however, even though these societies are mixed up in nature, the ways in which they participate in these processes distinguish them as unique. Thus all three theorists – Gilman, Spencer, and Mead – describe the ways in which humans gain some control over (acquire some distance from) these natural processes. The mechanisms by which persons participate in, yet transcend, the natural order seem crucial to imagining society not only in the classical period but also right into the present. As developed in this introduction, the concept of modern social imaginary is meant to provide a framework for reading the essays in this volume. While the aspects of the imaginary described here – economy, politics, culture, nature and science – describe crucial aspects of the intellectual and social context in which these

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theorists worked, there is no claim that these are the only aspects of the imaginary. Indeed, part of the purpose of providing such an introductory framework is to encourage further critical reading. Where do the above characterizations find their limits? How do they extend into the contemporary period described in the second volume of this Companion? What other imaginaries can be discerned in these essays? What imaginaries have been silenced? The idea to keep in mind though is that an imaginary is not simply an idea contributed by a single thinker – the goal is to develop accounts that describe the larger terrains within which theory operates. What are the assumptions and characterizations of social life that make it possible to think about social life in the first place? How do these theorists expose, reveal and then extend such assumptions? It is our view that reading these essays with such a project in mind not only fosters a more general understanding of the conditions that make social and intellectual life possible, but also provides for a rich engagement with these already tremendously rich essays.

References Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1967) The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Eisenstadt, S. N. (2000) “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus 129(1): 1–29. Taylor, C. (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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1 Ibn Khaldu¯n SYED FARID ALATAS

INTRODUCING IBN KHALDU¯ N Walı¯ al-Dı¯n ‘Abd al-Rah·ma¯n Ibn Muh·ammad Ibn Khaldu¯n al-Tu¯nisı¯ al-Had·ramı¯ (AH1 732–808/AD 1332–1406) is most well-known among scholars, Muslim and nonMuslim alike, as a founder of sociology. He was born in Tunis into a family that traced their origin to the Kinda, a South Arabian clan of the Hadhramaut. Prior to settling in Tunis, his ancestors had lived in Seville, Andalusia, in the early period of Arab rule in the Iberian Peninsula. They eventually left for the Maghreb (North Africa) after the Reconquista, and settled in Tunis in the seventh/thirteenth century. Many of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s ancestors were prominent personalities. One, by the name of Kurayb, was said to have revolted against the Umayyads in the ninth century and subsequently set up a quasi-independent state in Seville (Rosenthal 1967: xxxiii–xxxiv). The Banu¯ Khaldu¯n also had important roles in the political life of Seville. This attraction to political office remained a characteristic of the family after they had left Andalusia for the Maghreb. Ibn Khaldu¯n himself held many positions in the courts of Andalusia and North Africa. He lived during a period of political upheavals and instability in North Africa. His firsthand experiences with political fragmentation and chaos must have had an impact on the development of his theory of society. Indeed, it was his disillusionment with politics and the attraction of scholarly pursuit that led to his retreat from office so that he could write his Muqaddimah or prolegomenon to the study of history. Among Ibn Khaldu¯n’s principal works is his autobiography, Al-Ta'rı¯f bi Ibn Khaldu¯n wa rih · latuhu gharban wa sharqan (Biography of Ibn Khaldu¯n and His Travels East and West) (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1979). In addition to the autobiography, there are several works dealing with Ibn Khaldu¯n’s life and writings, including a wellknown early one by Muhammad Abdullah Enan [Muh·ammad ‘Abd Allah ‘Ina¯n], an The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Egyptian sociologist (Enan 1941; ‘Ina¯n [Enan] 1953). There are a large number of contemporary writings that introduce and describe Ibn Khaldu¯n’s ideas. These works tend to emphasize the importance of Ibn Khaldu¯n as a founder of sociology and other social sciences.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT Ibn Khaldu¯n experienced much political upheaval and witnessed what he considered to be the cultural decline of his society. His tenure in office, his service to various rulers, and the chaos of politics and decline in economic prosperity undoubtedly influenced the development of his social theory. Ibn Khaldu¯n’s world of fourteenth-century North Africa was vastly different from the centuries that preceded it. He seemed to be aware that he lived in a time of cultural stagnation and political fragmentation. Long before Ibn Khaldu¯n’s time the political economy of the Maghreb, as was the case in the eastern part of the Arab world, was characterized by a high degree of monetization and to a lesser extent the development of large-scale landed property. The ruling aristocracy was tribal-based and the appropriation of economic surplus was primarily from trade, especially the trans-Saharan trade in Sudanese gold. Centuries before Ibn Khaldu¯n, the growth of merchant capitalism, particularly in relation to the gold trade, led to the rise of cities, petty commodity production and the development of bureaucracy (Simon 1978: 15; Lacoste 1984: 20). Along with these came a thriving scientific, literary, and artistic culture. By the time of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s birth, there was little that was left of large empire. The Maghreb was ruled by three dynasties, the Marinids, the Abd al-Wadids, and the Hafsids. The relative unity that characterized the Maghreb under the previous successive dynasties, such as the Almoravids and the Almohads, had disappeared. Agriculture and city life were constantly under threat from nomadic invasions and pillaging. Territories within a state were differentiated in terms of regions under government control that paid taxes (bila¯d al-makhzan) and those outlying areas that were able to avoid such obligations (bila¯d al-siba¯) (Lacoste 1984: 35). The tribes assigned to collect taxes by the ruler in the makhzan areas often conducted raids on the peasantry, greatly contributing to economic insecurity and a sense of vulnerability. This was exacerbated by wars between the rulers of the three states, tribal wars, and internal rebellions. Generations of Khaldu¯ns before ‘Abd al-Rah·ma¯n were famed scholars, intellectuals and statesmen, having played important roles in Andalusia in the eleventh century and then North Africa from the thirteenth century. From a young age, Ibn Khaldu¯n himself served under various rulers in Tunis, Fez, Granada, and Bougie, in the capacities of Master of the Signature, private secretary to the sultan, head of the chancellery, ambassador, and governor. The offices that he held, and the plotting and intriguing that he participated in, eventually led to his life being in danger, causing him to seek refuge among the Dawawidah, an Arab tribe of the Banı¯ H . ila¯l (Lacoste 1984: 53). During his political career he also acted as intermediary between rulers and tribesmen. It was probably his tenure in politics, his firsthand experience of the insecurities and vicissitudes of political life, and his observations of the tenuous relationship

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between rulers and tribes, that led Ibn Khaldu¯n to be curious about the causes of historical events. The political economic problems of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s century, which he sensed were of critical proportions, were described by Ibn Khaldu¯n as requiring systematic treatment (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1378/1981: 32–3 [1967, vol. I: 64–5]).2 This systematic treatment, however, was not to be merely of political economic problems but more generally of the underlying structure of historical change. Ibn Khaldu¯n eventually gave up public life and service and withdrew into seclusion to write the Muqaddimah. A prolegomenon to the study of history, this was completed in 1378 and introduces what Ibn Khaldu¯n believed was a new science that today would be understood as sociology but which he named ‘ilm al-‘umra¯n al-basharı¯ (the science of human social organization) or ‘ilm al-ijtima¯‘ al-insa¯nı¯ (the science of human society).

THE PROBLEMATIZATION OF HISTORY AS THE BASIS FOR SOCIOLOGY: THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT Ibn Khaldu¯n’s Muqaddimah was finished in 1378 and was intended as an introduction or prolegomenon to Kita¯b al-‘Ibar, his empirical work on the history of the Arabs and Berbers in several volumes. In explaining the rationale for the prolegomenon, Ibn Khaldu¯n states in the foreword to the Muqaddimah, that the field of history, if merely providing information about past political happenings and facts about dynasties of the past, only covers the surface (z·a¯hir). This can be distinguished from the inner meaning (ba¯t¸in) of history which is reached through “speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events” (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1378/1981: 1 [1967, vol. I: 6]). In Ibn Khaldu¯n’s terms, the Kita¯b al-‘Ibar has as its subject matter the surface phenomena of history in that it reports the historical facts concerning the history of the Arab and Berber dynasties of the Arab East and North Africa. The Muqaddimah, however, attempts to arrive at explanations of the causes and origins of those facts. In the terms of modern sociology, it attempts to theorize the surface dimension of history. The Muqaddimah is the first book of the Kita¯b al-‘Ibar, which comprises three books. A theoretical work, the Muqaddimah was written by Ibn Khaldu¯n as an integral part of the Kita¯b al-‘Ibar. The Muqaddimah makes a case for the need for a new science of society. Books 2 and 3 discuss selected aspects of the history of the Arabs, Israelites, Persians, Greeks, Byzantines, Turks, and Berbers (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1378/1981: 6 [1967, vol. I: 11–12]). Properly dealing with such empirical topics as covered in books 2 and 3, however, requires what El-Azmeh (1979: 17) calls a master science, or what Ibn Khaldu¯n calls the science of human society. Ibn Khaldu¯n’s approach was a positive rather than normative one. He was concerned with the study of society as it is rather than as it should be. In this sense, he departed from the dominant writings on the state and society that preceded him. Ibn Khaldu¯n was concerned with how things are rather than how they should be (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1378/1981: 6 [1967, vol. I: 11]). The traditional method of distinguishing right from wrong in historical studies, which relied on assessing the reliability of sources, the character of transmitters of information, and so on, was regarded by

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Ibn Khaldu¯n as insufficient. Instead, he considered it necessary to assess the inherent possibility or absurdity of reported historical facts and events by investigating the nature of human society. The truth and falsehood of the former can be logically demonstrated from the latter (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1378/1981: 37 [1967, vol. I: 77]). In this sense, Ibn Khaldu¯n was heir to the tradition of rational thought in the Islamic tradition represented by philosophers such as Al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯, Ibn Sı¯na¯, and Ibn Rushd, but at the same time anticipated certain aspects of sociology as it developed in the West. Ibn Khaldu¯n’s substantive concerns were with the macro issue of the rise and decline of dynasties and states. His approach was to study the constituent elements of society such as economic and urban institutions (Mahdi 1957: 234), the state (Mahdi 1957: 235), and solidarity ('asabiyyah). These are the key elements of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s general ˙ sociology, in that they are relevant and applicable to all types of societies, nomadic or sedentary, feudal or prebendal, Muslim or non-Muslim. Indeed, this science of human society, or what we may call sociology, is the direct result of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s effort to distinguish between narrative history on the one hand, and history as a science that investigates the origins and development of society on the other. Finally, and more specifically, Ibn Khaldu¯n’s sociology included the following areas of study: (i) society (‘umra¯n) in general and its divisions, (ii) bedouin society (al-’umra¯n al-badawı¯), tribal societies (qaba¯’il), and primitive peoples (al-wahshiyyah), (iii) the state (al-dawlah), royal (mulk) and caliphate (khila¯fah) authority, (iv) sedentary society (al- `umra¯n al-h · ad·arı¯), cities, and (v) the crafts, ways of making a living, occupations (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1378/1981: 41 [1967, vol. I: 85]).

A THEORY OF STATE FORMATION For Ibn Khaldu¯n the key to understanding the rise and decline of North African states lay in the essential differences in social organization between pastoral nomadic and sedentary societies. A central concept crucial for the understanding of these differences is 'as·abiyyah, referring to a type of group feeling or social cohesion. In Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory of state formation, social groups with strong 'as·abiyyah could dominate and establish rule over those with weak 'as·abiyyah (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1378/1981: 139, 154 [1967, vol. I: 284, 313]). 'As·abiyyah tended to be stronger among the pastoral nomadic peoples. Nomadic society evolved towards sedentary society in the sense that “sedentary culture is the goal of bedouin life” and that “the goal of civilization is sedentary culture and luxury” (371 [285]). In this context, 'as·abiyyah refers to the feeling of solidarity among the members of a group which is derived from the knowledge that they share a common descent. The bedouin or nomadic groups had a greater degree of 'as·abiyyah and, as a result, could defeat sedentary people in urban areas and establish their own dynasties. In doing so, they themselves gradually became urbanized and experienced a decline in their 'as·abiyyah. This in turn resulted in the erosion of their military strength, leaving them vulnerable to attack by another group of nomads with superior 'as·abiyyah. The change is cyclical and there is a circulation of tribal elites. While the tribes establish rule, they in turn are dependent on the city for some of the basic necessities of life (153 [122]). Secondly, the tribes are dependent on a prophet or saint (walı¯) who interprets religion for them.

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Social cohesion or 'as·abiyyah is not wholly derived from agnatic ties in tribal social organizations. While it is true that all tribal groups have stronger or weaker 'as·abiyyahs based on kinship, religion can also function to establish a high degree of social cohesion. This was the case with the Arabs who developed a strong 'as·abiyyah as a result of being united under the aegis of Islam (151 [120]). 'As·abiyyah, however, is not to be confined to its psychological dimensions. There are also its material manifestations. Speaking about mulk or royal authority, Ibn Khaldu¯n says that it is not merely leadership. “Leadership means being a chieftain [s·a¯hib], and the leader is obeyed, but he has no power to force others to accept his rulings. Royal authority means superiority and the power to rule by force” (139 [108]). A tribal chieftain is obeyed by the tribesmen because of 'as·abiyyah. This is a precondition for achieving royal authority. However, it is not merely the psychological feeling of cohesion that makes royal authority possible. What contributes to 'as·abiyyah and the authority wielded by the chieftain is the material standing he achieves from surpluses he appropriates from trade, plunder, and pillage (Lacoste 1984: 107). 'As·abiyyah, then, refers to (1) kinship ties, (2) a socially-cohesive religion such as Islam which provides a common ideology that functions to legitimize the chieftain’s aspirations for mulk, and (3) the strength the chieftain acquires through trade, booty, pillage, and conquest. The founding of a dynasty by a tribe sets in motion a process of social change which results in the decline of 'as·abiyyah. There are at least two ways in which this decline is effected. One is where the second generation of tribesmen who founded the dynasty are socialized in a new sedentary environment. They change from the desert attitude to sedentary culture, from privation to luxury, from a state in which everybody shared in the glory to one in which one man claims all the glory for himself while the others are too lazy to strive for (glory), and from proud superiority to humble subservience. Thus, the vigour of group feeling is broken to some extent.

By the third generation 'as·abiyyah disappears completely (171 [137]). Secondly, 'as·abiyyah also declines when the “ruler gains complete control over his people, claims royal authority all for himself, excluding them, and prevents them from trying to have a share in it” (175 [141]). In other words, when a tribal group establishes a dynasty and its authority becomes legitimate the ruler can afford to dispense with 'as·abiyyah. He no longer rules with the help of his own tribesmen, but rather with that of other tribes, who become his clients. The ruler attempts to exclude his people from power. The cost is the difficulty of maintaining 'as·abiyyah. The decline in 'as·abiyyah eventually undermines the ability of the ruler to rule and weakens the state until it is finally conquered by another tribal group with superior 'as·abiyyah. And so the cycle repeats itself (154–5 [123–5]). Most of the Muqaddimah is devoted to elaborating a theory of state formation and decline. This is presented in the course of three major sections (fas·l), that is, sections 2 through 4. Section 2 deals with the nature of nomadic society, the superiority of tribal social solidarity ('as·abiyyah) or group feeling, the role of kinship and blood ties in group feeling, and the natural inclination of nomadic society to attain royal authority (mulk) and establish a dynasty. Section 3 focuses on the development and decay of royal authority, the role of religion in this, the various groups and forces that figure in dynastic decline, and the mode of origin and

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disintegration of dynasties. Section 4 highlights a number of aspects of the nature of sedentary civilization.

The understanding of reform Ibn Khaldu¯n’s Muqaddimah is well known as a work of what we may call political sociology, which explains the rise and decline of the state. It is rarely considered that this theory is, at one and the same time, a theory of religious reform. The first to recognize this was probably the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset. In a piece on Ibn Khaldu¯n, Ortega suggests that Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory on the rise and decline of states can be used to explain the rise of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia. Ibn Saud had the support of his tribe and captured the city of Najd. He employed an overarching religious ideology, Wahhabism. Ortega was incorrect in equating the puritanism of the Wahhabis with Islam itself, although he was correct in noting the extremism of Wahhabism. He was also correct in recognizing the relevance of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory for the explanation of the role of the Wahhabi revival movement in the rise of the Saudi state (Ortega y Gasset 1934/1976–8: 111–12). Here it is necessary to refer to Ibn Khaldu¯n on the role of religious leaders in the unification of the bedouin. When there is a prophet or saint among them, who calls upon them to fulfill the commands of God and rids them of blameworthy qualities and causes them to adopt praiseworthy ones, and who has them concentrate all their strength in order to make the truth prevail, they become fully united (as a social organization) and obtain superiority and royal authority. (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1378/1981: 151 [1967, vol. I: 305–6])

As was said earlier, the social cohesion or solidarity implied by the concept of 'as·abiyyah is not wholly dependent on kinship ties. Religion can also function to bring about or strengthen such solidarity. The conflict between the pre-urban bedouin and the sedentarized tribes is not just over the material riches of the city. The bedouin are also driven by the perception that the practice and belief of Muslims in the cities are corrupted and in need of reform. The pre-urban bedouin, therefore, are bent on abolishing what is objectionable (taghyı¯r al-munkar) (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1378/1981: 159 [1967, vol. I: 323]). The abolishment of what is objectionable, or wrongly practiced religion or impiety has to do with the excesses of urban life (347–51). But, the reform is temporary. The reform is cyclical. A tribe conquers a dynasty, founds a new one, and rules until it is overthrown by a reform-minded leader who has the support of a new set of preurban tribes bent on reform and on cashing in on the city. In such cycles of rise and decline of dynasties, ordinary folk were caught between the oppressive policies and conduct of royal authority on one hand, and the prospects of conquest by belligerent bedouin tribesmen led by pious religious leaders bent on “abolishing what is objectionable,” on the other. This Khaldu¯nian cycle was typical of many societies of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s world and can be seen to characterize the Ottomans, the Qajar dynasty in Iran, and the state in the Yemen. It was only when the basis of state power was no longer tribal that the cycle ended. However, the termination of the cycle was not something foreseen by Ibn Khaldu¯n, as he could not

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have anticipated developments that would lead to the elimination of conditions that caused the seemingly eternal repetition of the cycle. Ernest Gellner’s (1981) attempt to merge Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory with David Hume’s oscillation theory of religion is well known. Hume did not accept the unilinear theory of the development of religion from polytheism to monotheism. Instead, he favored an oscillation theory according to which there was a flux and reflux of polytheism and monotheism (Hume 1976, cited in Gellner 1981: 9). The change from polytheism to monotheism was driven by a competitive sycophancy. The competition between worshipers to adulate the deities of a pantheon escalates until one of the deities assumes the status of the one and only God. The elevation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to Jehovah and the creator of the world is an example that Hume gives. In time, however, this God is seen to be distant and inaccessible, necessitating demi-gods and other lesser gods that can mediate between humans and the one true God. This is the swing to polytheism. Then, there is a swing back to monotheism as “these idolatrous religions fall every day into grosser and more vulgar conceptions …” (Hume 1976, cited in Gellner 1981: 10). Hume’s theory is very psychologistic (Gellner 1981: 16) and ignores the role of social factors. This is where Ibn Khaldu¯n’s model becomes relevant, providing the social basis for Hume’s pendulum swing theory of religion. Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory furnishes an explanation for how the urban setting provides for a scripturalist unitarian puritanism while the nomadic setting provides for a saint-mediated, hierarchical system (Gellner 1981: 41–2). To date, Gellner’s work is the most serious attempt to understand Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory of state formation as a theory of Muslim reform. Nevertheless, there are some problems with it. Gellner was correct to note that Hume’s model was excessively psychological and he did successfully provide the social basis for the theory through the merger of Hume and Ibn Khaldu¯n. What Gellner failed to do, however, was to introduce Ibn Khaldu¯n’s concept of reform (taghyı¯r al-munkar) and discuss how the religious change was connected to the larger societal change that took place in the context of war and conflict, a change in the state elite and regime, and the rise of a new ruling tribe. In other words, there was more to the social basis than what was discussed by Gellner. Ibn Khaldu¯n’s own examples are from the rise and decline of three dynasties: the Almoravids (al-Mura¯bit·u¯n) (AD 1053–1147), Almohad (al-Muwa¯h·h·idu¯n) (AD 1147– 1275), and Marinids (AD 1213–1524). These dynasties were founded with the support of Berber tribes – the S·anha¯jah for the Almoravids, the Mas·mu¯dah for the Almohads, and the Zana¯tah for the Marinids – and declined according to the model elaborated by Ibn Khaldu¯n. The Almoravids established their state with the support of the S·anha¯jah tribes, but were eventually overthrown by the Almohads, who started as a religious reform movement under Ibn Tu¯ma¯rt with the support of the Mas·mu¯dah tribes. The Almohads themselves were overcome by the Marinids whose basis of power was the Zana¯tah (Montagne 1931: 14–15). There are general lessons from Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory of Muslim reform that are still relevant today: 1. Religious revival effectively takes place within the context of regime change, the emergence of a new ruling class, and the realignment of loyalties. 2. Religious revival functions as an all-encompassing 'as·abiyyah that transcends tribalism, class, and ethnicity and yet is immanent in them. For example, an

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5. 6.

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Islamic 'as·abiyyah transcends all tribes, but is at the same time dependent on the 'as·abiyyah of the strongest tribe which appealed to religion. The source of religious revival originates from societal groups characterized by simpler modes of making a living and less luxurious lifestyles. Religious revival is the result of conflict between a less institutionalized religion-based solidarity ('as·abiyyah) and an urban-based religiosity regulated by institutions (see also Spickard 2001: 109). Religious zeal and religion-based solidarity are positively correlated. The religious experience should be understood as not merely a psychological phenomenon. It must also be seen as a sociological phenomenon in that it is a function of a specific type of 'as·abiyyah. The Khaldu¯nian approach is not grounded in individuals (Spickard 2001: 108).

THE IMPACT OF IBN KHALDU¯ N IN THE WEST: DISCOVERY AND MARGINALIZATION Ibn Khaldu¯n was probably first heard of in Europe in 1636, in a Latin translation of Ibn 'Arabsha¯h’s Fı¯ Akhba¯r Taymu¯r 'Aja¯’ib al-Maqdu¯r (Viate et rerum gestarum Timuri, qui vulgo Tamerlanes dicitur, Historia). 'Arabsha¯h mentions the historic meeting between Ibn Khaldu¯n and Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror (Simon 1959: 36–7; 1978: 51). Some years later, a biography of Ibn Khaldu¯n was published in d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale (1697: II, 418). However, a translation of Ibn Khaldu¯n did not appear until a hundred years later. First to appear was a French translation of extracts of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s works. This was undertaken by Silvestre de Sacy and appeared in 1810. During the same period, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall published German translations of extracts of the Muqaddimah (1818) (Baali 1986: 32–3). William MacGuckin de Slane’s French translation of the Muqaddimah was published between 1862 and 1868. In the nineteenth century, Western scholars often regarded Ibn Khaldu¯n as the founder of sociology (von Kremer 1879; Flint 1893: 158ff.; Gumplowicz 1899/1928; 1899: 90–114; Maunier 1913; Oppenheimer 1922–35, vol. II: 173ff., vol. IV: 251ff.; Ortega 1934/1976–8). Becker and Barnes in their 1938 book, Social Thought from Lore to Science, spend many pages on the ideas of Ibn Khaldu¯n, and suggest that he was the first to apply modern-like ideas in historical sociology (Becker & Barnes 1961, vol. I: 266–79). Ibn Khaldu¯n continued to receive attention as the originator of the discipline among Arab and other Muslim social scientists from the early part of the twentieth century. ‘Abd al-’Aziz ‘Izzat wrote his thesis in 1932 entitled “Ibn Khaldun et sa science sociale” under the supervision of Fauconnier and René Maunier in France (Roussillon 1992: 56 n.48). He also published a comparative study of Ibn Khaldu¯n and Émile Durkheim (‘Izzat 1952). ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Wa¯h·id Wa¯fı¯ undertook a comparative study of Ibn Khaldu¯n and Auguste Comte (1951) and wrote a very well-known work in which he described Ibn Khaldu¯n as the founder of sociology (1962). During the same period, Syed Hussein Alatas from Malaysia had referred to Ibn Khaldu¯n as having established the principles of modern sociology (Alatas 1954: 2). It was noted by Alain Roussillon (n.d.: 5) and Abaza (2002: 146) that writing on Ibn Khaldu¯n became almost like a rite of entry into the profession of sociology. Not all, however,

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were impressed by the achievement of Ibn Khaldu¯n. The famed Egyptian novelist and social thinker, Taha Hussein, who had written a doctoral dissertation on Ibn Khaldu¯n, considered the claim that Ibn Khaldu¯n was a sociologist to be an exaggeration (Hussein 1918: 75). Today Ibn Khaldu¯n is largely ignored by sociologists in the West (Dhaouadi 1990). Most students of Ibn Khaldu¯n have not worked on developing Ibn Khaldu¯n’s ideas and integrating them into the theoretical frameworks of modern sociology, and applying such Khaldu¯nian models to historical and empirical cases. The absence of Khaldu¯nian sociology is all the more glaring in view of the fact that Ibn Khaldu¯n developed theoretical tools and concepts that belong to the domain of positive sociology as opposed to the normative study of society. While Ibn Khaldu¯n’s main empirical field of research was the Arab West and East, his theory of the rise and decline of states and dynasties has much relevance for the study of the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid dynasty, the Mongol conquest of China, and many other empirical fields. Nevertheless, there are few works that have attempted to go beyond merely comparing the ideas and concepts in Ibn Khaldu¯n’s work with those of modern Western scholars such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. These works attempt to integrate his theory into modern social science frameworks (Cheddadi 1980; Gellner 1981; Lacoste 1984; Carré 1988; Alatas 1990, 1993). We can, therefore, speak of the marginalization of Ibn Khaldu¯n, particularly in the discipline of sociology. What is meant by the marginalization of Ibn Khaldu¯n? While there are many scattered references to Ibn Khaldu¯n in works here and there, these tend to be descriptive and historical rather than conceptual and theoretical. Where Ibn Khaldu¯n is given attention in teaching, this is usually in courses in Middle Eastern, Arab, or Islamic studies. It is rare for Ibn Khaldu¯n to appear in a course on a par with Marx, Weber, and Durkheim as a social theorist whose thought comprises concepts and theories of universal significance and relevance. Part of the reason for this neglect is that a Khaldu¯nian sociological theory has not been developed over the centuries. There have not been efforts to make his work qua sociological theory more accessible and also relevant to the study of modern societies. Ibn Khaldu¯n is rarely systematically discussed methodologically or theoretically and his thought reconstructed as modern sociology. Furthermore, it can be said that theoretical neglect is also caused by the dominance of Eurocentric social science in global academia. The various features of Eurocentrism, such as the subject–object dichotomy, the placing of Europeans in the foreground, the presentation of Europeans as originators, and the dominance of European concepts and categories (Alatas 2006: 177–8), function to render non-Western thinkers like Ibn Khaldu¯n irrelevant or marginal. The fact that Ibn Khaldu¯n is often confined to Middle East, North African, or Islamic studies is due to this Eurocentrism in the social sciences. In many works on Ibn Khaldu¯n, Ibn Khaldu¯n appears as a provider of historical data rather than the source of ideas that are relevant to contemporary studies. In other words, Ibn Khaldu¯n appears as an object rather than a knowing subject. Because European thinkers are in the foreground this also means that it is European concepts and categories that are dominant in the social sciences. Ibn Khaldu¯n does have ideological uses, however. The French had a colonial interest in Ibn Khaldu¯n. For

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example, Gautier, writing in the 1920s, interpreted Ibn Khaldu¯n in a manner that conformed to French colonial interests. Gautier exaggerated the opposition between nomadic invading Arabs and sedentary Berbers in North Africa but erroneously attributed this view to Ibn Khaldu¯n and other Arab writers (Gautier 1937: 72, 374). This resonated with French colonial policy in Algeria and Morocco which saw it as advantageous to create a hostile relationship between the Arab and Berber populations. This hostility was to be instrumental in the French defeat of the Algerian revolutionary, 'Abd al-Qa¯dir, in 1847. Yves Lacoste noted that the French would not have been able to defeat 'Abd al-Qa¯dir had the Berbers not remained neutral (Lacoste 1984: 75). In this case, Ibn Khaldu¯n was not seen as a source of original theorizing, but was inserted into an ideological complex designed to further French colonial interests.

AREAS FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENT: APPLYING IBN KHALDU¯ N There is a need, therefore, to go beyond claiming that Ibn Khaldu¯n is a precursor of the modern social sciences or seeing him as a tool for the justification of colonial rule among Orientalists (Carré 1979–80: 109). There are clearly areas for the further development of sociology that seriously take the ideas of Ibn Khaldu¯n into account. Here I discuss the possibility of developing Khaldu¯nian sociology, a sociology that can be applied to historical and contemporary empirical cases. The point is to move beyond works that simply state that Ibn Khaldu¯n was a founder of sociology or provide descriptive accounts of his works. By Khaldu¯nian sociology I am referring to theoretical applications that include the integration of concepts and frameworks from Ibn Khaldu¯n into modern social science theories (Alatas 2007).

Ibn Khaldu¯n and the modes of production framework Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory of state formation as described earlier is an abstraction derived from his study of the history of North Africa. The theory of the rise and decline of states elaborated in the Muqaddimah was based on historical cases that Ibn Khaldu¯n knew only too well. For example, he discusses both in the Muqaddimah and in the Kita¯b al-'Ibar the formation and decline of the three successive dynasties of Morocco, that is, the Almoravids (AD 1053–1147), Almohads (AD 1147–1275), and Marinids (AD 1213–1524). Each of these dynasties was founded and upheld by Berber tribes – the S·anha¯jah for the Almoravids, the Mas·mu¯dah for the Almohads, and the Zana¯tah for the Marinids – and was subjected to the Khaldu¯nian cycle. Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory, however, is not only relevant to the study of North African states. His theory of the dynamics of tribal state formation can be applied to many other historical cases outside of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s geographical area of concern and historical period. Examples would be Safavid Iran and the Ottoman Empire. Applying Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory to these cases raises interesting theoretical problems as well. For example, while there is a conception of historical change in Ibn Khaldu¯n, the notion and typology of the economic system is missing. For this reason, it is fruitful to supplement Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory with a modes of production framework. The

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modes of production framework provides the concept of the economic system while Khaldu¯nian theory provides an understanding of the dynamics of state and society. Such a marriage of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory to a modes of production framework was attempted by Alatas (1990, 1993). I consider there the case of the rise and decline of the Safavid dynasty in pre-modern Iran. Safavid Iran provides empirical material for the study of the history and interaction of modes of production within the context of a Khaldu¯nian dynamics. Between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries the various tribes constituted approximately one-fourth of the population of Iran. These tribes were divided into five major ethnic groups: Turkoman, Iranian, Kurdish, Arab, and Baluch. Of particular importance, as far as the rise of the Safavid state is concerned, were the Turkoman tribes which provided the tribal military support behind the rise of the Safavid state. Despite the obvious Khaldu¯nian structure of Safavid history, there has been no systematic attempt to explain Safavid state formation in terms of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory. What I have suggested in previous studies is an explanation of Safavid history in terms of a Khaldu¯nian framework. Certain problems that arise from the application of Marxist or Weberian models to the study of the rise and decline of the Safavid state are solved by applying Khaldu¯nian theory. This does not mean that Marxist or Weberian concepts can be dispensed with. While Marxist and Weberian perspectives provide the tools with which to describe the Safavid political economy, the Khaldu¯nian approach enables us to understand the dynamics of Safavid history. The Khaldu¯nian approach itself does not provide a means to conceptualize the Safavid political economy, but the Marxist and Weberian approaches are less helpful when it comes to explaining the dynamics of Safavid history. At the same time the historical data provided by Safavid history help us to understand better certain aspects of Khaldu¯nian theory. The Safavid political economy is described in terms of the co-existence of several modes of production. The interaction of these modes of production with the state and the state’s eventual decline are explained in terms of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s notion of the dissipation of 'as·abiyyah. A dominant mode of production in Safavid Iran was prebendal feudalism. This was based on the granting of benefices called tuyu¯l to qizilbash tribal chieftains. The tuyu¯l were non-hereditary grants, unlike the suyurghal grants (Fragner 1986: 509). According to Fragner, the “reason for avoiding suyurghal grants in such cases was the intention to restrict, at least formally, the autonomy of the high amirs in the provinces” (Fragner 1986: 513–14). The granting of tuyu¯l instead of suyurghal was a strategy to restrict the autonomy of the benefice holders. The granting of benefices in general, however, was also an example of the ruler, the granter of benefices, attempting to dispense with 'as·abiyyah altogether. There was always the fear on the part of rulers that the tribesmen who supported their rise to power were potential usurpers. The assignment of benefices to tribal chieftains was an ingenious strategy because it placated them by paying them and at the same time set in motion a process that resulted in the diminution of their 'as·abiyyah. Indeed, there are indications of the decline in 'as·abiyyah in Safavid Iran, as reflected by the difficulty tribal chieftains had in raising sufficient troops (Reid 1983: 129). The above account can be restated at a theoretical level in terms of the relationship between the pastoral nomadic and prebendal feudal modes of production. The prebendal feudal mode of production is defined as one based on the granting of benefices. As noted above, in Safavid Iran, two kinds

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of benefices were widely granted, the tuyu¯l and suyurghal. These were granted in return for military services to be provided to the Shah (Lambton 1965: 374). It was in the context of prebendal feudalism that the 'as·abiyyah of the ruling tribe eroded. Ibn Khaldu¯n’s account of the rise and decline of states is sociological as he speaks of the social characteristics of groups such as tribes, states, and the ruling class. The concept of 'as·abiyyah, around which Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory revolves, is also sociological as it refers to a type of social cohesion – in this case, one that is founded on the knowledge of common kinship. But Ibn Khaldu¯n’s explanation of the context and manner in which 'as·abiyyah diminishes is devoid of any reference to the mode of organization of economic life. His theory lacks any conceptualization of the economy. The merging of the modes of production and Khaldu¯nian approaches provides the economic base for Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory and the historical dynamics for the modes of production framework.

Khaldu¯nian theories of the modern state Perhaps a more challenging area of the application of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory is the modern state, mainly because it is often assumed that Ibn Khaldu¯n’s work is relevant to the pre-modern, pre-capitalist times he lived in. However, it should be realized that the application of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory may extend beyond the historical domain. Rather, Ibn Khaldu¯n should be critically assessed and made relevant for understanding the modern state. One application of Khaldu¯nian theory in the study of the modern state was attempted by Michaud. He discusses what he calls the Khaldu¯nian triad of 'as·abiyyah, da‘wah (call, invitation to Islam), and mulk (royal authority, absolute power) with reference to the modern Syrian state (Michaud 1981; 2001: 168). In Syria in the 1970s, power was held by the minority Alawite community, with President Hafez Al-Asad as head of state. Down the hierarchy were family members of the President such as his brother, Rifaat, as well as others who occupied the highest positions in the intelligence services (mukhabara¯t), army, air force, and interior ministry. Power was derived not just from membership in the Alawite community but also from clientele, alliances and, of course, blood ties (nasab), the key to 'as·abiyyah. Michaud notes that according to Ibn Khaldu¯n, 'as·abiyyah not only does not exclude hierarchy but, as a result of the integration of several 'as·abiyyah, implies it (Michaud 1981: 120). Blood ties are so significant that they may result in a commandant having greater power than a general in the Syrian army. Michaud distinguishes between primary and secondary 'as·abiyyah in the Syrian state. After he came to power in 1970, Hafez Al-Asad worked to exert greater control over the Alawite community. He had some of the chiefs among the secondary 'as·abiyyah chiefs eliminated for keeping too close extra-community relations with the Sunnis of Damascus. It is interesting to note from this example that the Khaldu¯nian scheme of a dominant 'as·abiyyah of tribal origin remains relevant to the city (Michaud 1981: 123). The state abandoned any pretensions of civil relations with society, or what Ibn Khaldu¯n referred to as siya¯sı¯ (politics that leads to the adoption of laws for the common interest), in favor of primitive power (mulk t·abı¯ ‘ı¯), that is, power through simple violence (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1378/1981: 303 [1967, vol. 2: 138]; Michaud 1981: 123).

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While Michaud’s article may seem to be little more than a description of the politics of the Syrian state, it is certainly an advance in the development of what Carré calls neo-Khaldu¯nian sociology (Carré 1988), because it is an attempt to systematically apply Khaldu¯nian concepts to a modern case. A more successful application can be found in Carré’s work, which develops a typology of power in the Arab world. This is founded on Ibn Khaldu¯n’s three major divisions in his thinking on the state. These are: ideal versus rational systems, internal versus external repression, and the interests of the governed versus the interests of the government (Carré 1979–80: 118–19). There are six possible forms of the exercise of power in the resulting typology: 1. Rational power with external oppression, functioning in the interests of the public. Repression is externally applied through enforcement of norms and codes, with the basis of solidarity being tribal. Examples are the types of Baath regimes advocated by Syria and Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Carré 1979–80: 122). 2. Rational power with external repression, functioning in the interests of the government. Examples are the Baathist regimes mentioned in (1) above, this time not as advocated by their leaders but as actually existing systems that act to preserve their power by leveraging tribal agnatic ties (Carré 1979–80: 122). 3. Rational power with external repression inspired religiously, which functions in the interests of the governed and is founded on the solidarity that is partly tribal, partly professional in the urban milieu. Examples are Nasserism and the Muslim Brotherhood (Carré 1979–80: 123). 4. Rational power with external repression inspired religiously, but functioning to advance the interests of the governing group and dependent on military solidarity. An example is the Nasserist regime (Carré 1979–80: 124). 5. The ideal power of the utopian city with internal control and repression founded on faith in the virtue of social egalitarianism but also on legal repression in the context of military solidarity and a flourishing urban milieu. The example is South Yemen (Carré 1979–80: 124). 6. The ideal power of the Medinan community around the Prophet Muh·ammad founded on purely internal control (Carré 1979–80: 121). Carré has reflected on Khaldu¯nian concepts such as 'as·abiyyah as well as his distinctions between the ideal and rational, internal and external, and the interests of the governed and those of the government, and creatively applied them to the political realities of contemporary Middle Eastern states. The typology that he developed has the promise of applicability to the existing polities of today.

CONCLUSION This chapter makes the point that while there is a systematic sociology that is to be found in the works of Ibn Khaldu¯n, there has been insufficient attention paid to Ibn Khaldu¯n in introductory sociology texts and works on the history of sociology.

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Also, work of a theoretical and conceptual nature on Ibn Khaldu¯n is virtually nonexistent. I have suggested that the relative neglect of Ibn Khaldu¯n, particularly in theoretical and conceptual terms, is due to the dominance of Eurocentrism in the social sciences. I discuss the possibility of developing Khaldu¯nian sociology by combining his theoretical insights with those of modern sociology and systematically applying the resulting frameworks to both historical and contemporary empirical cases. The intention of this chapter is to demonstrate how the contributions of a social thinker may be approached not just as an object of study in which his theories and concepts are repeatedly described or in which his work is looked upon as a source of historical data, but as a source of theory that remains relevant and that can be applied to both historical and contemporary settings. The examples of the readings and applications of Ibn Khaldu¯n that I have presented above are not exhaustive. The list, however, is not very long when we consider that Ibn Khaldu¯n’s works have been known for 600 years. It should be noted that since the late 1990s, more works that can be considered as more theoretical readings and applications of Ibn Khaldu¯n have appeared (see Tehranian 1998; Ruthven 2002; Jabar 2003; Ahmed 2005; Rosen 2005). The project of developing Khaldu¯nian sociology is not meant to replace European categories and concepts with Arab and Muslim ones. It is undertaken for the purpose of enriching and universalizing sociology by making available to the discipline a greater variety of ideas and perspectives. Being true to Ibn Khaldu¯n involves explaining why and how things are as they are in the world that we live in (Djeghloul 1983: 42–3) and it is in this spirit that we should try to make his ideas available to modern sociology.

Reader’s Guide to Ibn Khaldu¯ n Ibn Khaldu¯n’s works appeared originally in Arabic. Good translations are available in English and French. Franz Rosenthal’s English translation of the Muqaddimah (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1967), Ibn Khaldun: The Muqadimmah – An Introduction to History, also provides a lengthy discussion of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s life and thought and a textual history of the Muqaddimah. Those who are comfortable with French may want to consider reading Vincent Monteil’s translation of the Muqaddimah (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1997). It has the advantage of more frequently providing the Arabic terms that Ibn Khaldu¯n used. A good translation into French of Ibn Khaldu¯n’s autobiography has been done by Cheddadi (Ibn Khaldu¯n 1984). Cheddadi also produced a totally revamped, and beautifully illustrated edition of the French translation which includes the Arabic text side by side with the French (Ibn Khaldu¯n 2006). Other works covering Ibn Khaldu¯n’s life and thought include Heinrich Simon’s Ibn Khaldun’s Science of Human Culture (1978) and Enan’s Ibn Khaldun: His Life and Work (1941). An excellent philosophical introduction to Ibn Khaldu¯n’s thought can be found in Muhsin Mahdi’s Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philosophic Foundation of History (1957), while those interested in Ibn Khaldu¯n’s historical sociology should consult Yves Lacoste’s Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World (1984). For interesting attempts to apply Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory to empirical cases, readers should look at the works of Alatas (1990, 1993, 2007), Carré (1979–80, 1988), Gellner (1981), and Michaud (1981, 2001).

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syed farid alatas Notes

1 In the Islamic calendar AH dates events from the emigration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. 2 Page numbers in brackets refer to Franz Rosenthal’s English translation from which this quotation is taken (see Ibn Khaldu¯n 1967).

Bibliography Writings of Ibn Khaldu¯n 1284/AD 1867. Kita¯b al-`Ibar wa Dı¯wa¯n al-Mubtada’ wa al-Khabar fı¯ Ayya¯m al-`Arab wa ¯ arahum min Dhawı¯ al-Sulta¯n al-Akbar (Book of al-`Ajam wa al-Barbar wa man `As · · Examples and the Collection of Origins of the History of the Arabs and Berbers), 7 vols. Ed. N. Hurini. Cairo: Bulaq. AH 1378/AD 1981. Muqaddimah Ibn Khaldu ¯ n (The Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldu¯n). Beirut: Da¯r al-Qalam. 1810. “Extraits des Prolégomènes d’Ebn Khaldoun.” Trans. Baron Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy. In de Sacy (ed.), Relation de l’Egypt, par Abd-Allatif, médecin arabe de Bagdad, Paris, pp. 509–24 (translation), pp. 558–64 (Arabic text). 1862–8. Prolégomènes historiques d’Ibn Khaldoun. Traduit en Français et commentés. Trans. W. MacGuckin de Slane. Notice et extraits des manuscripts de la Bibliothèque Impériale, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vols. XIX–XXI, Paris. 1967. Ibn Khaldun: The Muqadimmah – An Introduction to History, 3 vols. Trans. Franz Rosenthal (from Arabic). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1979. Al-Ta‘rı¯f bi Ibn Khaldu¯n wa Rihlatuhu gharban wa sharqan. Beirut: Da¯r al-Kita¯b al˙ Lubna¯nı¯; Cairo: Da¯r al-Kita¯b al-Masrı¯. 1982. Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique septentrionale, 3 vols. Trans. Baron de Slane. Paris: Libraire Orientaliste Paul Geuthner. 1984. Le Voyage d’Occident et d’Orient. Autobiographie présentée et traduite de l’arabe par Abdesselam Cheddadi. Deuxième édition. Paris: Sindbad. 1995. Luba¯b al-Muh · as··sal fı¯ us·u¯l al-dı¯n (The Resumé of the Compendium in the Fundamentals of Religion). Beirut: Da¯r al-Mashriq 1997. Discours sur l’histoire universelle. Al-Muqaddima. Troisième édition revue. Traduction nouvelle, préface et notes par Vincent Monteil. Paris: Sindbad, Actes Sud, “Thesaurus.” 2006. Autobiographie. Ouvrage présenté, traduit et annoté par Abdesselam Cheddadi. Témara: Maison des Arts, des Sciences et des Lettres. AH

Further Reading Abaza, Mona (2002) Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt: Shifting Worlds. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Ahmed, Akbar S. (2005) “Ibn Khaldun and Anthropology: The Failure of Methodology in the Post 9/11 World.” Contemporary Sociology 34(6): 591–6. Alatas, Hussein [Syed Hussein Alatas] (1954) “Objectivity and the Writing of History.” Progressive Islam 1(2): 2–4. Alatas, Syed Farid (1990) “Ibn Khaldun and the Ottoman Modes of Production.” Arab Historical Review for Ottoman Studies 1–2: 45–63.

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Alatas, Syed Farid (1993) “A Khaldunian Perspective on the Dynamics of Asiatic Societies.” Comparative Civilizations Review 29: 29–51. Alatas, Syed Farid (2006) Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Sciences: Responses to Eurocentrism. New Delhi: Sage. Alatas, Syed Farid (2007) “The Historical Sociology of Muslim Societies: Khaldunian Applications.” International Sociology 22(3): 267–88. Baali, Fuad (1986) Ilm al-Umran and Sociology: A Comparative Study. Annals of the Faculty of Arts, Kuwait University, 36th Monograph, vol. 7. Becker, Howard and Harry Elmer Barnes (1961) Social Thought from Lore to Science, 3rd edn., vol. 1, New York: Dover Publications. Carré, Olivier (1979–80) “Ethique et politique chez Ibn Khaldûn, juriste musulman: Actualité de sa typologie des systèmes politiques.” L’Année sociologique 30: 109–27. Carré, Olivier (1988) “A propos de vues Neo-Khalduniennes sur quelques systèmes politiques Arabes actuels.” Arabica 35(3): 368–87. Cheddadi, Abdesselam (1980) “Le Système du Pouvoir en Islam d’après Ibn Khaldun.” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 3–4: 534–50. Dhaouadi, Mahmoud (1990) “Ibn Khaldun: The Founding Father of Eastern Sociology.” International Sociology 5(3): 319–35. D’Herbelot de Molainville, Barthélemy (1697) “Khaledoun.” In Bibliothèque Orientale. Paris: Pédone. Djeghloul, Abdelkader (1983) “Ibn Khaldoun: Mode d’emploi les problèmes d’un heritage.” In Actes du premier Colloque International sur Ibn-Khaldoun: Frenda 1–4 September 1983, El-Annaser, Kouba: Centre National D’Etudes Historiques. El-Azmeh, Aziz (1979) “The Muqaddima and Kitab Al‘Ibar: Perspectives from a Common Formula.” The Maghreb Review 4(1): 17–20. Enan, Muhammad Abdullah [‘Ina¯n, Muh·ammad ‘Abd Allah] (1941) Ibn Khaldun: His Life and Work. Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf. Flint, Robert (1893) History of the Philosophy of History in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Edinburgh. Fragner, Bert (1986) “Social and Internal Economic Affairs.” In Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart (eds.), The Cambridge History of Iran, VI, The Timurid and Safavid Periods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 491–567. Gautier, E. F. (1937) Le Passé de l‘Afrique du Nord. Paris: Payot. Gellner, Ernest (1981) Muslim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumplowicz, Ludwig (1899/1928) Soziologische Essays: Soziologie und Politik. Innsbruck: Universitäts-Verlag Wagner. Gumplowicz, Ludwig (1899) The Outlines of Sociology. Trans. Frederick W. Moore. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science [translation of Gumplowicz 1899/1928]. Hume, David (1976) The Natural History of Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hussein, Taha (1918) La philosophie sociale d’Ibn-Khaldoun: étude analytique et critique. Paris. ‘Ina¯n, Muh·ammad ‘Abd Allah [Enan, Muhammad Abdullah] (1953) Ibn Khaldu¯n: H · aya¯tuhu wa tura¯thuhu al-fikrı¯. Cairo: Al-Maktabat al-Tija¯riyat al-Kubra. ‘Izzat, ‘Abd al-‘Azı¯z (1952) Etude comparée d’Ibn Khaldun et Durkheim. Cairo: Al-Maktabat Al-Anglo Al-Misriyyah. Jabar, Faleh A. (2003) “Sheikhs and Ideologues: Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Tribes under Patrimonial Totalitarianism in Iraq, 1968–1998.” In Faleh Abdul-Jabar and Hosham Dawod (eds.), Tribes and Power: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Middle East. London: Saqi, pp. 69–101.

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Lacoste, Yves (1984) Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World. London: Verso. Lambton, Anne K. S. (1965) “Reflections on the Iqta’.” In G. Makdisi (ed.), Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of Hamilton A. R. Gibb. Leiden: Brill, pp. 358–76. Mahdi, Muhsin (1957) Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philosophic Foundation of History. London: George Allen & Unwin. Maunier, René (1913) “Les idées économiques d’un philosophe arabe au XIVe siècle.” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 6: 409–19 Michaud, Gérard (1981) “Caste, confession et société en Syrie: Ibn Khaldoun au chevet du ‘Progessisme Arabe’.” Peuples Méditerranéens 16: 119–30. Michaud, Gérard (2001) “Le mouvement islamique en Syrie (1963–1982).” In Olivier Carré and Michel Seurat, Les Frères Musulmans (1928–1982). Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 123–203. Montagne, Robert (1931) The Berbers: Their Social and Political Organisation. London: Frank Cass. Oppenheimer, Franz (1922–35) System der Soziologie. Jena: Fischer. Ortega y Gasset, José (1934/1976–8) “Abenjaldún nos revela el secreto.” Revista del Instituto Egicio de Estudios Islámicos en Madrid 19: 95–114. (First published in 1934 in El Espectador 7: 9–53.) Reid, James J. (1983) “The Qajar Uymaq in the Safavid Period, 1500–1722.” Iranian Studies 11: 117–43. Rosen, Lawrence (2005) “Theorizing from Within: Ibn Khaldun and His Political Culture.” Contemporary Sociology 34(6): 596–9. Rosenthal, Franz (1967) “Ibn Khaldûn’s Life.” In Ibn Khaldûn, Ibn Khaldun: The Muqadimmah – An Introduction to History, 3 vols. Trans. Franz Rosenthal (from Arabic). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Roussillon, Alain (1992) “La représentation de l’identité par les discours fondateurs de la sociologie Turque et Egyptienne: Ziya Gökalp et ‘Ali Abd Al-Wahid Wafi.” In Modernisation et mobilisation sociale II, Egypte-Turquie. Cairo: Dossier du CEDEJ, pp. 31–65. Roussillon, Alain (n.d.) “Durkheimisme et réformisme: fondation identitaire de la sociologie en Égypte.” Unpublished MS. Cairo: CEDEJ. Ruthven, Malise (2002) “The Eleventh of September and the Sudanese Mahdiya in the Context of Ibn Khaldun’s Theory of Islamic History.” International Affairs 78(2): 339–51. Simon, Heinrich (1959) Ibn Khalduns Wissenschaft von der menschlichen Kultur. Leipzig: Veb Otto Harrasowitz. Simon, Heinrich (1978) Ibn Khaldun’s Science of Human Culture. Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf. Spickard, J. V. (2001) “Tribes and Cities: Towards an Islamic Sociology of Religion.” Social Compass 48(1): 103–16. Tehranian, Majid (1998) “Pancapitalism and Migration in Historical Perspective.” International Political Science Review 19(3): 289–303. von Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph Freiherr (1818) “Extraits d’Ibn Khaledoun.” Fundgruben des Orients 6: 301–7, 362–4. von Kremer, Alfred (1879) “Ibn Chaldun und seine Kulturgeschichte der Islamischen Reiche.” Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Philosophischhistorische Klasse) (Vienna) 93.

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Wa¯fı¯, ‘Alı¯ ‘Abd al-Wa¯h·id (1951) Al-falsafah al-ijtima¯‘iyyah li Ibn Khaldu¯n wa Aujust Kumt. Cairo. Wa¯fı¯, ‘Alı¯ ‘Abd al-Wa¯h·id (1962) “Ibn Khaldu¯n, awwal mu’assis li ‘ilm al-ijtima¯’.” In A‘ma¯l Mahraja¯n Ibn Khaldu¯n (Proceedings of the Ibn Khaldu¯n Symposium). Cairo: National Centre for Social and Criminological Research, pp. 63–78.

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2 Auguste Comte MARY PICKERING

Love for the principle and Order for the base; Progress for the goal. Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive In our postmodern world, where doubts about the inevitability of progress and the value of rationalism have weakened utopian impulses, Auguste Comte appears at first glance to be a quaint, outmoded figure. The “founder” of sociology and positivism seems to evoke a faraway era, when the benefits of social planning and the validity of knowledge went largely unquestioned. Yet as Robert Scharff suggested, the theories of this important nineteenth-century French philosopher have perhaps never been so relevant (1995: 6). Comte grappled with issues that continue to preoccupy contemporary thinkers: the basis of truth, the function of politics in modern society, the origins of moral crises, the significance of memory, the role of visual culture, and the question of gender, class, and racial identities. Furthermore, he foresaw the problems that arose when religion was not considered intrinsic to society and people disrespected the earth and other cultures. More complex than is commonly assumed, Comte’s contribution to social theory bears renewed examination.

THE THEORY Positivism Comte’s reputation rests on his dual achievement of establishing a new discipline, sociology, and closely connecting it to a novel philosophical system, which he called positivism. In the Cours de philosophie positive, published in six volumes between 1830 and 1842, Comte argued that because theory always precedes practice, the reconstruction of the post-revolutionary world could be accomplished only by The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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extending the scientific, or “positive,” method to the study of politics and society, the last stronghold of theologians and metaphysical philosophers. To adopt the positive method meant tying scientific laws to the observation of concrete facts, especially by avoiding speculations, which were invariably “metaphysical” in nature. In his Discours sur l’esprit positif of 1844, Comte further explained that “the positive” designated the real, the useful, the certain, the precise, the relative, and the constructive (as opposed to the “negative”) ([1844] 1963: 126–30). Once the positive science of society was established, positivism, the system embracing scientific knowledge, would be unified and complete because all our ideas would be scientific and thus homogeneous. Moreover, the science of society would unite all knowledge because it would focus people’s attention on humanity, which was also the object of study of the natural sciences. As a result, everyone would agree on the most essential intellectual and moral principles. Eliminating the anarchy that had ruled since 1789, the new social consensus would become the basis of a stable industrial order.

Sociology The science of society was thus the keystone of positivism. Comte asserted that because it would be based solely on the observation of social facts without reliance on theological and metaphysical dogmas, it would have the certainty and unquestionable authority of the natural sciences. Following Francis Bacon’s precept that knowledge is power, Comte assumed that a firm grasp of the scientific laws of society would lead to greater control over this organism. Like other scientific laws, sociological laws would allow one to predict social phenomena and thus formulate suitable social policies. Comte gave the new science of society a specific mission: to provide the principles necessary to end the moral, social, and political turmoil caused by the French Revolution of 1789. To prove that the coming of the positive study of society was inevitable, Comte devised the classification of the sciences. This schema demonstrated that the order in which the sciences were created depended on the simplicity of their phenomena and the distance of these phenomena from man. Astronomy first became a science because it studied the simplest phenomena, those that were farthest from man. The positive method was then extended to disciplines whose subjects were increasingly complex and closer to man: physics, chemistry, and biology, in that order. Each more complex science depended on knowledge provided by the simpler sciences, which had to become positive first. Comte maintained that now that astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology were positive sciences, it was time for the positive method to be applied to the study of society, which was the most complex science and focused entirely on man. He rejected the arguments of those who sought to reduce the study of society completely to another science, whether it be mathematics (especially statistics), biology, or political economy. To mark the birth of this new independent science, Comte coined a new term for it in 1839: “sociology” ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 88). In the 1850s, he added a seventh science, morality, which covered the individual. It reflected his growing concern with the human condition, especially the emotional component of behavior. He wished to give more guidance to sociologists, who studied the relationship between society and the individual.

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Repeatedly countering charges that he was an authoritarian eager to create a homogeneous, conformist society, Comte often emphasized his deep respect for the individual. It was the excessive individualism of his age that he claimed to be the object of his ire. Individuals had to remember that they constituted interdependent parts of a great organic whole, society. In keeping with his skepticism regarding metaphysics, Comte warned sociologists that they could not discover the source or nature of society, their object of study; they could explain only the way its phenomena were related in space and time. For this reason, sociology comprised two parts, social statics and social dynamics. They stressed the interconnectedness of the members of the human species across the globe and throughout history in order to counter the egoism of the modern age. Social statics was the study of the social order. It focused on what kept society together. One crucial aspect of the social order was the family, which taught the importance of love as the basis of moral self-improvement. Love was transferred from oneself to one’s family and finally to humanity as a whole. Thus social statics cultivated a person’s feelings of solidarity with other members of society. Although his atheism was unorthodox for the early nineteenth century, Comte’s views on the sanctity of the family and other moral issues were conventional. He sought to keep his distance from the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists whose questioning of traditional social institutions damaged their reputation. Giving people a sense of connection with past and future generations of the human species, social dynamics analyzed social development, which Comte represented as continuous, necessary, orderly, and limited. Each social state grew out of the preceding one and generated the next social configuration. Reflecting Comte’s attraction to aspects of Lamarckism, the salient feature of this development was that through exercise, the unique characteristics of the human species – intelligence and sociability – became more dominant within both the individual and society. In addition to delineating the two divisions of sociology, Comte outlined the methods of this new social science: observation, experimentation, and comparison. Because every aspect of society had multiple connections, Comte believed that the areas of sociological observation were very diverse. Sociologists should study ordinary events, common customs, diverse types of monuments, languages, and other mundane social phenomena. Comte’s insights into the significance of everyday life have been verified by recent social and cultural history. As for experimentation, the second means of scientific investigation, Comte felt its use was problematic in sociology because of the impossibility of isolating any of the circumstances or consequences of a phenomenon’s actions. He maintained that like a biologist, a sociologist must study pathological cases, which were forms of indirect experimentation. Because the pathological was simply a variation of the ordinary, examining periods of chaos, such as a revolution, provided clues to normality. The study of social disorder was an important means of gaining insights into the laws of social harmony and history. Comparison was sociology’s third method of scientific investigation. In sociology, there were three types of comparison. One could compare human and animal societies, different existing states of human society (i.e. savage and civilized peoples), or consecutive social states. The last of these involved the historical method, which was related to social dynamics and constituted sociology’s chief means of scientific

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investigation. History gave people a sense of social solidarity and continuity, in short a feeling for humanity in the world and their own role in its evolution.

The law of three stages The principal scientific law of sociology was a historical one: the law of three stages. Comte first “discovered” this law in 1822 and revealed its intricacies in his “fundamental opuscule,” the Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société of 1824 ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 1: 1). According to this law, each branch of knowledge (e.g. each science) and the mind itself passed through three modes of thinking: the theological, metaphysical, and positive. Such paradigms arose because all aspects of knowledge were interrelated and the mind naturally sought to make all ideas homogeneous. Each of the three theoretical systems affected politics and society, for in Comte’s view all of society represented an organic being in the process of a development influenced by intellectual progress. Intellectual evolution – especially scientific development – was the most advanced form of progress and served as the stimulus to historical change. In an important passage reflecting his idealism, Comte pointed out, “that ideas govern and overturn the world, or in other words, that the entire social mechanism rests ultimately on opinions.” Like Hegel, he believed that history was the story of the “emancipation of human reason” ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 1: 38, 379). Moreover, as all aspects of society were interrelated, a change in one feature, such as intellectual life, led to changes in other facets of the social organism. Comte wrote, “In effect … all the classes of social phenomena develop simultaneously and under each other’s influence” ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 4, “Appendice”: 135). In short, the law of three stages was a global one; it referred not only to intellectual evolution but also to social and political developments. It depicted the different stages of progress that every civilization had to experience, as well as a future positive age of social cooperation that was definitive, but not perfect. (Although society would see an increase in both intelligence and altruism, Comte believed ordinary man’s moral and intellectual weaknesses – his natural egoism and mental lethargy – would never completely disappear.) The law of three stages also pertained to the intellectual trajectory of every person as he or she went through life. In addition, Comte asserted that the three stages represented three mentalities that could co-exist at various times in a person’s or a civilization’s history. In the theological stage, man untangled the mystery of natural occurrences by relating them to supernatural beings, whose character was like his own. The notion that gods represented the first cause of all happenings and were in complete control of the universe was the theory that the mind needed in its infancy to link its observations. There were three substages in this first era of history: the fetishist, polytheistic, and monotheistic. In the first, gods resided in concrete objects. In the second, the gods became independent of the objects. In the third, a single god became the ruling principle. In a society that embraced the theological mode of explanation, priests and military men ruled. The theory of divine right was the reigning political doctrine. The metaphysical stage of history, which began in the fourteenth century, was a transitional period. In searching for first and final causes, people started to connect observed facts with personified essences or abstractions, such as Nature, which were

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neither supernatural nor scientific. In the process, metaphysicians replaced priests as the spiritual power. Military men ceded their role as the temporal power to lawyers, for society began to direct its activities toward production, not simply conquest. Lawyers helped reorganize the political system. The state of politics was embodied in the doctrines of popular sovereignty and natural rights. In the positive stage of history, no discussion of first causes or origins was allowed because the existence of supernatural beings and essences could not be proved. Instead, intellectual discourse was characterized by scientific laws explaining how, not why, phenomena worked. These descriptive laws expressed the “relations of resemblance and succession that facts have among themselves” (Comte [1929] 1851–4, vol. 4, “Appendice”: 144). Moreover, because production replaced conquest as the goal of society, social relations were based entirely on industry. Politically, industrialists constituted the temporal leaders of this secular, peaceful society. Positive philosophers held the spiritual power. Contrary to scholarly opinion, Comte did not argue that there should be a dictatorship of scientists in control of the future positive republic. He feared that if the mind grew too powerful, it would stifle progress, for it needed stimulation from the active life. Though an idealist, Comte never maintained that intellectual progress could be separated from material development. Furthermore, he recognized that practical enterprises would always remain most important in society because most men were drawn to the active life, not the intellectual one. If a minority of intellectuals took over the material realm, they would oppress society, lose all motivation, and wallow in admiration of the society they produced. Borrowing a term from his close friend John Stuart Mill, Comte called a technocratic society governed purely by philosophers or intellectuals a “pedantocracy” ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 656). The rise of such a regime could be prevented only by the separation of powers. The industrialists would control the practical, material activities of society, which were dangerous because the requisite specialization led to pride and egoism. These men would be checked by positive philosophers, who would be in charge of ensuring morality and encouraging the growth of ideas and feelings. Positive philosophers were not necessarily scientists, whose tendency to specialize made them as uncaring and socially indifferent as industrialists. Comte wanted positive philosophers to be men who had a general knowledge of all the sciences, especially sociology. In this way, they would understand the impact of the natural environment and human nature on society and the application of the positive method to social phenomena. Moreover, Comte assumed that intellectual well-roundedness was linked to “altruism,” a word he also coined. Thus because positive philosophers possessed general knowledge and consequently had the widest views and sympathies, they would uphold the interests of all of society. The breadth of their knowledge and sympathies gave them the legitimacy to speak for the entire community. Forbidden to rule directly, they would especially advise the industrialists on how to solve the “social question,” that is the difficulties faced by the working class. Although critics contend that Comte was an apologist for the status quo, he was in truth extremely critical of capitalism for promoting a selfish and materialistic culture. Like Marx, he argued that the appalling class struggle was due not to the workers but to “the political incapacity, social indifference, and especially blind egoism of the entrepreneurs” ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 620). Calling for the “personal liberation of

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workers,” he campaigned to resolve the class question by incorporating the proletariat into society ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 3: 402). The positive philosophers would be their biggest allies. These philosophers would also take control of the educational system to improve people’s intellectual development and to give them common ideas and values. Countering man’s natural egoism, which was exacerbated by the specialization of the modern age, they would persuade people to develop their inherent sociability and contribute to the common welfare. In short, positive philosophers would direct ideas, feelings, and images toward the improvement of Humanity, which would replace God and Nature as the object of people’s respect. Serving humanity would be an imperative for everyone, from housewives to scholars. The idea of humanity would thus hold society together. Comte wrote that the principal result of history was “the spontaneous convergence of all modern conceptions toward the great notion of humanity” ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 785). Though highly schematic, the law of three stages allowed Comte to pull together the natural and social sciences. Unlike Saint-Simon, he rejected the conventional approach of basing the sciences on a single method or on universal logical principles; to him, scientific knowledge itself had to be regarded as a historical process (Heilbron 1995: 200). Indeed, Comte was the only philosopher of the sciences who was more concerned with their social and political ramifications than their theoretical success and practical results (Grange 1996: 17). In his view, the most effective way to consider the sciences and their consequences was to place them in a historical perspective. Together with Comte’s classification of the sciences, the law of three stages ultimately demonstrated the triumph of sociology and completion of positivism. By providing a program ensuring intellectual rigor and encouraging social cooperation, positivism would lead to a political and social revolution that would be far more efficacious than a mere change in the form of government in bringing about a new, harmonious order. To Comte, practical, institutional reforms could never launch a new era, for they were ineffective and often premature. They did not take into account the fact that the disorganization of post-revolutionary society was due primarily to intellectual and moral anarchy.

The role of the sciences and scientists Although Comte believed that a firm grounding in the sciences was essential to proper reasoning, he did not support a purely scientistic interpretation of positivism. Indeed, Comte would never recognize the simplistic version of positivism that exists today as his own formulation. For years, scholars have commonly equated positivism with scientism, that is, a naive faith in science’s ability to solve all problems through the use of empirical, experimental, and quantitative methods of research. Jürgen Habermas claimed that “positivism stands and falls with the principle of scientism” (Habermas 1971: 67). Gertrud Lenzer accused positivism of being naively reductionist: “The triumph of the positive spirit consists in the reduction of quality to quantity in all realms of existence – in the realm of society and man as well as in the realm of nature” (Comte 1998: xxxv). Yet Comte never displayed an excessive faith in the power of the sciences to modify nature and society in a boundless fashion. Respectful of the environment and

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of the slow pace and direction of change, he argued against using the sciences to satisfy man’s love of power and conquest. As suggested above, he was more of a historicist in his approach to the sciences than an enthusiast of scientism (Grange 1996: 139). The Cours is therefore a paradoxical work. It called for a social philosophy based upon the sciences, but as reflected in his concept of the spiritual power, Comte deeply distrusted the regenerative capabilities of the purely scientific spirit. His disillusionment is evident at the end of the Cours, where he condemned “the prejudices and passions of our deplorable scientific regime” ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 791). The Cours, an apparently scientistic tract, was intended to counter the scientific spirit, that is, the “positivity” of the modern age whose specialization, egoism, and social indifference caused immeasurable moral harm. In his hatred of the hubris of scientists, Comte always maintained that even in the realm of what was understandable, scientific knowledge was deficient. He opposed, for example, the statistical approach to scientific research, which he believed overlooked the complexity of human existence and threatened the autonomy and individuality of each science. To him, the power of reason was limited. He wrote that “it was necessary to recognize that … our means for conceiving new questions … [was] much more powerful than our resources for solving them, or in other words the human mind … [was] far more capable of imagining than of reasoning” ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 1: 99). In fact, Comte did not believe in absolute truth, for he was a relativist: It is no longer a question of expounding interminably in order to know what is the best government; speaking in an absolute sense, there is nothing good, there is nothing bad; the only absolute is that everything is relative; everything is relative especially when social institutions are concerned. ([1816–28] 1970: 71)

His relativism was connected to his belief that “exact reality can never, in any way, be perfectly unveiled” to our weak mind ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 103–4). It was particularly impossible to have a complete grasp of social reality, which was extremely complex and involved people’s prejudices. Comte never lost sight of the fact that the emotions were of utmost importance in human existence. This realization was partly due to his recognition that he suffered from depression and could not work if he had emotional troubles. Since his youth, he had considered the emotions the motor of existence; their dominance was necessary to rouse the intellect from its natural torpor and give it moral direction. Indeed, he maintained that love, not reason, was the basic principle of social existence. In the Cours, he wrote that universal love, such as Catholicism conceived it, is certainly far more important than the intellect itself in … our individual or social existence, because love spontaneously uses even the lowest mental faculties for the profit of everyone, whereas egoism distorts or paralyzes the most eminent dispositions, which consequently are more often disturbing than efficacious in regard to true private or public happiness. ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 362)

Realizing that reason could not satisfy all human needs, Comte also emphasized that the imagination was crucial to both the creation and propagation of scientific

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theories. Although he recommended observation as a method of sociological research, he pointed out that complete empiricism was impossible and sterile, for accumulating discrete observable facts about a reality that could not be fully grasped was unproductive. To him, facts could not be perceived or connected without first formulating an a priori theory, which required imaginative work. Revealing an awareness of the mind’s limitations, he wrote, Man is incapable by his nature not only of combining facts and deducing from them several consequences, but of even simply observing them with attention and retaining them with certainty if he does not attach them immediately to some explanation. He cannot have connected observations without some theory any more than [he can have] a positive theory without regular observations. ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 4, “Appendice”: 144)

Social facts were the most difficult to observe. Because social scientists lived in society, it was impossible for them to notice the significance of familiar social phenomena and to be impartial. To be creative, scientific investigation of all phenomena, especially social phenomena, had to rest on the use of both induction and deduction, rely on rationalism as well as experimentation, and employ man’s imaginative capacities. Moreover, for laws to be scientific, they had to be predictive, that is, they had to display the capability to go from the present to the future and from the known to the unknown (Laudan 1971: 37–40). Comte wrote, “from science comes prediction; from prediction comes action” ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 1: 45). Facts in themselves with no connection to general laws had no predictive value. They were thus not useful. Comte advocated the use of provisional hypotheses as convenient, artificial devices to link facts and formulate natural laws. These hypotheses could not be considered scientific theories until they were verified by induction and deduction. Comte’s representation of hypotheses as useful and respectable tools that serve a crucial function in scientific discovery was an influential idea. His appreciation of the aesthetic considerations in scientists’ construction of hypotheses anticipated the work of Thomas Kuhn. To free scientists from being slaves to direct evidence, Comte also advocated the use of imagination in creating types of “scientific fiction” – hypothetical cases – to elucidate tentatively different scientific problems until the discovery of better evidence. For example, a biologist could insert “purely fictive organisms” between already known organisms in order to make the biological series more homogeneous, continuous, and regular (Comte [1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 728). As reflected in his approach to hypotheses and scientific fictions, Comte intended to offer imagination the “most vast and fertile” field for discovering, observing, and coordinating facts ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 102). To avoid giving reason excessive importance in scientific research, he deliberately refused to offer elaborate, universal, ahistorical rules of scientific procedure; he never produced an organon of proof. To him, purely abstract rationalist rules not only made scientific research less flexible but came dangerously close to metaphysical practices (Scharff 1995: 7, 65). Indeed, a few months before he died, in 1857, Comte wrote, “The present … evolution of positivism … depends on sentiment and imagination, and reasoning will henceforth be secondary” (1973–90, vol. 8: 502). His point was to offer scientists of society the widest possible variety of

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resources that would allow them to construct theories that did not require them tediously to observe facts to no purpose. They must be allowed to go beyond direct evidence without forgetting that ultimately every positive theory had to refer to real, concrete phenomena. Comte’s call to resist relying excessively on rationalism to grasp a “real” world was later echoed by Jean Baudrillard, who showed a similar appreciation of fiction’s role in social analysis. Mike Gane argued that Comte deliberately aestheticized his utopia to create a “sociological ideal-type” and to rally his followers (Gane 2006: 20).

The Religion of Humanity Comte’s followers were to worship Humanity, which was the most fundamental component of reality. In a famous passage, Comte wrote, “Considered from the static and dynamic points of view, man properly speaking is at heart a pure abstraction; there is nothing real except humanity, especially in the intellectual and moral order” ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 715). Comte reinforced the importance of all people being socialized and educated to work for this “real” phenomenon by constructing the Religion of Humanity. He called his doctrine a religion because he believed that the essence of religion lay in the ability to link individuals. People would be connected to one another, and they would achieve personal and social unity once they worshiped a common object, Humanity (Braunstein 2009: 184). Comte discussed this religion and introduced the final science of morality in his four-volume Système de politique positive, published between 1851 and 1854. Many scholars have asserted that this book was a repudiation of his previous scientific program. Yet there was no significant break in his intellectual evolution. The roots of this Religion of Humanity were evident in the writings of his youth, which focused on the need for a spiritual power. In 1826, Comte wrote an article entitled “Considérations sur le pouvoir spirituel,” in which he stated, “Dogmatism is the normal state of human intelligence, the one toward which it tends by nature continually and in all genres, even when it seems to move away from it the most.” Even skeptics and revolutionaries eventually give their “critical ideas” a “dogmatic form” ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 4, “Appendice”: 202, 203). From the outset, Comte sought to give his contemporaries a belief system that would satisfy their yearning for certainty and would gain legitimacy from having an institutional basis in a new spiritual power. In the Cours, Comte referred specifically to the need to create a “Positive Church” ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 696). The Système merely carried forth the program for the intellectual, moral, and political regeneration of society that Comte had formulated in the early 1820s. Whereas the Cours dealt with the systematization of ideas and provided a common belief system, the Système covered the political restructuring of society that would result from the intellectual and moral revolution Comte hoped to achieve. He explained that because he had already established “fundamental ideas,” he now had to describe their “social application.” This “social application” entailed “the systematization of human sentiments, [which was] the necessary consequence of that of ideas and the indispensable basis of that of institutions” (1973–90, vol. 3: 61). The Système thus stressed the organization of feelings. In view of the fact that the needs of society were not only intellectual but emotional, its spiritual reorganization

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had to involve the heart at least as much as the mind. As Donald Levine has written, “Comte’s positive philosophy … eliminates theology … but retains religion,” thus bridging the gap “between the rational imperatives of modern science and the emotional imperatives of societal order” (1995: 163, 165). Instead of dwelling on the scientific future of humanity, which he took as a given, Comte announced, somewhat provocatively, in the Système a new historical law: “man becomes increasingly religious” ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 3: 10). Convinced that a general doctrine and institutional networks were not sufficient in themselves to ensure social cohesion, Comte incorporated them into his new Religion of Humanity, adding social practices, rituals, and iconography to cultivate love of others in the past and around the globe. He believed that his new religion spoke to the needs of the current generation and would provide the moral adhesive necessary to hold society together. Ultimately human unity rested on the sympathies, for it was clear to him that the “essential principle of modern anarchy” consisted of “raising reason against sentiment” (Comte 1855: 10). The positive philosophy would bring about the intellectual and emotional consensus necessary to end anarchy and build the stable industrial society of the future. The main task of the Religion of Humanity was to cultivate altruism. Replacing Christianity with “a system of terrestrial morality,” it was a secular religion of love (Comte [1816–28] 1970: 40). Criticized for naming his moral system a religion, Comte explained in 1849 that he had “dared to join … the name [religion] to the thing [positivism], in order to institute directly an open competition with all the other systems” (1973–90, vol. 5: 22). He wanted a clear-cut doctrinal battle with Catholicism to precipitate the triumph of positivism and the start of a new order. To challenge Catholicism on its own grounds, Comte invented positivist sacraments. Four were similar to Catholic sacraments: baptism (which he called “presentation”), confirmation (which he called “initiation”), marriage, and death (which he termed “transformation”). Five other sacraments involved one’s dedication to Humanity and one’s practical career: admission (the start of one’s service of Humanity), destination (the final choice of a career), maturity (a recommitment to one’s career), retirement (the abandonment of one’s official career), and incorporation (a posthumous award signaling admittance into Humanity, based on merit). These sacraments were a constant reminder to people that they formed part of a large human community. To counter traditional Christian worship, Comte also created a special commemorative calendar, which divided the year into 13 months. On one Sunday during each of the months, there would be a festival in honor of a different movement, relationship, or group. In chronological order, the 13 festivals celebrated Humanity, marriage, paternity, filiation, fraternity, domesticity, fetishism, polytheism, monotheism, women, priests, the patriciate, and the proletariat. There would be two more festivals every week celebrating something relating to the principal theme of the month. For example, during the month devoted to fetishism, festivals would honor humans’ alliance with animals, fire, iron, astrolatry, and so forth. Besides bringing people together to reinforce solidarity, such festivals kept them engaged in the Religion. The Positivist Calendar also featured primarily secular “saints” one of whom was to be glorified each day as a servant of Humanity. The individuals were chiefly Western European scientists, artists, religious figures, and politicians, but some, such as Confucius and Muhammad, were from other areas of the globe. There were a few

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women: Joan of Arc, Heloise, Madame de Staël, and so forth. The months were renamed to highlight the achievements of the leading men of the past. January was called Moses. The other 11 months were renamed Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Caesar, Saint Paul, Charlemagne, Dante, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Descartes, and Frederick the Great. The thirteenth month was called Bichat. Statues of these great past figures were to adorn the central place of worship, the temple of Humanity. Comte’s theory anticipated the ideas of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who underscored the importance of collective memory in unifying society. Comte believed that private and public acts of commemoration in the form of worshiping important figures from one’s own past and that of Western civilization (highlighted in the calendar) would create a sense of continuity between past and present generations. The dead would continue to live in the memories of the living, who would learn to cultivate their subjective, that is, inner, selves and to love Humanity authentically with no self-interest (Karsenti 2006: 186). Such a system of commemoration would satisfy people’s natural “need for eternity” and stimulate them to contribute to the progress of humanity, especially through “benevolent actions” and “sympathetic emotions” (Comte [1830–42] 1975: 778). As Henri Gouhier pointed out, “The Religion of Humanity is essentially a cult of dead people” (1965: 212). The Système also described prayers and rituals that would rejuvenate people’s emotional life, bring them back into contact with the concrete, and stimulate the arts. Comte was creating an entirely new religious culture, which he felt was crucial for holding society together. He recognized that political action in the new age would consist of using religion, education, and the arts to form collective sentiments, beliefs, and representations. Having experienced the reigns of Napoleon I and Napoleon III, both of whom used iconography to popularize their regimes, he grasped the importance of visual culture in reinforcing political and social messages. To that end, he had his portrait and bust done by Antoine Etex to immortalize his image, he designed positivist flags with a young mother representing Humanity, he drew up architectural plans of the Temples of Humanity, and he printed his own charts of the human mind. Green, he insisted, was the color of the positivists in contrast to the white of the royalists and the red of the radical revolutionaries. (He chose green partly out of concern for the earth.) People might be brought together by common beliefs, but emotional bonds, cultivated by clear images and visual identifiers, counted for a great deal as well. In outlining the Religion of Humanity, Comte particularly aspired to revive the concreteness, intense emotional spontaneity, and poetic aptitudes of the earliest stage of religious life, that of fetishism. Of all the intellectual systems, fetishism, according to Comte, most encouraged the growth of sociability because it inspired “toward all beings, even inert, dispositions [such as veneration, trust, and adoration] that were eminently proper to cultivating … our best affections” ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 3: 108). This growth of the emotions destroyed man’s animal instincts and fortified his basic sense of humanity. Although Comte is known as an apostle of progress, he feared the effects of science and abstract thought, which made people proud and egoistic, and he believed the West needed an injection of primitive religion to continue to advance. He was one of the first thinkers to celebrate fetishism, which he connected with the black race and hoped to incorporate into positivism. To him, “the humble thinkers of

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central Africa” were more rational about human nature and society than the “superb German doctors,” with their “pompous verbiage.” Comte maintained, “The touching logic of the least Negroes is … wiser than our academic dryness, which, under the futile pretext of an always impossible impartiality usually strengthens suspicion and fear” ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 3: 99, 121). Unlike modern men, the fetish worshipers admired what was concrete and useful and respected the natural world. Comte tried to replicate this kind of worship by encouraging people to devote themselves to Humanity, the “Great Being.” The purpose of his neo-fetishist religion was to stress the importance of humility and self-effacement by demonstrating that all peoples were related to each other and to the earth, which at the end of his life he called the “Great Fetish.” Although a proponent of industrialization and its use of natural resources, Comte urged people to have more regard for the earth, the milieu of Humanity. They had to modify the earth not simply to benefit from it in a material sense but to increase social cooperation. In addition, if they submitted more intelligently to the laws of the earth, people would become less egoistic and more humble, loving, and joyful. In short, positivism had to emulate fetishism by recognizing what was beneficial to others in a concrete sense in this world. In 1855, Comte wrote to a friend to explain the “absorption of fetishism by positivism”: There exists essentially for us only two beings, both of which are eminently composite: the Earth, including the stars as appendices, and Humanity, of which the animals capable of association and even the useful vegetables are auxiliaries. … These are our two masters, which are closely connected at least to us; one is superior in power, the other in dignity, but both are worthy of our continual respect. (1973–90, vol. 8: 39)

In Comte’s mind, the highest stage of civilization represented a return to the beginning. “Human reason” at the height of its “virility” must include a “degree of poetic fetishism” (1973–90, vol. 3: 212). Comte was thus one of the first philosophers to contend that fetishism did not belong exclusively to the primitive age and did not always represent a type of false consciousness or prelogical mind-set.

Comte’s criticisms of his contemporary world and his vision of the future Condemning racism and imperialism for dividing humanity instead of uniting it, Comte challenged racial stereotypes when he asserted that one day a “Negro thinker” might study his works and lend him his support ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 3: 156). No man should be a slave to another in the modern age. Indeed, Comte went so far as to praise racially mixed couples, asserting that each race would gain in being in close proximity with the other. Although he took an essentialist position that whites were intelligent, blacks were emotional, and “yellows” were active and practical, he did not think that racial differences were immutable and all-determining. A black person, for example, could be primarily emotional but also intelligent and active. Comte asserted that the different races would grow more alike as they developed different parts of their brains because of changes in the milieu; in the positivist era, they would be obliged to use and thus develop all their forces. Interracial marriages would also lead to the sharing of characteristics associated with each race. Thanks to such

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marriages in particular, people would become better lovers, thinkers, and practicians, that is, fuller human beings. Comte’s radical idea stemmed from his Lamarckian belief in the influence of the milieu on human development. It seems to have been adopted by the American doctor Edward Bliss Foote, who depicted a black man kissing a white woman in one of his publications of the 1870s. According to Michael Sappol, the picture was “perhaps the first positive representation of an interracial kiss in nineteenth-century America” (2002: 265). Hoping to end militarism and wars, Comte wished to spread the feeling of our common humanity, that is, sociability, throughout the world. Opposed to the extreme nationalism of his fellow Europeans, he condemned England’s involvement in the Opium War against China, its retention of Gibraltar, and its treatment of India. In his view, these imperialist enterprises were linked to industrial interests. He also lamented the French take-over of Algeria, which he repeatedly insisted should be returned to the Arabs. He criticized the empire-building of both Napoleon I and Napoleon III. In his mind, “internal oppression” was “always allied with external oppression” (1973–90, vol. 8: 258). Some of his disciples who believed in the civilizing mission of the French took umbrage at his anti-imperialism. Nevertheless, Comte argued in favor of dismantling large states, especially because of their tyranny over other nations and their overbearing imperial ambitions. Once a common spiritual government was erected in the positivist era, all states would be divided into simple city-states (cities with their surrounding countryside and small towns), where sociability would be easier to cultivate and people’s loyalty would be spontaneous and voluntary. France itself would be broken up into 17 “intendancies,” another name for these city-states. Representing the chief intermediaries between the family and Humanity, these 500 small republics throughout the world would be less oppressive than large states. Because they would be approximately the same size, with one to three million people, who shared a common religion, there would be less chance of war. The capital of this vast universal republican system would be Constantinople, the city that Comte believed could best unite the East and West. Like his French contemporaries, he was fascinated by the “Orient.” To display positivism’s deep respect for all of history and generous appreciation of other faiths, he frequently praised Muhammad and Islam. He believed that Muslims were ripe for positivist conversion because their faith was tolerant and simple, they were already focused on the needs of the community, and they had been preserved from the anarchic influences of metaphysicians and legists. He went so far as to express his hope that the Algerians would convert the French to Islam rather than let the French make them Catholics.

The leading allies of positive philosophers: women and workers In the future positivist era, the city-states throughout the world would be marked internally by harmony among the chief groups: regenerated industrialists, who were the temporal power, and positive philosophers, women, and workers, who represented components of the spiritual power. The positive philosophers, who epitomized reason, would be helped primarily by women, who embodied feeling, and workers, who represented activity. These two oppressed groups – women and workers – had interested Comte since he was a young man. Unlike the ruling male

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bourgeoisie, whom he called “extremely gangrenous,” women and workers were preserved from the artificial, materialist culture of the day (1973–90, vol. 6: 188). He increasingly appealed to them for support, after being rebuffed by scientists and luminaries of his day. In the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848, Comte joined the issues of class and gender; he maintained that the liberation of both the proletariat and women was necessary for the advent of positivism. But once he discovered the strength of the proletariat’s loyalty to socialism, Comte decided in 1851 that the most “important work of positivism” was to persuade women to join him (1973–90, vol. 6: 188). He was weary of the “depressing regime” of men, who were shallow and narrow-minded (1973–90, vol. 7: 158). Repelled by the “disorders of male reason” and its futile political machinations, Comte found women to represent the best way to unify an increasingly fragmented society (1973–90, vol. 6: 183). Scholars frequently accuse Comte of being a “phallocrat” desirous only to preserve the current outlines of the patriarchal society (Kofman 1978: 233). He certainly did not approve of feminism and repeatedly condemned bluestockings and the “liberated woman” as aberrant, sexless creatures. Nevertheless, having read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a young person, he criticized men who employed “the horrible law of the strongest” to lord it over women, whom they regarded as a “domestic animal” or “toy destined for all eternity for the good pleasure and usage of his Majesty Man” (1973–90, vol. 1: 56). In the 1840s, he finally recognized that the problem of anarchy would not be resolved “as long as the revolution does not become feminine” (1973–90, vol. 6: 108). He feared his own reform movement would be discredited without female support. He begged women not to misunderstand the gist of his thought: The fatal antagonism … between the mind and the heart can be resolved only by the positive regime; no other is capable of subordinating in a dignified fashion, reason to sentiment. … In its vain present supremacy, the mind is ultimately our principal trouble maker.… Better judges than we in moral understanding, women will feel in several regards that the affective superiority of positivism … is even more pronounced than its speculative preeminence, which is henceforth incontestable. They will soon come to this conclusion when they have stopped confusing the new philosophy with its scientific preamble. ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 1: 224)

Trying to take advantage of “the feminine revolution” that he believed was about to begin and appropriating aspects of the contemporary women’s movement for his own purposes, Comte put woman at the center of his schemes for renovation in two of his last works, the Système de politique positive and the Catéchisme positiviste (1852) (1973–90, vol. 6: 109). Whereas in the Cours, he had declared that women were far from the “ideal type of the race” – the male – he declared in the Système the need to establish a “cult of Woman,” which would make her into a kind of goddess ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 1: 259). In participating in this cult, each man would worship three “guardian angels” – the most important women in his life (usually his mother, wife, and daughter), who would inspire him to think about others. Leaning more toward altruism by nature, women had less need of this cult. Nevertheless, they could worship their mothers, husbands, and sons. Comte acknowledged that his

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system did not address women’s needs very well because he lacked the help of a female colleague. Nevertheless, he persisted in targeting women. The Catéchisme, which consisted of a dialogue between a woman and a positivist priest, specifically addressed a female audience. It aimed to develop the alliance between positive philosophers and women that Comte was certain would spur the regenerative process. Although Comte never supported the notion of the equality of the sexes, he did give women a positive identity; they were not simply harlots or housewives as Pierre Proudhon proclaimed, or permanent invalids as Jules Michelet contended. Comte referred to the “feminine genius” in terms of its important function not solely to propagate but to participate in the public sphere and aid the spiritual power in reorganizing society along moral lines ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 300). Experts in the emotions, women made men more sociable, complete human beings. To fulfill this mission, they needed to be able to mold public opinion, preferably in the salons, whose revival he favored. Women also required freedom from economic and sexual exploitation. Comte envisioned the “utopia of women,” where they would gain “independence” from men, even in their “physical role,” by taking control of their own bodies and having children without any male participation whatsoever ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 4: 66–7, 286). Moreover, because they were endowed with the best human characteristic, that of sociability, women, he insisted, should represent Humanity itself. In the positivist temples, Humanity would be always depicted as a woman accompanied by her son. This daring displacement of God the Father in the positivist system reflects Comte’s conviction that women were morally superior and would be “in first place in the normal society” of the future (1973–90, vol. 7: 160). Agents of social unity, women were the key to completing the positive revolution and saving the increasingly fragmented West from complete dissolution. Their role illustrates Comte’s goal of placing nurturing and empathy at the center of public life in order to create a new more compassionate and harmonious society.

The sciences and the arts In his effort to make feeling of paramount importance and to use visual culture for propagandistic purposes, Comte also developed a greater interest in art. In the Système, he argued that art’s power of idealization encouraged the growth of feeling, social solidarity, and reform activity; because it developed the sympathies, art should have a higher place in society than science, whose work was primarily preparatory and too often egoistic. He wrote, “Art corresponds better than science to our most intimate needs. It is both more sympathetic and more synthetic” ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 4: 51). Ideally it would be possible to blend the scientific spirit with the aesthetic spirit. The latter would help make the former more ethical, that is, more concerned with helping Humanity. Comte tried to fuse the two in his last work, Synthèse subjective (1856), which was devoted to mathematics. Although often dismissed as nonsensical, this book is important. Comte used it to show his critics, who thought he had abandoned his original agenda, that he had never lost sight of the sciences that had inspired him in the first place. Preoccupied by religion at the end of his life, he returned to the sciences to demonstrate that they were inherently religious. In the Synthèse subjective, he argued that the scientific spirit was considered dry simply because the modern

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specialization that it engendered hurt moral and aesthetic growth. Yet even the “driest” science, mathematics, was inherently religious in the same way the other sciences were: it could be used to elevate human nature and to improve social conditions. All the sciences should serve Humanity in their own distinctive ways, proving their moral worth. In particular, the “abstract habits of clarity, precision, and consistency, which are normally acquired in the mathematical domain,” could be fruitfully applied to religious institutions and art (1856: xi). Even numbers themselves evoked feelings. The number one stood for harmony based on love, the number two represented order, and the number three meant progress. The numbers seven and thirteen were also symbolic and sacred. To demonstrate the closeness between sciences and the arts, Comte set down rules to ensure that future positive philosophers, who were scientific generalists, would also act as poets celebrating Humanity in verse. The poetic age of his doctrine could then commence. In some respects, Comte’s views seem to anticipate the concerns of Max Weber, who also considered rationalization a global process and worried about the “disenchantment” of the modern world.

The aims of Comte’s system In sum, Comte’s positivist system was never morally neutral or value-free as some scholars have asserted in equating positivism with a quest for objectivity. From the beginning, Comte embraced social activism and a moral goal, for he was convinced that impartiality was inappropriate and indeed impossible in studying society, whose phenomena were close to us; a viable social theory had to depict a better form of social organization. Comte sought to shape the world of action indirectly by molding people’s ideas and opinions. Because he believed that intellectual well-roundedness was linked to altruism, he declared that the adoption of the positivist mental outlook would lead first to a new moral order marked by the bonding together of individuals through sympathy and then to a political transformation that would launch a new positivist era of social consensus, association, and stability.

THE PERSON Comte was eager for this new era to begin, for he was profoundly disenchanted with his own period. Throughout his life, he had trouble fitting into the society around him and always felt he was an outsider. He later admitted that he sought in “public life the noble but imperfect compensation of the unhappiness of his private life” (1973–90, vol. 3: 36). In his youth he experienced the disruptive effects of civil war both within his family and in his native city. He was born in 1798 in Montpellier, which was one of the southern centers of the Counter-Revolution, the movement that resisted the reforming zeal of the French Revolution of 1789. Comte’s bourgeois parents were Catholic royalists also opposed to the Revolution. His childhood was thus full of bitter memories caused by the ordeals of this tumultuous period. In the “Personal Preface” to the sixth volume of the Cours, which included an autobiographical sketch, he pointed out that the French Revolution made a profound impression on

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him, especially because it was rejected by his family. Comte did not get along with his father, who was a bureaucrat in the tax collection office. Though closer to his mother, he alienated her by his unconventional beliefs and behavior. Like many members of his generation with whom he studied at the new Montpellier lycée, established by Napoleon, Comte was eager to display his defiance and rebelliousness. His questioning attitude was encouraged by his republican teachers. At 13 or 14, he announced that he no longer believed in God or Catholicism. Soon afterwards, rejecting his parents’ royalism and following the example set by the revolutionaries, he became a republican. A brilliant student with a phenomenal memory, Comte in 1814 gained admission into the Ecole Polytechnique, the prestigious Parisian engineering school. Taught by the best scientists of the day, he learned the importance of the sciences in improving social conditions. He also imbibed the republican, reform-oriented atmosphere of the school. Yet in April 1816 the new royalist government had him expelled for his republicanism and insubordinate behavior. Despite his abridged stay at the Ecole Polytechnique, he remained forever marked by its scientific mind-set. After his expulsion, Comte took courses in biology at the famous medical school in Montpellier, studied history, and read the works of Condorcet and Montesquieu on the “moral and political sciences” (1973–90, vol. 1: 19). In June 1816, he wrote his first essay, which was never published: “Mes Réflexions: Humanité, verité, justice, liberté, patrie. Rapprochements entre le régime de 1793 et celui de 1816, adressés au peuple français.” Horrified at the royalists’ vengeful series of massacres, he condemned the new Bourbon monarchy as well as other oppressive despotisms, namely those of Robespierre and Napoleon, which had had their own share of atrocities. Like other liberal republicans of this period, Comte called for a government based on the “national will,” that is, popular consent ([1816–28] 1970: 421). In his view, enlightened men, such as philosophers and scientists, should lead the way. From the start, there was a certain tension between his elitist and populist impulses. A year later, back in Paris, Comte began working for Henri de Saint-Simon, an older social reformer, whose “liberalism was … well known” (Comte 1973–90, vol. 1: 27). The extent of Saint-Simon’s influence on Comte is still controversial today. It is undoubtedly true that in his many works published during the Napoleonic Empire, Saint-Simon had shown that the creation of a new unified system of scientific knowledge – a “positive philosophy” – centered on the study of society would lead to a new stage of history, where industrialists and scientists would replace military leaders and the clergy. Yet, he scattered such seminal ideas haphazardly throughout his various writings along with other less viable notions, such as the necessity of unifying society by means of a single natural law, Newton’s law of gravity, which would replace God as “the sole cause of all physical and moral phenomena” (Saint-Simon 1966, vol. 6: 121 n.1, 154). When Comte started working for him in 1817, Saint-Simon had grown less interested in establishing the theoretical basis of social reconstruction and was turning toward the practical, industrial reorganization of society. He had dropped his faith in scientists and increasingly praised industriels (people involved in productive work) for preparing the new order. Comte, however, took up Saint-Simon’s original mission of founding the scientific system, that is, the positive philosophy, together with its keystone, the science of society.

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It is evident that Saint-Simon gave Comte’s thought a certain direction. Although he later denied Saint-Simon’s influence, immediately after their break-up Comte was more forthright: I certainly owe a great deal intellectually to Saint-Simon, that is to say, he has powerfully contributed to launching me in the philosophical direction that I have clearly created for myself today and that I will follow without hesitation all my life. (1973–90, vol. 1: 90)

Gifted with a disciplined, methodical mind, Comte built on the legacy given to him by Saint-Simon and achieved an originality of his own. While Saint-Simon was an incoherent autodidact who constantly revised his concept of the science of humanity, Comte had a talent for system-building and synthesis, which he used to develop sociology as a coherent discipline. Intellectual differences as well as generational tensions soon led to a rupture. Comte broke with Saint-Simon in 1824 after accusing his mentor of trying to take credit for his seminal essay, the Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société. In this work, Comte had revealed his latest “discovery” – the law of three stages. This law was in fact indebted to Saint-Simon’s view that each science passed through three stages – a conjectural stage, a half-conjectural and half-positive stage, and a positive stage – according to its degree of complexity. Yet unlike SaintSimon, Comte gave this law a new role as the basis of sociology. It was the key to understanding humanity’s development in the past, present, and future. Excited about his findings, Comte felt ready to launch his own career. Despite this rupture, Comte wrote for Le Producteur, the journal founded by Saint-Simon’s disciples after the old reformer’s death in May 1825. He did not join the Saint-Simonian sect, for he maintained purely literary relations with its members. In the two series of articles that he wrote for the journal in 1825 and early 1826, Comte developed his concept of the spiritual power. He was prescient in claiming that the key to power in modern society lay in controlling opinions and ideas. As soon as natural scientists and social scientists took over the educational system, he believed they would exert enormous influence over society. They would be especially important in checking the corrupt “administrative despotism” that marked the modern age ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 4, “Appendice”: 187). Henceforth Comte devoted himself to founding the positivist priesthood. In early 1826 he offered a course on positive philosophy at his apartment, which was attended by many of the great scientists of the day. Yet after the third lecture, he went mad. A paranoid manic depressive, he spent eight months in an asylum. As a result, he could never completely eliminate the suspicion that he was “crazy” – a term often used by his critics to discredit him. Finally recovering with the help of Caroline Massin, an administrator of a reading room whom he had married in 1824, he was henceforth always concerned about preserving his mental well-being. His struggles with mental illness made him distrust skepticism as corrosive and strengthened his conviction that a “normal,” sane existence necessitated a certain prescribed harmony and a rigid order. Indeed, he believed that the collective harmony created by positivism guaranteed physical health and longevity (Braunstein 2009: 182).

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After his convalescence, Comte worked as a mathematics tutor and journalist. Then in 1832 he procured a subordinate teaching and administrative position at the Ecole Polytechnique. He was a répétiteur (teaching assistant) and admissions examiner. This non-taxing work left him time to finish the Cours de philosophie positive in 1842. Its purpose was to establish sociology, to stimulate the reorganization of society, and to create the foundation for the reform of the sciences to meet the educational needs of modern civilization. One of the founders of the history of science, Comte analyzed the development of each science and its close relationship to the growth of other sciences. The first three volumes covered the history of mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. The last three volumes treated his new science of sociology. All in all, the Cours set down the basic program of study that he had undergone and that he believed the new spiritual power had to master in order to lead society to a new ethic of cooperation. When Comte began volume four in 1838, he experienced another prolonged period of mental illness, which he ascribed not only to the immense intellectual effort required to introduce sociology, but also to his wife’s infidelity. To improve his mental health, Comte underwent an “aesthetic revolution”; he suddenly developed an interest in music and poetry. He hoped to use the arts to cultivate his feelings and thereby enlarge his comprehension of society, the new object of his studies. At the same time, he adopted a regime of “cerebral hygiene.” To preserve his ego from attacks from critics and to maintain his sense of originality, he abstained from reading newspapers, books, and journals. He allowed himself only the pleasures of great poetry. Cutting himself off from other scholars, whom he accused of disregarding his work, he increasingly retreated from the world. This tendency toward isolation was strengthened when his wife suddenly left him in 1842 after he neglected her advice not to publish the “Personal Preface” to the sixth volume of the Cours, which viciously attacked his colleagues at the Ecole Polytechnique for slighting him. Her departure almost caused another mental breakdown. Several years later another woman entered his life. In early 1845 Comte fell in love with Clotilde de Vaux, the sister of one of his students. She was 17 years younger than Comte. Having been abandoned by her husband, she was an aspiring writer trying to gain independence from her parents, who were struggling to support her. Comte pursued her in a very calculated fashion to develop his feelings, which he worried were stunted due to his poor relations with his family and wife. Now that he was about to write the Système, which dealt with the emotional side of human existence, he believed he needed more depth in this arena. Comte represented de Vaux as a perfect lady, an angel who made him more virtuous. Moral improvement, he asserted, was imperative for a philosopher because “no great intellect” could develop “in a suitable manner without a certain amount of universal benevolence,” the source of lofty goals ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 181). He maintained that his adoration for de Vaux made him love all of Humanity. Although Comte now prided himself on being a model of both intellectual and moral strength, he lusted ironically after her body. Considering him only a close friend, de Vaux resisted his advances. Yet she was forced to increase her reliance on his good will and financial resources as she began to lose her battle against tuberculosis. In April 1846, she died. During this period, from mid-1845 to 1846, Comte

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again almost went mad. To immortalize her name, he decided to dedicate to her his next significant work, the Système de politique positive (1851–4). The extent of de Vaux’s influence on Comte is controversial. Comte claimed she was responsible for his “second career.” Scholars from John Stuart Mill to Raymond Aron have usually agreed that there was indeed a break in his intellectual evolution. Yet they considered what he wrote after her death to be far inferior to the Cours. The Religion of Humanity, which he erected in her honor, allegedly discredited his earlier scientistic program. Yet just as Comte’s earlier work was not completely scientistic, his later career was not entirely sentimental and illogical. His last work, the Synthèse subjective (1856), focused almost entirely on the sciences, especially mathematics; it reinterpreted their role from the perspective of the kind of moral education and logic required during the positive age. All of Comte’s works form a coherent whole marked by consistency; from the beginning, his concerns were “spiritual” in that he was trying to create a credible general doctrine that would replace Catholicism and still satisfy humans’ need for beliefs and values. Although de Vaux did not change the direction of Comte’s thought, she did reinforce his growing interest in the feelings, and her struggles to establish herself revived his interest in the “woman question,” which his bitter relationship with Massin had squelched. The alliance between women and positive philosophers that he had promoted in the closing volume of the Cours now became central to his doctrine, as reflected in the Catéchisme positiviste. When the Revolution of 1848 broke out, Comte became eager to gain greater popularity with the common people. Prompted by the belief that every educated person had a duty to enlighten those who wanted to learn, since 1831 he had given a highly successful public course on astronomy to workers. Now seeking to entice the workers from socialism, especially the “communist” doctrines of Etienne Cabet, he founded the Positivist Society to launch the positivist movement, and wrote a manifesto, the Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme. In this work, which later formed the opening section of the Système, he argued that although positivism did not seek to abolish private property, it absorbed and strengthened the basic principles of communism in that it agreed that the community should “intervene to subordinate [property] to the needs of society” ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 1: 155). Comte also supported the workers’ demands for the right to work and a republic where they would hold the reins of power. However, he soon feared the revolutionaries were becoming too violent and anarchic, and he ended by preferring the dictatorial regime of Louis Napoleon. In 1855 he wrote Appel au Conservateurs to persuade all conservatives, including Catholics, to unite with positivists against the Left. Comte’s growing conservatism cost him the support of liberals, such as Émile Littré, a leading scholar who had been his most important French supporter. Nevertheless, Comte still had 50 or so faithful disciples in the Positivist Society, which continued to meet once a week. They supported him financially. Such assistance was especially necessary after Comte lost his last job at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1851. His resentment at not being promoted to mathematics professor had led to friction with his colleagues, who finally dismissed him. He depended on his disciples until his death in 1857. In the last years of his life, Comte ruled the positivist movement in a dictatorial manner, refusing to allow any dissension, especially in matters pertaining to the

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Religion of Humanity, whose cult he meticulously organized. He also wrote his Testament, which enclosed a “Secret Addition”; it was to be used against his wife if she challenged his will and tried to downplay the importance of this religion. The note accused Massin of having been a prostitute – an allegation that has been generally accepted as true. Yet Comte was falling into the binary logic of his time. If de Vaux was an angel, Massin, whom he now hated, had to be the opposite, a demonic force, whose representation in the mid-nineteenth century was a prostitute. When Massin did challenge the will and the case went to court, she was shocked to read the “Secret Addition,” whose truth she vigorously denied. Just as Comte succeeded in forever associating de Vaux with his name, he forever sullied the reputation of Massin. Auguste Comte was a brilliant visionary but a difficult, egoistic person. The certainty that he was right, his intolerance of criticism, and his paranoia led to one rupture after another. He lost many important friends, such as Saint-Simon, François Guizot, Émile Littré, and John Stuart Mill. He broke with his wife and his family, alienated his colleagues, and wrangled with his disciples over personal, financial, and doctrinal issues. Many followers left the movement. It is paradoxical that the man who founded the science that specialized in social relations could not get along with other people. And yet, perhaps because of his manic depressive condition, he imagined himself the savior of the world, the “Great Priest” of Humanity to which he claimed to be devoted. In a sense, he sought in his social philosophy the stability, harmony, and love that eluded him in his private life.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT Generating a series of dramatic transformations, the French Revolution seemed to make such dreams of salvation plausible. Comte’s aspirations cannot be entirely understood without properly appreciating the social context in which he wrote. His sociological theory was a direct response to the upheavals caused by the French and Industrial revolutions, two turning points in Western history that rendered social conditions uncertain and unstable. The French Revolution was a cataclysmic event that threw into question the legitimacy of the government and the religion upon which traditional society rested. Henceforth, the basis and ends of power were matters of debate. During the 60-odd years that Comte lived, France experienced nine different governments and revolutions. In their search for a new government, the French people seemed unsuccessful at avoiding the twin problems of mob rule and dictatorship. The various constitutions setting down the rules of government were discarded one right after another. Different social groups, impelled by the new forces of financial and industrial capitalism, manipulated events to their own advantage and to the detriment of the lower classes, who were trying to adjust to a new machine-based economy that threatened their traditional, artisanal ways of life. Having watched political experimentations wreak havoc in his country, Comte, like many of his countrymen, had little faith in purely political solutions to the anarchy of his time and looked with skepticism on such conventional abstractions as the “rights of man” and “popular sovereignty,” which he believed had led to this confusion. Like others, from traditionalists on the Right to republicans on the Left, he craved a moral community.

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For Comte, as for the revolutionaries, the idea of regeneration had to be a global program that touched on politics, the economy, morality, philosophy, and religion. Commending the revolutionaries for presiding over the necessary work of destruction, he looked forward to the day when there would be a new, more profound revolution, a constructive one instituting a more virtuous society, not just in France but everywhere. By the mid-nineteenth century, he was well aware that all parts of the world were interconnected. Partaking of the Eurocentrism of his time, he assumed that the other areas of the globe would follow European patterns of development. Deeply affected by the disunity and anarchy surrounding him, he created sociology and positivism to give the world the stability, order, and harmony it needed in an industrial, secular age that he recognized would no longer be dominated by nobles and clergymen. Eliminating the questionable abstractions of both religion and conventional philosophy, positivism would serve as the basis of a new social consensus. To create a grand philosophical synthesis that would appeal to both the Left and Right and thus transcend party politics, Comte drew from many intellectual traditions. Despite his embrace of “cerebral hygiene,” he was also deeply affected by developments going on around him. Comte wanted his system to represent not only the completion of the French Enlightenment but the endpoint of a more wide-ranging, European intellectual evolution as well. To him, this great comprehensiveness made his work even more serious and significant. As a result, his doctrine represents a delicate balancing act.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT Comte’s approach to epistemology and the scientific method was influenced by Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume. In scientific investigations, Comte recommended achieving a balance between Bacon’s stress on induction and Descartes’ emphasis on rationalism (or deduction) in order to come up with useful laws. Such laws were to be limited to describing facts, for they had to be constructed in accordance with Hume’s warning to avoid the absurd pursuit of first and final causes. Like Kant, who Comte believed had elaborated on the British philosopher’s conclusions, Hume had stressed the “fundamental dualism between the spectator and spectacle” and had brought mankind closer to the triumph of relativism and nominalism ([1929] 1851–4, vol. 3: 588). By showing that an artificial logic provisionally linked our thoughts, both Hume and Kant had taught Comte that people could never know more than what appeared to them through their senses and categories. They thus contributed to Comte’s theory of the subjective synthesis, which maintained that knowledge was not comprehensive or objective but rested on the nature of man. Comte also took a great interest in biology, a science that was in a crucial era of development during his lifetime. It deeply influenced his conception of sociology, especially his idea that society formed an organism. Comte frequently used biological terms, such as “social illness,” “pathological case,” and “chronic epidemic,” to characterize French society ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 16, 48, 50). Four biologists in particular had a large impact on Comte. François Broussais’s theory that the

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pathological was simply a variation of the normal was the source of Comte’s concept of the use of experimentation in social studies. Henri Ducrotay de Blainville interested Comte in the influence of the environment on living bodies and turned his attention to the difference between statics and dynamics. Marie François Xavier Bichat’s concept that there were three types of human skills – rational, emotive, and motor – inspired Comte’s idea that the spiritual power consisted of philosophers, women, and workers. The phrenological doctrine of Franz Gall offered Comte a materialist replacement for the religious explanation of the world and human existence. Comte enthusiastically embraced Gall’s principle that sympathy, or sociability, was an innate disposition in every individual because this theory strengthened the positivist argument that people simply needed to be socialized to become more altruistic. Both Gall and Bichat were considered by Comte to be his main scientific predecessors (Clauzade 2009: 97, 132). A wide variety of social thinkers and philosophers in France and abroad also influenced Comte’s development. Montesquieu, Saint-Simon, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught him that society ultimately represented an application of ideas, particularly moral principles, because a common world view united people. Once the dominant philosophy changed, so did morality and politics. Montesquieu inspired Comte to look for social laws. Saint-Simon recommended the scientific study of society based on a priori and a posteriori ideas and the history of progress. Making Comte aware that they were living in an age of transition requiring a radical new approach to reconstruction, Saint-Simon also delineated the new temporal and spiritual elites that would take over the emerging industrial-scientific society and direct it toward working productively for the happiness of man on earth. Herder emphasized the importance of a feeling of humanity, and Hegel reinforced Comte’s organicism and deterministic approach to history. Political economists, such as Adam Smith and J. B. Say, turned Comte’s attention to the problems associated with industrialization and made him see both the benefits and disadvantages of the division of labor. Comte recognized that the division of labor was crucial to progress. However, he lamented that specialization, which was one of its components, led to a withering of the spirit and a breakdown of the community. The Scottish Enlightenment philosophers (Hume, William Robertston, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith) and the Idéologues (Condorcet, Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Antoine-Louis Claude de Destutt de Tracy, and J. B. Say) also were influential because of their respective efforts to launch a scientific study of society. Comte appreciated the Scottish philosophers’ attempt to establish moral principles on a secular, empirical basis in order to reinforce the progress of the human species from rudeness to civilization. They stressed the importance of studying how government and society developed gradually from man’s inherently social nature, not from a contract between strong individualists. Contradicting social contract theory, this emphasis on man’s natural feeling of sympathy for others, which was also found in Gall’s phrenological doctrine, had a large impact on the positivist concept of human nature. As a means of combating “egoistic metaphysics,” that is, doctrines of individualism, the Scottish theory of man’s natural sociability as the basic unifying force in society contributed to Comte’s own doctrine of altruism and to the establishment of morality as a seventh science based on the social psychology of man.

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Carrying on the legacy of the Enlightenment in the early nineteenth century, the Idéologues tried to develop a social science that would lead to social stability while remaining faithful to the essence of liberalism, the movement that had been salient during the first stages of the Revolution. They imagined a secular, educated elite leading a republic according to the findings of a rational, all-encompassing science of man, not according to vague, potentially dangerous political principles, such as inalienable natural rights. Comte was most impressed by the philosophe who inspired this movement: Condorcet. He admired Condorcet’s attempt to establish the science of society on the basis of history, particularly the law of progress of the mind, which was the source of the improvement of humanity. Moreover, Comte acknowledged that he borrowed Condorcet’s concept of humanity as a single people experiencing the various stages of history. He thus considered Condorcet his “essential precursor” ([1852] 1966: 32). Comte regarded Joseph de Maistre as “the only thinker” after Condorcet and Gall to whom he owed “something important” (1973–90, vol. 6: 325). Maistre was part of the “reactionary” or counter-revolutionary school of social thought, which included Louis de Bonald. In the pursuit of a synthesis that would transcend stale ideological debates and appeal to people tired of party politics, Comte staked his claim to the liberal tradition by linking his philosophy to that of Condorcet and the Idéologues. Recognizing the force of the Catholic revival that occurred in France after the end of the Napoleonic Empire, Comte also felt obliged to appeal to the conservative sector of the population. He frequently acknowledged his great debt to the doctrine of the theocrats. He agreed with their assessment that “moral anarchy” was the “great scourge” of the nineteenth century and stemmed from the absence of a general unifying doctrine. Inspired by the conservative thinkers’ romanticization of the Middle Ages and their organicism, he looked back fondly on the dogmas and structured spiritual order that he believed formed the basis of medieval social unity. Though a severe critic of Catholicism, Comte conceded that the decline of religion had destroyed this harmonious society and had led to “the most abject” individualism and social fragmentation (1973–90, vol. 1: 147, 156). He blamed the Protestant Revolution in particular for this state of affairs. It had embraced individualism, which influenced the Enlightenment thinkers and the French revolutionaries and formed the basis of liberalism. According to Maistre, the concept of the autonomous, free individual endowed with natural rights was alarming because man could not be understood apart from the organic society in which he lived. Comte concurred with Maistre’s arguments against liberalism, finding it an anti-social doctrine, one that contributed to the atomization, materialism, and corruption of modern society. Impressed by Maistre’s assessment that the stress on the sovereignty of reason had left people suffering in an abnormal state of unbelief, Comte agreed that to fulfill the “spiritual condition for the continued existence of human society,” people needed “fixed, positive, and unanimous principles,” which had to be firmly established by a strong spiritual authority ruling a hierarchical society (1973–90, vol. 1: 147). Maistre argued in particular that social solidarity rested on the unlimited power of the pope, the source of all valid authority. Appreciating his demonstration of the importance of an institution to the power of a religion, Comte strongly endorsed Maistre’s concept that a powerful spiritual authority had to remain independent of the temporal government to ensure a moral order. In short, Comte’s

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system reflected Maistre’s stance that a unifying spiritual doctrine and structure represented the key to social cohesion. Yet Comte by no means adopted Maistre’s system in its entirety, for he did not wish to return to the past as the theocrats did. Comte recognized the benefits of progress and the new needs of the future industrial-scientific society. He was deeply influenced by contemporary movements promoting change. As a young man, he had been influenced by liberalism and belonged to various republican organizations before he lost faith in political solutions to the anarchy of his times. Despite his turn to the Right, he was a critic of the status quo and remained an opponent of traditional religion and a monarchical form of government. As mentioned previously, he was also much affected by the women’s movement and socialism. Moreover, Comte was touched by the contemporary romantic movement, many of whose themes came to him through the Saint-Simonians, whom he closely watched. Like the romantics, he despised the bourgeois commercialism of his age, argued in favor of spontaneity, and reveled in his eccentricity, which he considered a source of creativity. At the same time, he shared the romantics’ interest in the spiritual aspect of human nature and participated in their celebration of women and the emotions. Comte believed that although the intellectual faculties would become stronger with the advance of civilization and would exert more influence on the emotions, they would still need the superior power of the affections to rouse them from their habitual torpor, give them direction, and subject them to the control of reality. Finally, like the romantics, he looked favorably on the Middle Ages. For this reason, he was most drawn to Sir Walter Scott and Alexander Manzoni, who idealized the medieval period in historical epics. The two writers seemed to epitomize the power of the poet or artist to enchant and ennoble. Such aesthetic power would be important in the positivist republic.

IMPACT With such a rich, all-encompassing doctrine predicting a harmonious future, Comte attracted numerous followers on both the Left and the Right in France, England, the United States, and Latin America. Pierre Laffitte, one of Comte’s disciples, became head of the international positivist movement after his master’s death. The “orthodox” disciples in the movement compelled him to develop the religious strain of positivism that had preoccupied Comte at the end of his life. Yet the “unorthodox” Littré rejected Comte’s religious construction and transformed positivism into a powerful scientific manifesto for a new generation of anti-clerical republicans, who sought legitimacy for their materialist beliefs and hoped to remake the world with the help of science. In this guise, the doctrine became very compelling to Latin American republicans, especially in Brazil, whose flag displays Comte’s motto “Order and Progress.” But it was often used to bolster dictatorial regimes, such as that of Porfirio Diáz in Mexico. In France, positivism became the semi-official doctrine of the Third Republic. It was a significant weapon in the republic’s battle against the Catholic Church, especially in the struggle surrounding the control of schools. Both Jules Ferry and Léon Gambetta, who were leaders in the Third Republic, were enthusiasts, as was

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Émile Zola, the famous writer. However, another devotee of positivism was Charles Maurras, who in 1898 founded the Action Française, a proto-fascist movement that denounced “un-French” elements such as Protestants and Jews and claimed support for its authoritarian nationalism on the basis of a scientific study of the “facts.” In England, John Stuart Mill actively corresponded with Comte from 1841 to 1847 and came close to becoming his disciple. He absorbed the essential aspects of Comte’s conception of a social science, including the positive method and the law of history. He also responded to Comte’s call for educated men to provide constructive leadership to a society undergoing a period of transition. Mill and George Henry Lewes helped to popularize the positivist doctrine, as did Harriet Martineau, who wrote an abridged translation of the Cours (1853), which Comte preferred to his own book. The effects of its theories can be seen in the novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing. Richard Congreve and Frederic Harrison set up rival centers of worship dedicated to the Religion of Humanity, whose secular, scientific principles and humanism had wide appeal as an alternative to Christianity. The Fabian Socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb were taken with Comte’s scientific approach to the study of society, his notion of altruism, and his stress on the role of enlightened leaders of opinion (Wright 1986). Comte’s concern for the common good and his elitism also proved tantalizing to many American liberals, who found in positivism a new naturalistic philosophy that could replace religion as the foundation of society. In the midst of the professionalization of society, these educated elites appreciated the large role that Comte’s new science of society entrusted to well-rounded intellectuals to correct the social problems caused by the concentration of corporate power. Henry Edger, David Croly, Thaddeus Wakeman, Edward Bellamy, Herbert Croly, and Lester Ward were some of the American reformers of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era who were influenced by Comte. They turned liberal ideology away from its traditional libertarian, laissez-faire position and made it far more receptive to the idea that an organic community could be created by an interventionist state managed by a professional elite of experts devoted to serving humanity (Harp 1995). Comte’s influence extended to the science he created, sociology. His interest in preserving social cohesion and harmony was echoed by Émile Durkheim, who adopted Comte’s idea that society itself is a reality with its own laws and should be studied in a scientific manner. As reflected in his concept of “anomie,” he too measured social health in terms of social solidarity. Durkheim’s functionalist approach in the end triumphed over alternative schools of sociology, such as those of his competitors Gabriel Tarde and René Worms, and thus ensured the further diffusion of Comte’s ideas in the social sciences (Levine 1995: 168). Lucien Lévy-Bruhl introduced positivist ideas into anthropology. His studies of the primitive mentality may have been inspired by Comte’s interest in fetishism, for Comte was the first European thinker to look favorably upon this religion. Other social scientists influenced by Comte include Alfred Espinas, Thomas Buckle, Herbert Spencer, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Charles Booth, Patrick Geddes, Leonard Hobhouse, and Lewis Mumford. Scientists and philosophers, especially philosophers of science, have been affected by Comte’s explanation for the uniqueness of science, especially its difference from metaphysics. Comte’s recognition of the importance of hypotheses as useful,

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convenient devices to be used in scientific research foreshadowed the later work of Hans Vaihinger and Henri Poincaré and may have also influenced Claude Bernard, Marcelin Berthelot, Paul Janet, Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Pierre Duhem. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, the philosophy of science was almost thoroughly positivist (Manicas 1987: 185). There was in particular a connection between Comte’s positivism and logical positivism; both took a similar approach to the problems of determining meaningfulness, distinguishing scientific from nonscientific knowledge, and using the principle of verifiability to criticize metaphysicians. Both argued that the natural and social sciences share common logical bases and a superiority to other forms of knowledge. The leading logical positivists included A. J. Ayer, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and Hans Reichenbach. In many respects, the influence of positivism has been more widespread than that of either Marxism or Freudianism. A great many people today are unknowingly positivists in that they claim to believe only statements supported by tangible evidence. Yet the name of Comte is not a household word, for he has always been subject to severe criticism.

ASSESSMENT Comte is easy to ridicule. He was pedantic, dogmatic, and authoritarian. His treatment of others was invariably harsh and egotistical. Because his writing is dry, austere, and convoluted, his works are a struggle to read. As for sociology, many of Comte’s ideas are not very scientific and seem to be merely assumptions. For example, there is little basis for his schema that there are three stages of history, each of which is rigidly determined and inevitable everywhere in the world. He supported this law of three stages by carefully selecting only those facts that would demonstrate it. His depiction of the third stage of history, the positive one, seems fanciful and “utopian,” a reflection of his love of system-building. His epistemology has been criticized for not providing a formal logic of proof; however Comte’s omission was deliberate, for he did not believe one could adequately or usefully define facts, scientific observation, or rules of verification. His rejection of psychology has also been regarded as unwarranted, although critics again have failed to see that his remarks were directed against the speculations of Victor Cousin (Scharff 1995: 11). Comte’s basic impulse to synthesize seems misguided in many respects. In his embrace of French, English, and German philosophical traditions, he betrayed a certain eclecticism, simplicity, and even superficiality. He appeared anxious to synthesize philosophical movements no matter how different they might be. Like his contemporary François Guizot, Comte was trying to find a juste milieu which would accommodate all opinions. Positivism, in Comte’s eyes, would triumph because it would present a doctrine that was even “more organic” than that espoused by the reactionaries and “more progressive” than that advocated by the revolutionaries ([1830–42] 1975, vol. 2: 40). In other words, it would create social harmony by combining the traditionalism of the Right and the rationalism of the Left. Comte believed that the Left would be attracted by his hostility toward the Church and established religions; his republicanism; his faith in reason, relativism, and progress;

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his emphasis on the importance of freedom of discussion to change the world; his concept of radical social reconstruction in the interest of the working class; and his vision of a new industrial and secular order. The Right would allegedly approve of his promotion of traditional values; his stress on a strong spiritual power, duties, hierarchy, order, and stability; and his opposition to equality, popular sovereignty, and individualism. In the end, his synthesis made him highly vulnerable; because he did not cater to one specific group as Marx did, he had no inherent supporters. The Right attacked his anti-religious, anti-monarchical views and his worship of a secular abstraction, Humanity. The Left criticized his brand of illiberalism, which disregarded the rights of the individual and egalitarian impulses. As a careful reader of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Comte endeavored to bring together religion and politics and make the needs of society paramount (Chabert 2004: 48, 71). The society that he depicted was a highly regimented one. People would be pressured by public opinion and by the ever-present positivist priests to adopt the Religion of Humanity, an artificial creation that substituted Humanity for God as an object of worship, while keeping most of the ceremonies of Catholicism. Consensus would be achieved through uniformity, not by working out differences of opinion. Society would be based on love. However, Comte’s concept of love was mechanical, devoid of much feeling of equality or mutual sympathy (Wernick 2001: 152). In encouraging everyone to live only for others and to be open and transparent about everything, he tended to suppress the private sphere (Bourdeau 2006: 148–9). To a certain extent, Comte sacrificed freedom and pluralism for social control, thus exacerbating the problem of the abuse of power. Yet considering his preoccupation with uniting humanity through the recognition of its manifestations in different singularities (individuals, nations, cultures, and religions), Juliette Grange argued that Comte was not a proto-totalitarian intent on eliminating individualism; indeed, in an effort to reconcile pluralism and holism, he maintained that humanity developed only through the individual. Humanity was a spiritual or moral community, not an institutionalized political construct demanding blind submission and conformity from each member. The unity of humanity rested on the participation of all its individual members, who were necessarily diverse and specialized (Grange 1996: 270–6). In addition, Michel Bourdeau and Laurent Fedi correctly pointed out that people in the positivist society would retain the freedom to choose to adhere to his system. No military force or law would force them to comply (Bourdeau 2006: 170; Fedi 2004: 160–1). Despite the ambiguity and defects in Comte’s semi-authoritarian solution to the turmoil of the modern era – a solution that reflects the tensions of his own time and his own fragile personality – his attempt to cure society of its ills continues to be a central objective of the science of society. Comte’s admonitions about the dangers of sociology succumbing to the “positivity” of the scientific age are still highly relevant today, when the model of the physical sciences continues to hold great appeal and some sociologists and other scholars remain attracted to an empirical, jargon-laden discourse, one fearful of grand theories. Sociology has become a fragmented discipline that Comte would never recognize as his own, considering his repeated condemnation of modern specialization. Nor would he approve of the direction that philosophy has taken. As Robert Scharff has shown, the so-called “post-positivists,” such as Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, erred in fostering a detachment from

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history in their desire to proclaim the beginning of a new era; they never questioned the legitimacy of their belief in their own maturity, originality, and correctness. They would have benefited from taking a new look at Comte’s suggestions about the relativism and tentativeness of knowledge – especially the impossibility of validating epistemological proofs – and his demonstration of the importance of reflecting on prescientific practices and their kinship with positivism. Emphasizing Comte’s statement that “no conception can be fully understood without its history” (Comte [1830–42] 1975, vol. 1: 21), Robert Scharff has maintained that Comte promoted a “historico-critical reflectiveness” among philosophers that is highly relevant today (Scharff 1995: 16). Put into its historical context in a Comtean fashion, the postmodern world may not be as innovative as it prides itself on being. It may well heed Comte’s call for moral commitments to the other members of humanity and to the earth and his recognition of the power of religion. As Juliette Grange suggested, Auguste Comte may well be the sociologist for the twenty-first century (1996: 15).

Reader’s Guide to Auguste Comte Readers seeking a good short introduction to Auguste Comte should read the relevant pages on him in the works of Frank Manuel (1962), Raymond Aron (1968), Donald Levine (1995), Johan Heilbron (1995), and Wolf Lepenies (1998). Mike Gane (2006) offers an original interpretation of Comte’s thought from a sociologist’s point of view. Robert Scharff (1995) cogently defends Comte’s system of positivism against criticisms made by John Stuart Mill and more recent philosophers of science. Andrew Wernick (2001) analyzes Comte’s Religion of Humanity, adding an interesting postmodern twist. Mary Pickering’s three-volume biography (1993– 2009) offers an in-depth analysis of Comte’s life and his ideas, highlighting the continuity in his intellectual trajectory. She also gives a brief synopsis of his influence throughout the world. T. R. Wright (1986) provides a fine survey of Comte’s influence in Great Britain. Richmond Laurin Hawkins (1936, 1938), Charles Cashdollar (1989), and Gillis Harp (1995) trace his impact in the United States. The easiest way to study Comte’s writings is to peruse the excellent anthology edited by Gertrud Lenzer (1998). Oscar Haac’s volume containing the Mill–Comte correspondence (1995) gives readers a chance to savor the positivist’s fascinating letters.

Bibliography Writings of Auguste Comte [1816–28] 1970. Ecrits de jeunesse 1816–1828: Suivis du Mémoire sur la Cosmogonie de Laplace 1835. Ed. Paulo E. de Berrêdo Carneiro and Pierre Arnaud. Paris: Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. [1929] 1851–4. Système de politique positive ou Traité du sociologie instituant la religion de l’Humanité, 5th edn., 4 vols. Paris: Au Siège de la Société Positiviste. [1830–42] 1975. Cours de philosophie positive, 2 vols. Ed. Michel Serres, François Dagognet, Allal Sinaceur, and Jean-Paul Enthoven. Paris: Hermann. [1844] 1963. Discours sur l’esprit positif. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions. [1852] 1966. Catéchisme positiviste, ou Sommaire exposition de la religion universelle en treize entretiens systématiques entre une femme et un prêtre de l’humanité. Paris: GarnierFlammarion.

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1855. Appel aux Conservateurs. Paris. 1856. Synthèse subjective ou Système universel des conceptions propres à l’état normal de l’humanité, vol. 1. Paris. [1884] 1896. Testament d’Auguste Comte avec les documents qui s’y rapportent: Pièces justificatives, prières quotidiennes, confessions annuelles, correspondance avec Mme de Vaux, 2nd edn., Paris. 1998. Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, 2nd edn. Ed. Gertrud Lenzer. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Comte’s Correspondence 1973–90. Correspondance générale et confessions. Ed. Paulo E. de Berrêdo Carneiro, Pierre Arnaud, Paul Arbousse-Bastide, and Angèle Kremer-Marietti. 8 vols. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. 1995. The Correspondence of John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte. Ed. and trans. Oscar Haac. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. 2006. Auguste Comte/Caroline Massin: Correspondance inédite (1831–1851). Ed. Bruno Gentil and Pascaline Gentil. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Further Reading Aron, Raymond (1968) Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 1. Trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books. Bourdeau, Michel (2006) Les Trois Etats: Science, théologie et métaphysique chez Auguste Comte. Paris: Editions du Cerf. Braunstein, Jean-François (2009) La Philosophie de la médecine d’Auguste Comte: Vaches carnivores, Vierge Mère et morts vivants. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Cashdollar, Charles (1989) The Transformation of Theology: 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chabert, George (2004) Un Nouveau Pouvoir spirituel: Auguste Comte et la Religion scientifique au XIXe siècle. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen. Clauzade, Laurent (2009) L’Organe de la pensée: Biologie et philosophie chez Auguste Comte. Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté. Fedi, Laurent (2004) Comte. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Gane, Mike (2006) Auguste Comte. London: Routledge. Gouhier, Henri (1933–41) La Jeunesse d’Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, 3 vols. Paris: J. Vrin. Gouhier, Henri (1965) La Vie d’Auguste Comte, 2nd edn. Paris: J. Vrin. Grange, Juliette (1996) La Philosophie d’Auguste Comte: Science, politique, religion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Habermas, Jürgen (1971) Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press. Harp, Gillis J. (1995) Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1920. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Hawkins, Richmond Laurin (1936) Auguste Comte and the United States (1816–1853). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hawkins, Richmond Laurin (1938) Positivism in the United States (1853–1861). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heilbron, Johan (1995) The Rise of Social Theory. Trans. Sheila Gogol. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Karsenti, Bruno (2006) Politique d’esprit: Auguste Comte et la naissance de la science sociale. Paris: Hermann. Kofman, Sarah (1978) Aberrations: Le Devenir-Femme d’Auguste Comte. Paris: Aubier Flammarion. Kremer-Marietti, Angèle (1982) Entre le Signe et l’histoire: L’Anthropologie d’Auguste Comte. Paris: Klincksieck. Laudan, Larry (1971) “Towards a Reassessment of Comte’s ‘Méthode Positive’.” Philosophy of Science 38: 35–53. Lepenies, Wolf (1998) Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levine, Donald N. (1995) Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Manicas, Peter T. (1987) A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Manuel, Frank E. (1962) The Prophets of Paris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pickering, Mary (1993–2009) Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de (1966) Oeuvres de Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, 6 vols. Paris: Anthropos. Sappol, Michael (2002) A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scharff, Robert C. (1995) Comte after Positivism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wernick, Andrew (2001) Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: The Post-Theistic Program of French Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, T. R. (1986) The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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3 Harriet Martineau SUSAN HOECKER-DRYSDALE

In the preface to her condensation and translation of August Comte’s Positive Philosophy, Harriet Martineau states that she was motivated to produce the English edition out of her “deep conviction of our need for this book in my own country.” Two years later, in her Autobiography, she went so far as to state that among all her writings she considered her translation of Comte’s major work, which introduced French positivism into English thought, to be the best reflection of her direction and influence. The point of her self-appraisal, written shortly after mid-century, was not so much to identify herself with a specifically Comtean world view as to profess her commitment to science as the source of new knowledge and to sociology and the “moral” (social) sciences as the basis for social progress and reform. Harriet Martineau (1802–76) subscribed to a broadly conceived science of society, a science which, in her view, would offer the key to understanding societal change and the “uncertainties of the age.” As a sociologist, historian, journalist, and public educator, Martineau had a significant impact during her lifetime on the thinking of the British public, and through her publications, in English and in translation into numerous other languages, she advanced the sociological understanding of her readers in Britain, America, and many countries around the globe. From her first publications at age 19 to her last major writings at age 74, Martineau addressed a wide range of subjects and issues in a variety of genres to diverse audiences, publishing over 70 volumes, dozens of periodical articles, and nearly 2,000 newspaper leaders and letters. Her ideas were not only consonant with, but influential for, those of succeeding social theorists.

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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THE THEORY Martineau’s achievements fall within a number of theoretical perspectives and levels of social analysis, both macro- and microsociological. The theoretical and epistemological concerns reflected and developed in her major works fall within political economy, historical-comparative analysis, theories of history, feminist theory, social stratification theory (including race, class, and gender theory), metamethodology, and the philosophy of science. Although influenced by certain aspects of sociological positivism as well as by sociological organicism, she drew from them selectively. Her work is most clearly compatible with the historical and comparative perspectives and substantive concerns of Weber, Marx, and Durkheim. In both her theoretical and empirical work Martineau assumes a critical sociological approach, seen particularly in her “immanent critique” of American society. Her strategy is to focus particularly on societal principles, morals, and values in relation to the institutional structures, social relationships, and behavioral patterns in which they are concretized, analyzing the inconsistencies, conflicts, and incongruities. Her empiricism is informed by a critical metamethodology, which takes nothing for granted and sets the foundation for a systematic, informed, and reflexive sociological methodology. In a convergence of theory and method Martineau utilizes typological analysis in an innovative manner to examine and compare types of suicide, religion, marriage and family structures, governments, segments of the economy, and occupations. Finally, in her role as a public educator, she contributes in no small measure to the interpretation and communication of theory in political economy, philosophy, politics, sociology, and science.

Interpreting theory: political economy Martineau began her career in social science with a project designed to serve the aspirations of society toward progress and improvement, and, in so doing, began to realize her self-defined role as a public educator. It was in fact the endeavor of interpreting political economy which constituted her first major theoretical study in 1832–4, an undertaking that developed her nascent interests in theories about society and was responsible for her entry into the public sphere. Her keen interest in theories of political economy shaped her later original sociological work, which systematically recognized the significance of the economy in the social order. This first major work is important in the sense that it involved the interpretation, rather than creation, of theory. Having absorbed the ideas of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Dugald Stewart, and Francis Bacon, Martineau wrote reviews of works on political economy in the Monthly Repository and then a few “eightpenny stories” in pamphlet form, which dealt, somewhat unintentionally, with such political economy issues as the impact of machinery on wages, the identity of economic interests, and social imperatives in a changing division of labor. In 1831 she conceived the idea of writing a series of stories which would illustrate the principles of political economy for the public, facilitate an understanding of the economic laws at work, and thereby foster social progress. The result was her 25-volume Illustrations of Political Economy, a monthly

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series of tales which illustrated the principles of production, distribution, consumption, and exchange, drawn from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy (1821). Convinced that the public would not be attracted to Mill’s rather academic and somewhat dull exposition of the science, Martineau skillfully utilized the genre of the novelette to inspire some understanding of the principles. She could thereby dramatize the network of class interests and the increasingly complex interconnections of industrial capitalism and the market economy. Martineau’s purpose was to present didactic stories comprehensible to all classes: “all classes bear an equal relation to the science” (1832, Preface, I: xiv). In this instance, fiction became a means to interpret theory, to communicate principles of political economy as yet inaccessible to the general reader. Martineau seems to have shared Spencer’s view that increasingly complex societies are more vulnerable precisely because of the growing interdependence of a multifarious division of labor. Hence the duty of members of all classes to understand the principles and relationships of this complicated social organism. If it concerns rulers that their measures should be wise, if it concerns the wealthy that their property should be secure, the middling classes that their industry should be rewarded, the poor that their hardships should be redressed, it concerns all that Political Economy should be understood. If it concerns all that the advantages of a social state should be preserved and improved, it concerns them likewise that Political Economy should be understood by all. (1832, vol. 1: xvi)

The topics in the tales included: labor as the basis of wealth and capital; the growing division of labor and the effects of machinery; the relation between wages, prices, and profits; the importance of individual initiative and labor and the negative effects of state support; the necessity to limit population growth; the principles of a market economy and free competition; supply and demand; the function and supply of money; the advantages of free trade; the positive and negative roles played by unions; productive and unproductive consumption; the requirement of public expenditure for defense, public order, and social improvement; the importance of just taxation and avoidance of public indebtedness (Hoecker-Drysdale 1992: 21–48). The work reflected her nominalist view of society as a collection of individuals who are informed and act in consonance out of their rational understanding and belief in the principles or fundamental laws operating therein. Martineau’s illustrative narratives caught the public imagination at the time, although, as often happens with first works, in later years she was quite critical of her early efforts.

Theorizing empiricism: Martineau’s metamethodology Following her Illustrations of Political Economy series, Martineau turned toward another challenging and more original project. Partly as relief from two years of intensive work and partly out of burning curiosity, she embarked in 1834 on a trip to America. This was to be a mission on behalf of an improved British understanding of American society: “If I am spared to come back, this country shall know something more than it does of the principles of American institutions. I am tired of being kept floundering among the details. … It is urged upon me … that I should go and see for

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myself” (Martineau to William Tait, August 29, 1833, MS Ogden 101, University College, London). During the six-week sea voyage to America and in anticipation of the research ahead, she wrote a methodological treatise, the earliest explicit treatment of sociological methods and social research. It remains a landmark in the development of the art and science of social investigation. How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) includes discussions of metamethodological considerations, principles of social investigation, research strategies and methods, and a framework for the study of a total society which she applied in the three-volume Society in America (1837). Martineau insists that studies in the science of morals must be based on disciplined observation, impartiality, a theoretical framework, and systematic research methods used consistently and self-consciously. The treatise emphasizes the necessity of tracing the impact of societal phenomena on one another and of developing a critical view, in order to understand, for example, the corruptive elements of the “marital status,” or the overreliance on public opinion. How to Observe Morals and Manners is organized into three parts: “Requisites for Observation,” “What to Observe,” and “Mechanical Methods.” Following a discussion of metamethodology, Martineau presents her macrosociological framework for studying a total society. The institutional areas that must be examined include: 1. Religion (churches, clergy, superstitions, suicide). 2. General moral notions (national character, popular culture, stories, idols, songs, literature, treatment of criminals, the aged, and children). 3. The domestic state (topography and geography, economics and occupations, family, marriage and children, health). 4. The idea of liberty (police, law, social classes, servitude, communications, education, public opinion). 5. Progress (cultural, economic, and technological change). 6. Discourse. “Wise inquiry into Morals and Manners [will] begin with the study of things, using the discourse of persons as a commentary upon them” (1838: 63). Facts must be gained from the “records” of a society: “architectural remains, epitaphs, civic registers, national music, or any other of the thousand manifestations of the common mind which may be found among every people” (1838: 64). In a later chapter she elaborates on discourse as the indispensable commentary upon the classes of national facts which are observed; it gives meaning and illustration to the evidence of facts. In the study of discourse the traveler or investigator must seek intercourse with all classes of the society … not only the rich and the poor, but those who may be classes by profession, pursuit, habits of mind, and turn of manners … . He must study little ones at their mothers’ knees, and flirtations in ballrooms, and dealings in the market-place … .Wherever there is speech, he must devote himself to hear. (1838: 222)

Martineau felt a real advantage as a woman investigator, for it gave her access to the kitchens, the nurseries, the boudoirs, where much of the “inner life” of a people is revealed. Discourse is important precisely because it exhibits a certain character of

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its own and expresses the distinct national character and values of a society, from which we can derive types of societies. But discourse in itself is limited and can be deceptive, particularly because it may not, and often does not, coincide with the facts, nor does it represent an appropriate sample of views and opinions. The danger always exists that every observer assumes he or she can understand, apart from all other phenomena, human behavior. Martineau emphasizes the need for the observer to refrain from premature conclusions, to be self-conscious of his or her own biases, to examine all sides and perspectives on issues, situations, and practices, to use a variety of methods in obtaining information, and to immerse oneself, as a true participant observer, enough to know and understand, while maintaining self-checks of distance and objectivity. For these reasons she advocates the use of three specific methodological tools for the corroboration of facts and observations: a diary, to record one’s personal reactions; a journal, to record impressions, incidents, anecdotes, descriptions; and a notebook, to record the facts of daily life. These were mechanisms for systematization and self-monitoring. Martineau utilizes typological analysis, at once a theoretical and methodological approach, in a number of instances in her work to organize historical/empirical data and to analyze their contents theoretically. Particularly effective is her examination of religion and suicide in society. Reflecting the methodological influence of Montesquieu, she develops a typology of religion – Licentious, Ascetic, and Moderate – distinguished by the degrees of ritualism, physical or spiritual self-indulgence, individual liberty, and emphasis on interpersonal sentiment. While all societies hold religious sentiments of key importance in understanding them, she concludes that despotic governments can only prevail where licentious or ascetic religions are dominant. On the other hand, democratic government is possible only under a moderate form of religion. At the same time, religious freedom is the highest expression of democracy. “Religion is the highest fact in the Rights of Man from its being the most exclusively private and individual, while it is also a universal concern. … Religion is, in its widest sense, the tendency of human nature to the Infinite … [to] the pursuit of perfection” (1837, vol. 3: 224). Likewise, in her analysis of suicide, Martineau designates types of suicide which are indicative of the character of social relationships and the sentiments of the social order. “Every society has its suicides, and much may be learned from their character and number, both as to the notions on morals which prevail, and the religious sentiment which animates to or controls the act” (Martineau, in Hill 1989: 105). Half a century before Durkheim’s study of suicide, she derives the following types of suicide: (a) suicide as duty, as with soldiers; (b) suicide out of devotion to others; (c) suicide when hope of honor is gone; (d) suicide to protect the virtue of chastity; (e) martyrdom for truth, ranging from veneration to fanatical self-seeking. Martineau linked the prevalence of suicide to a group’s or society’s view of future life, to enslavement as opposed to freedom, to religious practices such as suttee, to imitation within certain groups, and to religious beliefs, suggesting that considerations of purgatory, for example, might discourage the Irish and the French from such acts. Suicide out of devotion to others generally carries cultural approbation and martyrdom (How to Observe Morals and Manners). Martineau was so convinced of the importance of suicide for understanding societal relations that she returned to the subject, not only in her America studies but

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also in an article which appeared in the Victorian periodical Once A Week, and later in one of her collections (Health, Husbandry, and Handicraft), in which she developed a somewhat different typology: suicides based upon shame, complete devotion to others, preservation of honor, and withdrawal from duty and expectations of others. She concluded that suicide was more frequent among men, was linked to intemperance, varied according to occupation, district, and education, was related to weak imagination and strong egoism, and probably had a hereditary component. In these discussions she also advocated enlightened attitudes toward the treatment of mental illness. Having analyzed the sociological relevance of religion and suicide, she proceeds to an inquiry into the moral and cultural values of a society. Martineau’s approach in How to Observe Morals and Manners is to insist that, in the study of a society, consideration must be given, as in the work of Montesquieu, to the totality of society, including its geographical, climatic, and economic bases; to civilization, as examined by Condorcet, particularly the degree of freedom and equality of its members, especially women; to class structures and cultures and their consequences, as we see later in Marx; and to morals and values, the culture and consequences of religion, as in Weber and Durkheim, as well as the phenomenon of suicide as perhaps a crisis in values or relationships. This important sociological treatise was overshadowed by her other “America studies” and, unlike her other books, was not reprinted for a century and a half, perhaps because it was a metamethodological treatise, actually, if not intentionally, aimed at the researcher and epistemologist. There is little doubt, however, that this remarkable piece was of enormous aid to Martineau herself and to those travelers and students of societies who availed themselves of it.

Theorizing America: Martineau’s macrosociology Martineau’s macrosociological investigation of America in the 1830s, including the methodological treatise and her analysis of American society, comprise her most significant sociological work in terms of both empirical investigation and theoretical analysis. The study itself, done in the same decade as Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, is equally perspicacious, more clearly rooted in empirical fact, and more self-consciously theoretically ordered. In the analysis, a systematic framework for the study of social structures, social institutions and their interrelations, and social dynamics is complemented by attention to the idiographic and the ethnographic. The investigation explores empirically, and analyzes theoretically: 1. Politics, parties and government. 2. The morals of politics (political office, newspapers, citizenship, sectional prejudice, citizenship of people of color, the political nonexistence of women). 3. The economy, of various regions, including agriculture, transport, markets, manufactures, commerce. 4. The morals of economy, including the morals of slavery, the morals of manufacture, the morals of commerce. 5. “Civilization,” her nomenclature embracing the idea of honor, caste and classes, property and intercourse, women, marriage, occupation, health, children, sufferers, utterance. 6. Religion, the science (principles) of religion, spirit, and administration of religion.

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Throughout Martineau’s analysis of these institutions in America and their interconnections there are several implicit theoretical foci: (a) the discrepancies between normative structures and social behavior; (b) structural inequalities; (c) conflicts and incongruities of values and value systems; (d) the meaning and motives, and their contradictions, of social actors. These foci are woven into the fabric of the study, accompanied by observations, interviews, narratives, anecdotes, descriptions, and statistical and documentary facts. The following analysis attempts to show these theoretical convergences as well as to provide something of the tenor of Martineau’s own research narratives.

Setting and framework Martineau spent two years (September 19, 1834 to August 1, 1836) exploring American society, traveling close to 10,000 miles throughout the United States, visiting many areas more than once, talking with and interviewing people of all ages, classes, races, religions, and political parties. She interviewed and interacted with a wide range of the population, from the highly placed, including the President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, to ordinary persons. She observed and interviewed slaves, mill girls, Indian tribes, members of experimental communities, abolitionists, farmers, workers, feminists, and many others. She visited prisons, hospitals, mental asylums, literary and scientific institutions, factories, plantations, and farms, and lived in all sorts of dwellings, from stately homes to log cabins. She used all possible means of transportation, walked a great deal, as she felt that that was the best means of learning about a people, and studied all aspects of the young society. Like Tocqueville, she brought with her a companion and research assistant, Louisa Jeffrey, to aid her in observation and collection of material and to serve as a second set of eyes and ears (Martineau being by then quite deaf). Martineau’s particular interest in her investigation of America was in the “theory and practice of society,” which in fact was her original title for the book. The theoretical stance of Society in America can best be understood as immanent critique; that is, an understanding and assessment of the structures and practices of a society on its own terms, not by external criteria, particularly in the relationship between cultural norms and societal practices. In this context, morals and values become the center point for understanding social behavior. Martineau explained at the outset that her purpose was “to compare the existing state of society in America with the principles on which it was professedly founded; thus testing Institutions, Morals and Manners by an indisputable, instead of an arbitrary standard, and securing to myself the same point of view with my readers of both nations” (1837, vol. 1: viii). To compensate for the possibility of omission and misinterpretation and in full recognition of the tentativeness of any interpretation, Martineau used immanent critique to scrutinize social behavior in terms of the principles, beliefs, and values articulated in the society’s formal documents: the American Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and other institutionalized creeds. The true test of a nation’s success, according to utilitarian standards to which she at least in part subscribed, is the general happiness of its members. She was concerned, therefore, to assess the extent to which happiness or general well-being could be seen to characterize the lives of people in

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various social groups. Her analysis and conclusions remain solidly in the tradition of early critical sociology. Her investigation is descriptive, analytical, and critical. As she conducts her empirical research, her methodological self-consciousness is apparent. She is able to capture the richness and variety, as well as dynamism, of life in a thriving, exciting new society, precisely because she adhered to her own dicta, presented earlier, to “seek intercourse with all classes of society” and to search for the “inner life” of society. At the same time, Martineau integrates her observations into more general theoretical analysis within a historical and comparative perspective. Martineau observed and analyzed critically the complexities of the plantation as a site of contradictions between the ideology of freedom and the practices of slavery; the New England town hall as a cradle of both democracy and bigotry; the prevalence of political apathy within the world’s first modern democracy; the legal freedoms enjoyed but social shackles endured by women; and the disastrous societal consequences of the enslavement of a part of the population by the privileged few.

The morals of politics The analysis is structured around three general concerns: politics and government, the economy, and culture and social institutions. Observations and analyses of the structures, functions, and norms of each are followed by close examination of government and the morals of politics (volume I), the structures and morals of economy (volume II), and culture and society (volume III). Martineau explores the dynamics of power, conflict, and control which occur in everyday life in these arenas. In examining government and politics, for example, Martineau emphasizes the strengths of the system – its principles – and the potential for genuine democracy. “Politics are morals, all the world over; that is, politics universally implicate the duty and happiness of man” (1837, vol. 1: 6). It is in the arena of politics, she maintains, that the theory and practice of a nation’s principles intersect, where material realities and the highest ideals confront one another. The theory that “the majority are in the right” requires that basic principles be secured and that the citizenry have the liberty to ensure a correspondence between the principles and their institutional forms. Inconsistencies arise out of human fallibility rather than political design. Martineau identifies crucial contradictions within American society, in examining, for example, the dynamics of office-holding (e.g. that holding office means the end of one’s moral independence), the role of the press (e.g. that it exercises arbitrary power through control of content and perspective), failure of citizenship (through apathy, fear of opinion, or lack of the franchise), significant class, race, and gender differences in observing the law, and the absence of any political and economic power and participation for Negroes and women. The flagrant violations of the law by mobs of “white gentlemen” in the North as well as the South left it to the (disenfranchised) women to take responsibility for seeking peaceful means of resolving these conflicts and contradictions. This meant that women abolitionists were suspect in both regions and were frequently harassed, jailed, or, especially if black, beaten or killed as they challenged the corruptions of society. Martineau found that this new “nation of equals,” based upon Enlightenment ideals and lacking a feudal history, created its own hierarchy and class distinctions,

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exemplifying the “tenacity of rank.” She analyzed the many practices that sustained structured inequalities in American society. Although “the law, in a republic, is the embodiment of the will of the people,” she noted that the public, commonly uninformed and indifferent, ignored the horrendous treatment of the abolitionists with rationalizations about the respectability of the anti-abolitionists (“the gentlemen of Boston would do nothing improper”), and condemned the meddlesomeness and trouble-making of the abolitionists (1837, vol. 1: 176). Although the citizenship of all society’s members was a legal reality, constitutionally, people of color were badly treated. “They are protected as citizens when the public service requires their security; but not otherwise treated as such” (1837, vol. 1: 195). She noted that prejudice against color was on the increase. Likewise, the democratic principle that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” was entirely violated given the “political non-existence of women” (1837, vol. 1: 199). “Indulgence is given her [every woman] as a substitute for justice” (1837, vol. 3: 106). Martineau concluded that the denial to Negroes and women of the ability to exercise their rights as free citizens within the society constituted the greatest injustice and contradiction in American society. Nonetheless, there were many instances, she reported, of strong-minded and remarkable women and blacks who overcame all odds to free themselves and others.

The morals of the economy The morals of the economy likewise revealed serious problems in the values and goals of the society. Martineau pays particular attention to the high priority given to mercenary rather than human values. Indeed, the pursuit of wealth as possible for all and the reduction of all values to mercenary ones lay at the heart of America’s cultural malady. In her analysis of work and honor, she showed that in regions of slavery and/or systems of rank, labor was regarded as degrading; work was debased. In the North and particularly in the rugged but free and open western regions, work was seen as necessary, honorable, and an exercise of one’s freedom. She predicted that in this new nation eventually labor would be honored. “America is in the singular position of being nearly equally divided between a low degree of the ancient barbarism in relation to labor, and a high degree of the modern enlightenment” (Martineau, in Hoecker-Drysdale 2004, vol. 3: 302). The culturally accepted notion that women do not work was utterly untrue, she demonstrated, as married or single women did indeed work, enduring low pay or no pay, while being charged with enormous responsibility in holding the society together. In her discussions of the economics of stratification, including race, gender, and class, she drew attention to the “mean whites” of the South, who worked with their hands, had no prospects and few positive life chances, and took the harshest attitudes toward Negroes. (A similar discussion is found 80 years later in Max Weber’s discussions of class in America.) By contrast, there were white plantation women who taught the slaves to read, in relationships of respect and friendship. The morals of slavery revealed the horrendous degradations of Negroes and women, particularly black women, the disregard for human rights, and the hypocrisies of mistreatment and exploitation of men, women, and children within a declared system of honor. Contrarily, the morals of manufactory and commerce showed that,

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in a democratic society, work was of a higher caliber, resulting, for instance, in improvements in manufacture. In that context, there existed a concern, if rather paternalistic, of employers for employees and a spirit of enterprise emerging from a “sordid love of gain,” a love of art, and the practice of benevolence and philanthropy. Again, however, practices of speculation, greed, and support for the profitable institution of slavery created the problematics of this free and open economy.

Civilization “The degree of civilisation of any people corresponds with the exaltation of the idea which is the most prevalent among that people” (Martineau, in Hoecker-Drysdale 2004, vol. 3: 1). Martineau examined “civilisation,” which in the old world still corresponded with the low idea that “the generality of men live for wealth, ease and dignity and lofty reputation” (in Hoecker-Drysdale 2004, vol. 3: 3), rather than with inner values. Although the new world was forged out of the fundamental human values of truth and justice – as expressed in the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence – its members remained captivated by the old world’s pursuit of wealth rather than social and political freedoms. These economic realities and accompanying values resulted in peculiar and perhaps destructive conceptions of social honor. “It is true that it is better to live for honour than for wealth: but how much better, depends upon the idea of honour” (Martineau, in Hoecker-Drysdale 2004, vol. 3: 10). While moralists, scholars, professionals, and even some merchants were dissatisfied with the importance attached to wealth, general lifestyle and consumption practices as well as the American idea of honor seemed solidly based on obvious signs of consumption and leisure and an exaggerated concern with reputation and the opinions of others. Tensions existed, therefore, between the tendency toward maintaining an aristocratic Europeanderived culture, on the one hand, and an obsession with wealth and the real opportunities of economic freedom and mobility within a republic, on the other. In the absence of an established class system, according to Martineau, patterns of consumption, leisure and accumulation of a most conspicuous and self-conscious nature became crucial social indicators. In that context, women became vehicles of display and consumption (in Hoecker-Drysdale 2004, vol. 3: 37–53). These value incongruities posed significant problems for American society as it attempted to both profess and practice its cultural ideals. According to Martineau, these contradictions were exhibited in the intercourse and discourse of the members of society: a good-natured, friendly, and hospitable people who nevertheless engaged in dueling; a population generous in time and money in the service of others who held a preoccupation with the practice of flattery; and an enterprising and idealistic society which allowed itself to be dominated by the pressures of public opinion. Martineau included within her analysis an examination of the mechanisms which supported the class system, as, for instance, in her discussions of the rules and distinctions in socializing, anticipating Simmel’s concept of sociation, where social classes establish their own rules for interaction and inclusion. Rules of imitation paralleled rules of anti-commensality in relations between Negroes and whites. The class, and even caste, system challenged the very authenticity of the ideology of equality. Nevertheless, even within the context of materialistic, superficial,

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and anti-democratic behavior, Americans were distinguished in the honor given to the intellect and the intellectual as well as in their desire to be open and to communicate on a variety of subjects.

Religion After exploring the status of women, children, and sufferers, and those marginalized by virtue of being criminal, mentally ill, disabled, poor, or alcoholic, Martineau explored the literary life of the society, completing her study of American society with an analysis of religion. With particular sociological finesse, she distinguished the science of religion from its spirit and practice, and dealt specifically with the history, theology, and current status of religion, the spiritual ethic and meaning of religion, and the “administration” or social organization of religion. She emphasized the need to separate the role of theological research (“the science of religion”) and the open pursuit of ideas from the function of preaching and administering to the religious needs of the population. Martineau had written considerably about religion early in her writing career; she was well informed on the subject. Examining American society, she was struck by the lack of diversity in religious beliefs in a country exalting freedom of conscience, by religious intolerance, by hypocrisies among the clergy, and by practices of churches as agents of stratification, sometimes helpful but usually ineffectual challengers to the system of slavery. Throughout, the sociological significance of religion was emphasized.

Her conclusions Martineau concluded her macrosociological study of America with the suggestion of the tentativeness of her observations, but noted that American society had a smaller amount of crime, poverty, and mutual injury of every kind than any known society. “They have realised many things for which the rest of the world is still struggling” (Martineau, in Hoecker-Drysdale 2004, vol. 4: 298). She held high hopes for this new nation founded upon the principle of equality. Americans were self-governing, she noted, and had avoided an aristocracy, a link between church and state, excessive taxation, and the irresponsibility of any class. Any evils arising out of the legislative or executive branches of government could be remedied by the people themselves. However, her final and most general conclusion was that “the civilisation and the morals of the Americans fall far below their own principles” (Martineau, in Hoecker-Drysdale 2004, vol. 4: 299), that there were severe contradictions between the principles and practices of American social life. Resolution of the two great contradictions of slavery and of women’s suppressed condition was required before the republic could realize its true goals and morals. Martineau continued to monitor both issues and analyzed them in periodicals and newspaper leaders until well through the 1860s. The issue of slavery, which she had thought earlier would be resolved, had precipitated a challenge to the very existence of the nation. A rich ethnography of American society is to be found in the second three-volume work, Retrospect of Western Travel (1838), which, though less analytical, contains excursions into the microsociological: occurrences and sites which express something of the quintessence of American social and cultural character.

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Interpreting theory: the Comtean system Martineau declared the rationale for her 1853 translation and condensation of Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy thus: “While our science is split up into arbitrary divisions … and while the researches of the scientific world are presented as mere accretions to a heterogeneous mass of facts, there can be no hope of a scientific progress” (1853, vol. 1: v). The book, she wrote, would be recognized as “one of the chief honours of the century” and must be “rendered accessible to the largest number of intelligent readers.” The six volumes of Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive, written and published between 1830 and 1842, were intended to outline the hierarchy of the sciences, to show their development historically and the methods and findings in each as relevant to the whole positive system, and to show that the sciences of observation now needed a new science – social physics or sociology. Undoubtedly, it was Martineau’s sense of the urgent need for both a system of the sciences and specifically a science of society that drew her to the task. Human perfectibility and social progress, Enlightenment values fundamental to Martineau’s thinking, required knowledge and understanding, not just for the educated few, but for the population as a whole. Martineau believed human beings to be situated at a critical point in history: We find ourselves suddenly living and moving in the midst of the universe, – as a part of it, and not as its aim and object. We find ourselves living, not under capricious and arbitrary conditions, unconnected with the constitution and movements of the whole, but under great, general, invariable laws, which operate on us as a part of the whole. (1853, vol. 1: x)

The six volumes of rather turgid style, repetition, and ennui had to be translated, condensed, and revised into a final version of two volumes. Aware of the obtuseness of Comte’s original work, Martineau made clear that hers “is a very free translation.” However, she sought the expertise of Professor John Nichol of Glasgow for the sections on mathematics, astronomy, and physics, only the last of which required revision in the form of condensation. As she explored each part of Comte’s “rich and diffuse” text, filled as it was with “wearisome epithets,” she simultaneously studied the subjects and disciplines discussed in full preparation for the work. She had cultivated a knowledge of science, social science, and philosophy, as seen from her first published essays in the Monthly Repository. Her education in languages, classics, philosophy, history, literature, and sciences fully prepared her for the task. Positive philosophy, she was convinced, was the only remedy for the “uncertainties of the age” which haunted and disoriented even the most enlightened and progressive of minds. “The supreme dread of every one who cares for the good of the nation or race is that men should be adrift for want of an anchorage for their convictions … a large proportion of our people are now so adrift” (1853, vol. 1: v). Both her interests in science and her indefatigable desire to bring scientific knowledge to the public (“the growth of a scientific taste among the working classes of this country is one of the most striking of the signs of the times” [1853, vol. 1: v]) were from her youth integral to her life and work. If society had entered a “critical” period from which regeneration and a new order would emerge, science itself,

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Martineau believed, would facilitate the “growth of knowledge and the evolution of philosophy” (1853, vol. 1: vi). The social sciences, yet to be developed, would be the new basis of “intellectual and moral convictions” not simply for middle-class academics and intellectuals but for the general public – the working classes as well as the bourgeoisie. Her task was to make the public aware of the “great, general, invariable laws” through Positive Philosophy. Martineau disagreed with Comte’s patriarchal, even misogynist, perspective on women, his idea of a hierarchical society with centralized planning and control, and, most certainly, his advocacy of a secular religion with sociologists as high priests and Comte himself as the Pope. While his presentation of a new science of society seemed exactly what was needed, Martineau seems to have regarded the accompanying ideology as regressive, if not reactionary. Nevertheless, she refused to criticize his ideas in the context of the translation, implying in the preface, as in her autobiography written a few years later, that, though she had serious disagreements with Comte, it would be inappropriate to raise them in that context. In fact she did not publish any kind of criticism of Comte’s ideas and writings during his lifetime, although some critique appears in later letters (see Arbuckle 1983: 164–5; Sanders 1990: 233) and in her review (Daily News, April 9, 1858) of the article “The Religion of Positivism” that appeared in the Westminster Review that year. Comte himself was so pleased with Martineau’s translation that he informed her that he would replace the original with her version in his Bibliothèque positiviste du prolétaire au dixneuvième siècle. He was convinced that Martineau’s English version should be translated into French, which was ultimately done by C. Avezac-Lavigne in 1871–2. Later, however, Comte was less enthusiastic about Martineau’s work when, in his religious phase, he became aware of Martineau’s agnosticism.

Other aspects of Martineau’s theory These works, then, remain among Martineau’s most salient contributions to sociology in interpreting theory, theorizing empiricism, and analyzing society at the macrosociological level. Nevertheless, her theoretical achievements extend considerably beyond these and include feminist theory, social evolutionary theory, historical sociology, theories of religion, microsociology (socialization, childhood, the sociology of health, illness and disability, for example), law and citizenship, the sociology of work and occupations, and sociological journalism. Elaboration on these theoretical and empirical writings is not possible here. The reader should consult the primary and secondary sources in the accompanying bibliography.

THE PERSON Harriet Martineau was born on June 12, 1802 in Norwich, England, the sixth of eight children in a Unitarian family of Huguenot descent, significant in shaping the emotional and intellectual lives of Harriet and her siblings. Descendants of the forced migration of Protestants from France in 1686 following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, generations of the Martineau family endured minority status as Dissenters but cherished their religious freedoms in the new land, and preserved their French heritage,

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ensuring that all children were bilingual and educated in the rich historical, philosophical, and literary legacy of England and the Continent. This included most importantly Enlightenment values related to natural rights, respect for the individual, freedom of self-realization, equality of men and women in most matters, and the individual’s obligation to serve society. A rather Calvinist posture pervaded this culture. The primary profession for generations of Martineaus had been medicine, but Thomas Martineau, Harriet’s father, became a textile manufacturer. However, in the context of a serious economic recession and the devaluation of his textile inventory in 1825–6, his factory failed, and Thomas Sr. died in June 1826. The consequences for the Martineau family were financially grave, and became, as we shall see, the challenge to which Harriet responded with great success. Her mother, Elizabeth Rankin, was the daughter of a wholesale grocer and sugar-refiner in Newcastle upon Tyne – an intelligent woman of limited education who, in addition to her devotion to the household (“a true nineteenth-century matriarch” [Pichanick 1980]), saw to it that her children were properly educated by tutors at home and in Unitarian schools. She was, nonetheless, stern, with seriously high expectations for the children and sharp reprimands for those who disobeyed. Harriet saw it as “a tyranny of the mind,” accompanied by little affection or care for the emotional well-being of her children, particularly Harriet, who became increasingly defiant toward her mother. The major fact of Harriet’s childhood was her poor health. She was passed to a wet-nurse as an infant, was sickly as a child, spent several periods away from the family in “recuperative” situations, and suffered her mother’s “cures,” which generally exacerbated the problem. Out of fear, physical instability, and emotional deprivation, Harriet responded to family interaction and expectations with trepidation and anxiety. She had been deprived of the senses of taste and smell since childhood and by early adolescence began to suffer from a significant hearing loss. She had largely lost her hearing by the age of 20 and was soon forced to resort to the use of ear trumpets. As the deafness encroached she felt increasingly isolated and unhappy; her family accused her of being stubborn and deliberately difficult. Withdrawal and a sense of unworthiness resulted from negative comments by her mother and other relatives. She prayed in chapel for the angels in heaven to come down to take her away; at one point she contemplated suicide. Harriet’s strategy for coping was a turn to religious faith and a precocious study of the Bible. She found sanctuary in books and ideas. Like her siblings, Harriet, an avid reader and learner, studied languages, classics, mathematics, music, literature, biography, history, and religion, and developed a passion to write. Particularly influential in Harriet’s intellectual development were the writings of Shakespeare, Bunyan, and Milton, initially, and later Bacon, Condorcet, Montesquieu, Hegel, Lessing, Smith, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld, and Hannah More. David Hartley, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Malthus, Joseph Priestley, and, by 1830, Saint-Simon, whose work she was introduced to by Gustave d’Eichtal, figured predominantly in the formation of Harriet’s interests and ideas in philosophy, political economy, and sociology. She read with enthusiasm the fiction and poetry of such literary figures as Austen, Goethe, Wordsworth, and others. As an adolescent she studied logic, rhetoric, and poetry, extended her learning in Latin, Greek, and Italian, and enjoyed translating Tacitus and Petrarch, and later

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German and French authors. Harriet nearly married a college friend of her brother James, but the prospective bridegroom became ill and died within a year. She never married, and considered herself to be “the happiest single woman in England.” In 1822 Martineau began her career as a published author in the Unitarian Monthly Repository, edited by William J. Fox, with articles on the feminist perspective on religion and on women’s education, and by 1832 had published nearly 100 articles, stories, and poems in the Unitarian publication. They reveal her literary and analytical skills and her thorough education and breadth of interests, and most importantly anticipate many of her later concerns, as she moved from topics in religion to philosophy, literature, political economy, social issues (slavery, education, women’s condition), natural rights, natural theology, science, and the works of Socrates, Godwin, Lessing, Doddridge, and Crombie. Her intellectual and social perspective emerges in, for example, “Essays on the Art of Thinking” (1829) and “Essays on the Proper Use of Retrospective and Prospective Faculty” (1830). In “Theology, Politics and Literature” (1832), she develops a rationale for the moral sciences (the study of Man) and discusses: the importance of positioning knowledge in past, present, and future; induction and analogy as methods of reasoning; and the problems of the ambiguity of terms. In fact, throughout these essays she outlines a scientific epistemology. Physical science is advancing steadily, and with an accelerating rapidity, under the guidance of philosophical principles. Moral science is lagging behind, blinded, thwarted, led astray by a thousand phantoms of ancient ignorance and error. … Let it be ascertained what are the true objects of research, and what is their natural connexion, instead of proposing to split men into parties whose object will be … but to magnify one science at the expense of another … moral and physical science are to [Man] connected in an indissoluble union. (1836, vol. I: 194–5)

Martineau’s first major project was Illustrations of Political Economy, discussed above. Criticized for oversimplification and incautiousness in her direct approach, she did not shun controversial and complex issues. The popularity of the tales is attested by extremely high sales (on average 10,000 copies per month), and the fact that, even at moderate royalty rates, Martineau thereby secured not only her financial independence but her reputation as a public educator and interpreter of scientific doctrines. Harriet’s trip to America in 1834–6 resulted in three multi-volume works on American society, as we have seen, and established her as a major social investigator, critic, and travel writer. After so many such major projects, she sought relief from the hard work of writing and publishing by turning to fiction. In 1839 she published the novel Deerbrook, in which the protagonists are a doctor and a governess whose experiences centre on issues of science, work, and occupation. Martineau endured illnesses throughout her life, which occasionally resulted in a complete withdrawal from daily affairs. In 1839, while on a trip to Italy, she became very ill with gynecological disorders, returned to England, and spent six years, 1839–44, in Tynemouth as an invalid. Released from the pressures of her regular schedule, she found time and energy to write a historical novel about the Haitian hero Toussaint L’Ouverture (The Hour and the Man, 1841), a four-part series of

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moralistic children’s stories (The Playfellow, 1841), and a sociological analysis of illness and the patient–caretaker relationship (Life in the Sickroom, 1844). In 1844 she was “cured” by mesmerism, of which she wrote in a series Letters on Mesmerism (1844), thereby alienating her family and many friends. But Martineau continued to live life as she saw fit, and, upon her recovery, moved to Ambleside in the Lake District, where she designed and built her home, and then left immediately for a seven-month tour of the Middle East. The result of that journey was the threevolume Eastern Life: Past and Present (1848), in which she demonstrated the influence of religion on culture and the evolution of religion from magic and superstition to monotheism, from hierarchical godheads to personal belief, from the goal of immortality to a rationalized life of duty and asceticism. Religion had become, for her, a subject for investigation, in which she concluded that an increasingly rational or “intelligent” world had precipitated the growth of rationality in religion within the context of a world-historical evolution of religions. The 1850s was perhaps the most productive decade of this prolific writer/social investigator, involving the publication, among other works, of a history of England, a book on Ireland, a book on the family and socialization, and her most controversial Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851) with Henry George Atkinson. While this exchange between the two was meant to promote the application of scientific method to social life, Martineau was critical of predicating ideas on evidence from the five senses only. She explored other forms of perception, including mesmerism, which she believed united the subjective and intuitive with the rational inductive approach of science. Its materialism and avowed agnosticism, interpreted by many as atheism, made the book her most controversial, and cost her many friendships, including the close relationship with her brother James. The two in fact neither saw nor spoke to one another again. Soon after becoming a regular contributor of leaders to the London Daily News (1852–66), Martineau took up the task of translating and condensing Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1853), seeing the potential of Comtean positivism to systematize science and perhaps knowledge in general. In 1855 Martineau became ill again, and this time she was convinced that she was entering the final stage of her life. As someone who had worked diligently throughout her life and who wished to retain control over her own reputation and ideas, she wrote her Autobiography, an account of her life, thought, and work, in which she characterized her own intellectual development as having followed the Law of Three Stages: Theology, Metaphysics, and Science. Having had it printed and stored to await her demise, she appointed her American friend Maria Weston Chapman executor of her papers and the Autobiography. In releasing the book posthumously (1877) Chapman added a volume of Memorials, extracts from letters and documents of Martineau and her correspondents. After 1855, however, Martineau once again recovered and entered an extremely busy and productive period of her life. During her last two decades she published compilations of her writings in periodicals and newspapers, as well as major works on India, on Ireland, on health and the military, and on continuing developments in America. Hers was a life of thinking and writing, but also of investigation, exploration, and education. Her journalism allowed her to apply sociological skills to current history in more than 1,600 Daily News articles over 14 years. She continued to publish

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periodical articles, sustained her voluminous correspondence, and communicated with many individuals and groups regarding major legal and social debates on such women’s issues as the Contagious Diseases Act, laws against women, suffrage, and the Salem witchcraft controversy. But she became increasingly weak and by the mid-1870s was ailing considerably. She died on June 27, 1876 at her home, The Knoll, in Ambleside. The historical and sociological perspectives held by Harriet Martineau over a lifetime were shaped by and helped to shape the social context. Her life and writings, in fact, reflect the issues, debates, crises, signs of progress, and changing material life in Victorian England. As a known and respected writer and journalist, she played a significant role in influencing social and political change. Yet she recognized her own marginality as a woman, a Dissenter, a disabled person, someone deprived of higher education, a single woman who had to be self-reliant for her livelihood, a woman in the male worlds of writing and science, an agnostic, and a private person who nevertheless worked in the public sphere. Thus situated, her experiences, education, and precociousness produced an intense sensitivity and astuteness to the public issues, problems, and societal complexities of her age.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT The increased rate of change in all spheres, particularly technological and scientific, led to an emerging and substantial Victorian belief in progress. People responded enthusiastically to signs of the modern age: the expansion of railways, the Crystal Palace (emblem of modernity), discoveries in science and medicine, experimentation in many fields, the increasing mechanization of work, new practices in agriculture, and a modern economy of reorganized production which replaced traditional family business practices – some of the many indicators of the promise of progress. But accompanying these changes were doubts, skepticism, questioned beliefs, and the resistances of patriarchy and empire. Optimism coexisted with anxiety, enthusiasm and adventurousness with anti-intellectualism and dogmatism. The class system was being challenged, while the poor, much discussed in the context of the Poor Laws, were increasing in numbers. Martineau was asked by Lord Brougham to write some Poor Law tales in anticipation of changes by the Poor Law Commission (1834), which in fact established workhouses, much deplored by Dickens, in place of outdoor relief. The state of the workers in terms of housing, literacy, skills, and cultural development became a popular topic of discussion. Wages, hours, and safety in industrial production became issues of polarization, pitting factory owners against unionists speaking for workers’ rights and welfare. Women’s rights were much discussed, but social, political, and economic freedoms became legal realities only very slowly, especially regarding married women’s property, legal rights, sexuality, suffrage, occupation, and education. Slavery had been formally abolished in Britain and was widely criticized, but survived as a system in the West for two-thirds of the century. The traditional practices of medicine were supplanted in some circles by mesmerism and phrenology. Agriculture brought both increased production and the disasters of famine. The Malthusian thesis created general concern about the issue of food production in relation to population needs. With her pen Martineau joined those who fought

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against the Corn Laws, which prohibited imports and kept the prices of corn artificially high and therefore unaffordable to many. Travel itself as a leisure activity of the middle and upper classes was increasing and becoming redefined. Although the rising middle classes were fascinated with travel to “exotic” cultures, from the Caribbean islands, the Middle East, and African nations to the young American democracy, few popular writers were able to present objective analyses of their journeys. Martineau, however, contributed to new and more sophisticated ethnographical and sociological perspectives on other cultures and demonstrated how travel could serve the sphere of scientific investigation. Issues of colonialism and empire became increasingly interrogated, resulting in serious examinations of some of the consequences of empire for peoples around the globe. In that context, particular attention was directed toward India. Martineau spent considerable journalism and two books questioning the role of the British Empire in India and that country’s future. This was the age of reform: reform in public institutions such as prisons, the military, the factory, agricultural policy, education, health, medicine, and government. Martineau participated in the discourse of reform and influenced courses of action taken. She was keenly interested in prisons and prison reform, visited prisons in America and interviewed men in solitary confinement, wrote a novel (never published) on the life of prison reformer John Howard, and ironically shared a common birthplace with Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845), pioneer in English prison reform. In the areas of military and health reform, Martineau collaborated with her friend Florence Nightingale in convincing the government, politicians, and the public of the need for reform and for the advancement of the profession of nursing. On the issue of factory legislation, and in no small degree out of her enthusiasm for new technologies, Martineau often found herself on the side of factory owners, sometimes holding workers responsible for carelessness in the workplace; but she was not beyond publicly criticizing conditions in the workplace and worker exploitation. Above all, women in all classes were participating to a greater extent in the public sphere, through work, travel, publishing, and reform movements. Martineau was among those bringing women’s issues into the public discourse and women’s contributions into societal spheres.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT As already suggested, Martineau reflects not only the ideas and values of the Enlightenment – natural law, natural rights, liberty, equality, individual selfrealization, and societal progress – but also the Victorian frame of mind, embracing the tensions and ambivalences with which Victorians confronted modernity. These perspectives can be best seen, perhaps, in terms of a fundamental tension between the rational and the irrational within the post-Enlightenment milieu. Certainly the clashes between science and religion were significant in the lives of Martineau and her contemporaries. Views on this particular confrontation often determined one’s relations with family, friends, colleagues, and the public in general. The Unitarian perspective embraced Enlightenment values while insisting on the importance of religious study and pious self-discipline.

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The intellectual world of Martineau’s youth was filled with the imposing figures of William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, William J. Fox, and the heady influence of Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost. In Unitarian circles the works of Newton, Hartley, Priestley, Bacon, Kant, and Stewart were widely read; fascination with the potential of science was prevalent. Among the most attractive and influential intellectual theories were necessarianism, associationism, and later positivism. Necessarianism maintained that natural and unchangeable laws in the universe determine the basis of human action and are beyond the control, if not the understanding, of human beings. This was essentially a theory of causation, but, like a Calvinist version of human conduct, it also carried the message of the “importance of moral habits, the never-failing consequences of moral discipline,” as Martineau phrased it in an 1824 article on the study of metaphysics in The Monthly Repository. Individual moral responsibility was taken very seriously among the Dissenters, who emphasized particularly one’s obligation to serve society, perhaps the Dissenters’ first rule of life. Theories of moral conduct did not suffice, for the inquiring mind, to explain human nature and human behavior per se. Hence the turn toward theories of the mind, such as the associationism of David Hartley. Hartley’s explanation of the mind, an expansion of Locke’s tabula rasa, was essentially a process whereby impressions or ideas stimulate related vibrations and associations (Pichanik 1980). Its limitations prompted many like Martineau to go beyond Hartley to theories of phrenology and mesmerism. Phrenology seemed to provide a more detailed and scientific explanation of the structure and functions of the brain, with little consideration of nonmaterialist or spiritual factors. The influence of materialism grew as Victorians searched for explanations of facts, of the concrete, the verifiable. Phrenology could be translated into practice, into situations of treatment. It led, therefore, into the examination of human nature and the impact of the social environment on the individual, questions for social psychology and sociology. If phrenology broke the barrier toward an understanding of the interconnections between the individual and social influences, mesmerism helped to destroy the other polarity, the mind–body bifurcation. Here materialism is expressed in the context of magnetic force. “Animal-magnetism,” expounded by Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), involved the notion that magnetic force could be transmitted from one person to another, with the effect of changing or “curing” certain symptoms. Mesmerists developed the practice of artificial somnambulism, later called hypnosis, a state in which the practitioner could assess the ailment and therefore devise a treatment. Martineau and many of her generation used mesmerism, often quite successfully, to treat symptoms deemed untreatable by medical doctors. Such practices aroused both intrigue and scandal, reflecting Victorians’ enormous ambivalence about theories and practices which challenged traditional medicine and/or religious beliefs. Nevertheless, these theories and practices derived from the intellectual quest for certainty, for proof, for useful facts, for a reconstruction of life based on logical, rational principles. This quest gathered momentum and led to the attraction of positivism for thinkers like Martineau, Mill, Whewell, Comte, and others. Saint-Simon and Comte outlined the sciences, assigned each functions and spheres of study, and showed that science could become the source of social reorganization, mental hygiene, and new knowledge. The controversial nature of these discussions can be

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seen, for example, in the fact that Martineau and Atkinson’s Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851), in which they simply reiterated the empirical and materialist discourse and made the case for scientific proofs and paradigms, “positive science,” scandalized the public. This approach to understanding universal laws and man’s place in the physical and social world was radical, seasoned by the authors’ agnosticism and naturalism. In addition, the collaboration of a man and a woman on such a project carried its own disapproval, even disgrace, in Victorian eyes. Several intellectual developments and movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries significantly shaped the discourse of Martineau’s generation. Among the most influential were political economy, the equality and human rights issue, Malthusian theory, and socialism. Here again, ambivalence regarding the merits and costs of industrial capitalism, its effects on population trends, the uncertainties of democratic revolutions, and, finally, the increase of both profits and the proportion of poor in society created theories and opinions which linked, in sometimes peculiar ways, traditional attitudes and institutions with modern goals and practices. This can be seen particularly with regard to the debates in political economy and in socialism around such issues as the Poor Laws, Chartism, factory legislation, trade unionism, the class system, and the portrayal of the classes in literature.

IMPACT In the context of the history of sociological theory and methodology, Harriet Martineau was not only more creative and innovative but also more influential than has previously been assumed. As a member of a generation of Victorian intellectuals, writers, politicians, artists, and professionals attempting to understand and come to terms with the impact of modernity on British society, still imbued with traditionalism, she lent a special voice to the discourse. As a woman situated outside of academic life, as a self-educated and independent scholar, she is not unlike her male contemporaries and predecessors whose education and backgrounds were diverse and, in twenty-first-century terms, unorthodox. By the fact of the popularity of her writings and the breadth of her reputation, however controversial at times, she was a significant author in the Victorian period. With her forays into literature, particularly given her talent for moralistic tales and novels and novelettes of social realism, she inspired her contemporaries: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, for example. Her depiction of community dynamics and the culture of social classes in Deerbrook, for instance, made an enormous impression on authors and readers alike. Her tales for children, most specifically in The Playfellow series, were read to and by British children for many generations. These tales and most of her fictional work were translated into several languages (German, French, Swedish, Japanese, and Russian, for example) as well, so that she took on a kind of international reputation and presence. In matters of government legislation regarding the Poor Laws, the Corn Laws, public education, property laws, and individuals’ rights and freedoms, Martineau’s ideas as expressed in fiction or in periodicals and newspapers exercised considerable influence. The fact that politicians frequently called upon Martineau to help them in

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proffering a particular political stance on controversial issues offers important commentary on the value placed by the public on her points of view. She effectively used the didactic mode to convince the public of the rectitude of her particular perspective, particularly on the issues of slavery, women, work, and education, as we have seen. But she also exerted considerable authority on issues of the empire, and its impact on colonials and on British society itself. Martineau became recognized as a social critic and authority on American society, India, Ireland, and the Middle East. In scientific concerns, particularly on the need for the moral or social sciences, Martineau participated in the discourse of science and scientific epistemology and in an examination of the nature and goals of science as a social enterprise. Clearly she was concerned with the practical as well as theoretical and empirical uses of science. She was engaged in a circle of dialogue and influence that included Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, William Whewell, John Stuart Mill, William G. Sumner, and others. Even in the context of the “scandal” of her book with Atkinson, she brought to the public discourse the idea of a scientific study of the brain and the mind–body relationship. Nowhere was she more influential than in her writings on slavery and on the condition of women. She wrote extensively and over her lifetime on the whole moral question of slavery and demonstrated that societies dependent on that form of domination were bound for failure and crisis. In addition to her novel about Toussaint L’Ouverture, her extensive analyses of American slavery and the Civil War were read widely and helped to shape the moral positions of many in Europe and America. “A source of much controversy in both Britain and America, it [Society in America] played a major role in forming English opinion, particularly among the liberal left of her day” (Lipset 1981: 10). The other instance of her focus on subordination and repression concerned the status of women, in England, Ireland, America, India, and the Middle East, as we have seen. She was the first to sign a petition on behalf of suffrage for women to John Stuart Mill for presentation in the House of Commons. She took up the cause for reform of the Married Women’s Property Act, and for women’s right to work at decent wages under humane and acceptable conditions. She lectured the British public on the issue of gender equality in education. Even early in her career, Martineau’s reputation as a social analyst was already significant, as indicated by the fact that, shortly after returning from America, she was offered the opportunity to become editor of a proposed new periodical “to treat of philosophical principles, abstract and applied, of sociology,” by Saunders and Otley Publishers. She would have accepted the invitation enthusiastically but for the intervention of her brother James, who strongly discouraged her formal involvement in such secular scientific work, so Harriet missed an unusual opportunity to move into more academic circles. Martineau’s impact on later sociological theory and sociologists and social scientists has been underexamined and underestimated. Her contributions in many instances have been unacknowledged. But when we examine the intellectual backgrounds of leading figures, as well as some of the most innovative and renowned theories and empirical studies, we find the presence of Martineau. Some of these instances have been pointed out above. It can be shown that Martineau was read and appreciated by not only Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, Marx, and Veblen, but also Herkner, Myrdal, Beatrice Webb, Charlotte Gilman, Alice Clark, Edith Abbott, and

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Annie Besant. Martineau’s ideas and original theories, as well as investigatory innovations, converge with their work. The road was not smooth, however. She was criticized and slandered by Karl Marx and Frederic Harrison, and unacknowledged by Émile Durkheim (theories on suicide and on religion), Alexis de Tocqueville (studies of America), Thorstein Veblen, and Gunnar Myrdal. That she was a woman doing research and writing in the early Victorian era, producing pioneering ideas and analyses that were emulated by these and other social scientists, created a resistance and ultimately dismissal by her male contemporaries and successors. She was not a formally trained academic and therefore remained outside professional circles. Evaluation of Martineau’s work has been complicated by the scope of her writings and of the issues she engaged. Like Weber, she is interested in the motivational structures underlying behavior, particularly as they are shaped by cultural and historical contexts and expressed in value systems. Like Durkheim, she understands that the morals and values expressed in religion and translated into politics, for example, lie at the centre of social cohesion, and that the interconnection between the individual and larger social structures is complex and compelling, as studies of suicide reveal. Like Marx, Martineau explored various aspects of work, such as the social organization of work, alienation, and the impact of gender and class on work. Both considered labor to be fundamental in human existence. Within the third wave of feminism and, in the millennial decade, the search for sociology’s roots as well as women’s contributions to the emergence of sociology has become an increasingly active and significant area of scholarship. Seymour Martin Lipset, in his introduction to the 1961 re-publication of Society in America, stated, “Harriet Martineau’s Society in America is one of the most important of the early efforts to describe and account for these seemingly constant aspects of American society” (Lipset 1981: 9). “Harriet Martineau … belongs in the annals of those who carved out a niche for a science of society. Moreover, she was one of the first to apply explicitly a sociological approach to comparative analysis” (Lipset 1981: 37). In the sesquicentennial publication of How to Observe Morals and Manners, Michael Hill (1989: xxii) asserted that “Martineau undertook pioneering studies – substantive, theoretical, and methodological studies – in what is now called sociology.” “In her maturity she was an astute sociological theorist, methodologist, and analyst of the first order” (Hill 1991: 289). Simon Dentith (1983) maintained that Martineau was a central figure in the nineteenth-century attempt to “make immediately and practically recognizable principles [political economy] which were widely thought to be abstract and difficult to understand.” Deegan stated that Martineau “dared to write her views on society and in support of a daring young discipline: sociology” (1991: 14). In Women Founders of the Social Sciences, McDonald (1994) shows Martineau’s significant contributions to sociology, particularly to methodology. Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley (1998: 39) have demonstrated that, “Martineau represents in the founding generation both the interpretive paradigm … and the feminist paradigm.”

Recent scholarship on Harriet Martineau There is growing interest in the contributions of women and minorities within the history of sociology and the social sciences in general (see McDonald 1994; Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley 1998; Weiner 2000). A measure of the recognition

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of Harriet Martineau’s place in the history of sociology is the steady expansion of research and analyses of her work (Riedesel 1981; Reinharz 1992; Winclawska 2004), as well as her inclusion in collections on theory and in university textbooks. Not only are her writings and ideas increasingly integrated into the historical narrative of both social theory and empirical research, but her substantive interests and analyses are seen as pioneer work in a number of macro- and microsociological areas (see Hill & Hoecker-Drysdale 2001; Hill 2005): work and occupations (Hoecker-Drysdale 2001a, 2001b); political sociology (Conti Odorisio 2007; Vetter 2008); political economy (Oražem 1999; Logan 2008), the family and population theory (Cooper 2007); the sociology of health (Deegan 2001; Annandale 2007; Deegan 2008); cultural studies (Dryjanska 2008); macrosocietal studies (Hill 2001); race and gender studies (Boucher 2006; Connell 2007); and sociological methodology (Hill 2001; Hoecker-Drysdale 2001c; Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley 2001). In addition to sociology, other disciplines are taking up the implications and impact of Martineau’s work, particularly political theory (Conti Odorisio 2007; Vetter 2009), economics (Dimand, Dimand & Forget 1995; Bodkin 1999; Nyland & Dimand 2003), literature (David 1987; Amigoni 2001; Roberts 2002), and history (Hall 2001; Warren 2008), to mention a few recent studies. In the identification of the direction and scope of recent scholarship on Harriet Martineau, three particular currents stand out: (1) the growth of comparative analyses of the America studies by Martineau and Alexis de Tocqueville; (2) renewed efforts to account for the meaning and significance of the “domestic realm” in both the life and writings of Harriet Martineau; and (3) concern about the continuing resistance or impasse, despite recent inclusions, in the integration of Martineau into sociology. These are not inclusive categories but are indicative of current questions in scholarship across the disciplines and contemporary interests being pursued. (1) The turn toward historical and comparative studies has produced a revival of interest in nineteenth-century studies of American society, particularly those by Alexis de Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau. New comparisons have focused on their respective analyses of American social and political structures, freedom, equality, gender, family, and the character of American society (Hill 2001; Conti Odorisio 2007; Vetter 2008, 2009). Whereas Tocqueville traveled in America for nine months (1831–2, including 10 days in Quebec, Canada), Martineau spent two years (September 1834 to August 1836) covering a great deal of territory and revisiting certain sites. Their travels in America followed somewhat similar but far from identical paths. However, their personal backgrounds, purposes, preparation, methodologies, conclusions, and interpretations, with some exceptions, were very different (see Hill 2001; Wolin 2001; Wills 2004). Comparisons of their discussions on the status of women and slaves reveal the complexity, and in Tocqueville’s case ambivalence, of their viewpoints and experiences. Martineau immersed herself in American life even in circumstances of which she disapproved, such as the plantation South. Tocqueville limited his exposure, preferring contacts with white males, usually of high social status. His observations and interviews were from the “outside” so to speak. Tocqueville reports no interviews with women, Native Americans, or slaves (Hill 2001), although he expresses decided views on their feelings and self-concepts, and ideas on their place in society (Vetter 2008, 2009). Martineau’s observations and analysis have been discussed

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earlier in this chapter. Tocqueville’s concerns that equality and liberty were incompatible and that democracy ultimately generates a tyranny of the majority are challenged by Martineau’s conviction that gender and race equality are required in a democracy and that the dominance of male authority has no place in a free society (see Locke & Botting 2009; Vetter 2009). Tocqueville’s American women need education for the purpose of effectiveness in domestic life, certainly not for the purpose of participation in “male spheres.” Martineau’s American women need equality, justice, and access to the public sphere. Tocqueville stresses the need for reliance upon contractual relations in society because of the inevitable inequalities in society and relative absence of natural sympathy (Winthrop 1986; see also Locke & Botting 2009). Martineau, following Adam Smith, emphasizes the centrality of sympathy in a democratic society, although her views on the status of women differ significantly from those of Adam Smith (Vetter 2009). Renewed interest, then, in early studies of American society has generated new examinations of the contrasts between Harriet Martineau and Alexis de Tocqueville. Comparative analysis provides significant opportunity to understand more thoroughly the distinctiveness and significance of Martineau’s American studies as pioneering sociological investigations (Lipset 1981). (2) Coincident with increased appreciation of the lives and work of nineteenthcentury intellectuals, we see a more sophisticated concern with the ways in which life and lifestyle were reflected in one’s work. Martineau’s interest in, and appreciation of, domestic life was lifelong. This is reflected in much of her fiction and nonfiction and in the way she saw the world, as indicated, at least in part, in her Autobiography. Recent scholarship in several disciplines has turned toward considerations of the import of the private domestic and community life for intellectuals and scientists (Bodkin 1999). Certainly it is relevant to explore the mutual influences between Martineau’s domestic life and community participation and her intellectual concerns. Warren (2008) warns us, in his acerbic critique of works on Martineau, not to ignore the connections between Martineau’s community and domestic life and her fiction and nonfiction. Martineau’s concerns about domestic life and its relation to societal patterns and about the private and the public are of course interwoven throughout much of her writing. Previous scholarship has addressed some of these concerns (Pichanik 1980; Postlethwaite 1989; Oražem 1999; Amigoni 2001; Hoecker-Drysdale 2001b; Logan 2002b; Hill 2004; Cooper 2007), but they have been under-analyzed. The domestic realm is after all the foundation for the family, education and socialization, and community life, aspects of the social order that she analyzed and considered critical in any society (Martineau 1849). In both her fiction (e.g., the political economy tales, Deerbrook, the Playfellow series) and her nonfiction sociological works (periodical articles in Household Words, Daily News articles, her studies of America, Ireland, the Middle East), Martineau takes up many dimensions of community and domestic life. Her participation in domestic and community matters, designing and building her own home and her farmer’s home, organizing the Building Society for workers’ housing, lectures to the Mechanics Institute, her writings on health and household hygiene, her appreciation of the natural environment and conservation, and her focus on safety at work sites are but a few examples of the interconnections between her domestic and community life and social action, and her intellectual and conceptual productions. Amigoni (2001) has focused

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on the significance of domesticity for the lives and outlooks of Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Martineau: “Martineau’s Autobiography thus grounds her conception of authorship in a view of socially-orientated labour which conforms to the tenets governing the well-ordered middle-class workplace, and the well-ordered middle-class home” (Amigioni 2001: 16). (3) The third current of Martineau scholarship of concern has to do with the integration of her work into contemporary sociological literature, research, and teaching. The inclusion of the life and work of Harriet Martineau in the social science and sociology literature has its roots in pre-World War II scholarship, and expanded significantly from the 1960s, particularly during the past 20 years. Contributions by historians, political scientists, economists, and literary scholars have also advanced Martineau’s emerging recognition. In addition to singular treatments of Martineau’s work, specifically in journal articles and books, her contributions are discussed within analyses of women’s contributions to sociology and social science (e.g., Blaug 1958; Lipset 1968, 1981; Rossi 1973; Spender 1982; Weiner 1983b; Reinharz 1989, 1992; Deegan 1991; Hoecker-Drysdale 1992; McDonald 1993, 1994; Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley 1996; McDonald 1998; Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley 1998; Ritzer 2000; Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley 2001; Scott 2007; to mention perhaps the best-known examples). New collections of Martineau’s writings, many of which had been out of print, and her letters, dispersed in many archives and otherwise scarce, have been published, constituting an enormous contribution to the project of research on Martineau: Arbuckle, Harriet Martineau’s Letters to Fanny Wedgwood (1983), Arbuckle, Harriet Martineau in the London Daily News (1994), Sanders, Harriet Martineau: Selected Letters (1990), Hooper, Harriet Martineau: Letters from Ireland (2001), Hoecker-Drysdale, Harriet Martineau: Studies of America 1831–1868 (2004), Logan, Writings on Slavery and the American Civil War by Harriet Martineau (2002), Logan, Illustrations of Political Economy: Selected Tales by Harriet Martineau (2004), Logan, Harriet Martineau’s Writings on the British Empire (2004), Logan and Sklar, Harriet Martineau’s Writings on British History and Military Reform (2005), Logan, The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau (2007). Such collections of writings and letters provide further insights and newly disclosed knowledge, and reveal the possibilities of fresh and expanded interpretations of Martineau’s work. Collections of analytical discussions of her writings and those of other women sociologists/social scientists have likewise created juxtapositions of intellectuals and activists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that reveal Martineau’s mentors, provocateurs, and protégés as they influenced and reflected her work, the literary and historical contexts in which she wrote, and the influences that she had on her successors (Deegan 1991; McDonald 1994; Honegger & Wobbe 1998; Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley 1998; Hill & Hoecker-Drysdale 2001; Logan 2002b; HoeckerDrysdale 2002, 2007a; Romano 2002; Vetter 2008). Turning to the matter of Martineau’s inclusion in general textbooks and more specialized theory and methods texts/collections, it can be said that her representation has increased significantly in recent decades (Ritzer 2000, 2003, 2007; Feagin 2001; Zeitlin 2001; Scott 2007). Michael R. Hill discusses the matters of teaching Martineau in the classroom, of understanding the sociological import of her life and

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work, and of recognizing the basic tenets of Martineauian sociology (Hill & HoeckerDrysdale 2001: 3-22). Increasingly theory courses, both undergraduate and graduate, include Martineau and other women founders of sociology (Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley 1996; Hill 1998; Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley 1998, 2001; Zeitlin 2001). The question is: will mainstream texts and courses at both the undergraduate and advanced levels incorporate Martineau’s work and that of other women, or will the sociological literature and its transmission continue to include only the writings of men, in the classical “male” tradition?

ASSESSMENT Undoubtedly, Harriet Martineau merits recognition for her contributions to the field of sociology in terms of her philosophy of science and epistemology, her innovations in methodology and empirical investigation, and her theoretical work, conceptual contributions, and critical analyses. Expressing her vision of a science of society, she engaged in the timely education of both academics and the public regarding the need for such an enterprise. The perspectives she brought to her arguments and analyses were singular in their stance and impact. Also singular was her ability not only to communicate with the public in her role as public educator, but also to connect sociological knowledge to public issues, to demonstrate the important ways in which knowledge can and must be useful, and to utilize journalism to transmit sociological understandings on local, national, and international topics. Martineau’s contributions to theoretical sociology must be understood within the context of her time. She was creative and original in her theoretical analyses, if sometimes incomplete, perhaps a reflection of a proliferation of projects, subjects, and genres in which she worked. Her sociological concepts and typologies are innovative and enlightening, as in her analyses of types of religion and of suicide. She was not involved in purely academic exercises, but rather interested in how genuinely to understand the phenomena she studied and to convey that understanding. In the case of her exposition of Comtean positivism, she has a nuanced position but does not provide us with her own critique, preferring to present his most salient scientific ideas and not her commentary. Martineau addressed the general subject of investigator bias as well as the problem of her own biases (How to Observe Morals and Manners). Indeed, she frequently indulged in self-criticism and even self-effacement. Her own class origins and personal background influenced her work sometimes, creating serious contradictions, as in her analysis of societal power relations, where she consistently supports the interests of women and slaves but not always those of workers or the British poor. Martineau was an opinionated woman, although a similar male contemporary probably would be described as having “definite and profoundly held views.” Webb and some others refer to her as dogmatic. At times she could be moralistic, critical of others’ relationships and ethics. She was seen as an apologist for industrial capitalism and bourgeois power, and considered by some to be an “ultra laissezfaire” liberal, at least in her early years. In fact, however, politically she was quite ambivalent, vacillating between the values and goals of liberalism and socialism and

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reflecting the mixed attitude toward the Enlightenment of her generation’s “Victorian frame of mind” (Houghton 1957). On the other hand, she was a master of the didactic, which she used effectively to convince and educate. Martineau was an extremely skilled empirical investigator. Her methodological treatise provides a clear guide to maximizing objectivity and clarity in gathering facts, views, attitudes and opinions, and the life experiences of one’s subjects. Throughout her life she promoted the social usefulness of knowledge, and was not beyond using knowledge for purposes of promoting a particular political agenda. Perhaps the singular characteristic of Harriet Martineau as a sociologist was her ability to see the interconnections of theory, empiricism, and social policy and social action. Her work flowed easily among these three intellectual missions, because she was keenly aware that a science of society had to operate on the three levels of social knowledge to validate its own raison d’être and to realize its societal relevance. Is Harriet Martineau making her way into a permanent position in the history of sociological theory and research? Are her works, particularly How to Observe Morals and Manners and Society in America, considered on their own merits, apart from comparisons with Tocqueville (Sinha 2007) and later sociologists? Are we open to understanding her original theoretical contributions (Lipset 1981)? Will she continue to be seen as an early public sociologist who knew how to make sociological data accessible to the public and applicable to social problems and issues? Some sociologists and social scientists mentioned in this chapter are concerned that Martineau, like other early women sociologists, may have hit the “glass ceiling” in terms of recognition, that she too is a victim of tokenism. Sinha refers to a “ ‘first wave of forgetting’, i.e., the systematic omission of women social thinkers, theorists and methodologists from characteristic accounts of sociology and its origins” (Sinha 2007: 10). Surely the discipline will be only strengthened by the inclusion of Harriet Martineau and other women who participated in the emerging periods of the discipline (Deegan 1991; Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley 1998; Hill & Hoecker-Drysdale 2001; Romano 2002; Sinha 2007). Thomas and Kukulan (2004) point out that a thorough understanding of how our discipline developed, who contributed to that development, and the contexts in which it emerged is utterly incomplete without the inclusion of Harriet Martineau and the many other women who participated in that history. As past and present studies of the life, activity, and writings of Harriet Martineau show, her methodological logic, organization and practices; her macro- and microperspectives on societies and social phenomena; her development of analytical tools such as typologies, comparative analysis, immanent critique, and a variety of research methods and techniques; her sociological sensitivities toward her subjects and toward the critical questions to be asked and significant social indicators to look for; her adeptness as a keen social observer; her abilities to analytically integrate the private (domestic) and public worlds, to see societal import in local situations, to understand the interconnections and functions of social institutions to provide social cohesion and stability and conditions for justice and equality; and finally her commitment to a social science which not only generates knowledge but also is committed to the public good – a public sociology: these achievements affirm our recognition of Harriet Martineau as an early sociologist, and as the first woman sociologist.

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susan hoecker-drysdale Reader’s Guide to Harriet Martineau

Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (1877) is a fascinating and informative starting place for understanding her life and writings. There are a number of biographies, not all of which appear in the bibliography. For perspectives on Martineau specifically as a sociologist/social scientist/historian/journalist (rather than as a literary figure, e.g., Thomas 1985; Sanders 1986), see the biographies by Logan (2002b), Hoecker-Drysdale (1992), and Pichanik (1980), with briefer but contextually and theoretically valuable contributions by Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley (1998), McDonald (1994), Hill (1991), Riedesel (1981), and Rossi (1973). For an examination of Martineau on population and political economy, Cooper (2007) is an excellent source. Insightful treatments of Martineau’s political economy writings can be found in Logan’s volume of selected political economy tales (2004a) and Freedgood (1995). Thomson (1973) discusses the philosophical influences that shaped Martineau’s approach to political economy. More details on the profile of Martineau as a political economist from the perspective of economists appear in Dimand, Dimand, and Forget (1995) and in Mark Blaug (1958), whose analysis remains valuable. Bodkin (1999) takes up the contributions of Jane Marcet and Martineau to rational economics, to the discourse on race and gender equality, and to feminist economic theory. The most recent collection of analyses of the sociological dimensions of Martineau’s writings can be found in Hoecker-Drysdale (2007a), Arni and Muller (2004), Hill and HoeckerDrysdale (2001), Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley (1998), and McDonald (1994). To consider Martineau’s sociological work in relation to other classical founders, see HoeckerDrysdale (2002) and Hill and Hoecker-Drysdale (2001); on Martineau and Thorstein Veblen, see Hoecker-Drysdale (2007a), and on Martineau and Tocqueville, see Hill (2001). Most of Martineau’s writings of interest to sociologists and social scientists have been reissued by Logan (2002a, 2004a, 2004b, 2007; Logan & Sklar 2005), Hoecker-Drysdale (2004), Hill (1989, 2004), and Weiner (1983a). As indicated in the bibliography, several collections of her letters have been published since the 1980s.

Bibliography Writings of Harriet Martineau 1832–4. Illustrations of Political Economy, 9 vols. London: Charles Fox. 1833. Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated, 4 parts. London: Charles Fox. 1834. Illustrations of Taxation, 5 parts. London: Charles Fox. 1836. Miscellanies, 2 vols. Boston: Hilliard Grey (selected articles from the Monthly Repository [a British Unitarian publication]). 1837. Society in America, 3 vols. London: Saunders and Otley. (Ed. Seymour Martin Lipset, New York: Doubleday; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981.) 1838. How to Observe Morals and Manners. London: Charles Knight. (Paperback edition, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989; introduction by Michael R. Hill.) 1838. Retrospect of Western Travel, 3 vols. London: Saunders and Otley. 1838. “Domestic Service.” London and Westminster Review 29 (August): 405–32. 1838. “The Martyr Age of the United States.” London and Westminster Review 32 (December): 1–59.

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1838, 1839. The Guide to Service: The Housemaid, the Lady’s Maid, the Maid of All Work. London: Charles Knight. 1839. Deerbrook, a Novel, 3 vols. London: Edward Moxon. 1839. The Martyr Age of the United States. New York: S. W. Benedict. 1841. The Playfellow: Settlers at Home; The Peasant and the Prince; Feats on the Fjord, 4 vols. London: Charles Knight. 1841. The Hour and the Man: An Historical Romance, 3 vols. London: Cassell. 1844. Letters on Mesmerism. London: Edward Moxon. 1844. Life in the Sickroom: Essays by an Invalid. London: Edward Moxon. 1848. Eastern Life: Past and Present, 3 vols. London: Edward Moxon. 1849. The History of England During the Thirty Years’ Peace 1816–1846, 2 vols. London: Charles Knight. 1849. Household Education. London: Edward Moxon. 1851. Introduction to the History of the Peace, from 1800 to 1815. London: Charles Knight. 1851. Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development, with Henry G. Atkinson. London: John Chapman (Boston: Josiah Mendum, 1889). 1852. Letters from Ireland. London: John Chapman. 1853. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau), 2 vols. London: John Chapman. 1854. “Results of the Census of 1851.” Westminster Review 61 (April): 323–57. 1855. The Factory Controversy: A Warning Against Meddling Legislation. Manchester: National Association of Factory Occupiers. 1856. A History of the American Compromises. London: John Chapman. 1857. British Rule in India: A Historical Sketch. London: Smith, Elder. 1857. “ ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the American Union.” Westminster Review 68 (July): 1–25. 1857. The “Manifest Destiny” of the American Union. Boston: American Anti-Slavery Society. 1857. “Female Dress in 1857.” Westminster Review 68 (October): 315–40. 1858. Suggestions towards the Future Government of India. London: Smith, Elder. 1858. “The Slave-Trade in 1858.” Edinburgh Review 108 (October): 276–99. 1859. Endowed Schools of Ireland. London: Smith, Elder. 1859. England and Her Soldiers. London: Smith, Elder. 1859. “Female Industry.” Edinburgh Review 109 (April): 151–73. 1861. Health, Husbandry, and Handicraft. London: Bradbury and Evans. 1862. “Modern Domestic Service.” Edinburgh Review 115 (April): 409–39. 1863. “Convict System in England and Ireland.” Edinburgh Review 117 (January): 241–68. 1864. “Middle-Class Education in England: Boys.” Cornhill Magazine 10 (October): 409–26. 1864. “Middle-Class Education in England: Girls.” Cornhill Magazine 10 (November): 549–68. 1865. “Life in the Criminal Class.” Edinburgh Review 122 (October): 337–71. 1868. “Salem Witchcraft.” Edinburgh Review 128 (July): 1–47. 1869. Biographical Sketches (new edn., London: Macmillan, 1877). 1877. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman, 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder.

Further Reading Amigoni, David (2001) “Gendered Authorship, Literary Lionism and the Virtues of Domesticity: Contesting Wordsworth’s Fame in the Life Writings of Harriet Martineau and Thomas Carlyle.” Critical Survey 13(2). New York: Berghahn Books.

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Annandale, Ellen (2007) “Assembling Harriet Martineau’s Gender and Health Jigsaw.” Women’s Studies International Forum 30(4): 355–66. Arbuckle, Elisabeth Sanders (ed.) (1983) Harriet Martineau’s Letters to Fanny Wedgwood. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arbuckle, Elisabeth Sanders (ed.) (1994) Harriet Martineau in the London Daily News: Selected Contributions, 1852–1866. New York: Garland. Arni, Caroline and Charlotte Muller (2004) “More Sociological than the Sociologists? Undisciplined and Undisciplinary Thinking about Society and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.” In Engendering the Social: Feminist Encounters with Sociological Theory. Maidenhead: Open University Press, pp. 71–97. Blaug, Mark (1958) “Political Economy to be Read as Literature.” In Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ch. 7. Bodkin, Ronald G. (1999) “The Issue of Female Agency in Classical Economic Thought: Jane Marcet, Harriet Martineau, and the Men.” Gender Issues 17(4): 62–73. Boucher, Daniella (2006) “Small Victories, Lasting Change: Harriet Martineau, Slavery, and Women’s Rights.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 4: 321–9. Cawelti, John G. (1963) “Conformity and Democracy in America: Some Reflections Occasioned by the Republication of Martineau’s Society in America.” Ethics 73 (April): 208–13. Connell, Eileen (2007) “The Absence of Gender Equity in Social Discourse: The Void Where Women’s Voice Should Be (Harriet Martineau, Dorothy Smith).” Dissertation Abstracts International, A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 67(9): 3621. Conti Odorisio, Ginevra (2007) “Harriet Martineau and Tocqueville: Observers of the Dangers and Inoffensiveness of American Democracy.” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 28(1): 167–82. Cooper, Brian P. (2007) Family Fictions and Family Facts: Harriet Martineau, Adolphe Quetelet, and the Population Question in England, 1798–1859. London: Routledge. Crossley, Barbara (2000) The Other Ambleside. Kendal: Titus Wilson & Son. David, Deirdre (1987) Intellectual Woman and the Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. London: Routledge. Deegan, Mary Jo (ed.) (1991) Women in Sociology: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. New York: Greenwood Press. Deegan, Mary Jo (2001) “Making Lemonade: Harriet Martineau on Being Deaf.” In Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (eds.), Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 41–58. Deegan, Mary Jo (2008) “Harriet Martineau and the Sociology of Health: England and Her Soldiers (1859) and Health, Husbandry and Handicraft (1861).” Advances in Gender Research 12: 43–61. Dentith, Simon (1983) “Political Economy, Fiction and the Language of Practical Ideology in Nineteenth-Century England.” Social History 8: 183–99. Dimand, Mary Ann, Robert Dimand, and Evelyn Forget (1995) Women of Value: Essays on the History of Women in Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Dryjanska, Anna (2008) “Harriet Martineau: The Forerunner of Cultural Studies.” In Advances in Gender Research, vol. 12. Bingley: Emerald Group, pp. 63–77. Durkheim, Émile (1951) Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. New York: Free Press.

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Durkheim, Émile (1995) Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Feagin, Joe R. (2001) “Social Justice and Sociology: Agendas for the 21st Century.” American Sociological Review 66(1): 1–20. Frawley, Maria H. (1992) “Harriet Martineau in America: Gender and the Discourse of Sociology.” The Victorian Newsletter (Spring): 13–20. Frawley, Maria (2007) “Unburnt Offerings. Review of the Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, edited by Deborah Anna Logan.” Times Literary Supplement 5450 (September 14): 7–8. Freedgood, Elaine (1995) “Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy.” Victorian Studies (Autumn): 33–53. Frost, Cy (1991) “Autocracy and the Matrix of Power: Issues of Propriety and Economics in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Harriet Martineau.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10 (Fall): 253–71. Hall, Catherine (2001) “Men and Their Histories: Civilizing Subjects.” History Workshop Journal 52: 49–66. Harrison, Frederic (1896) “Introduction.” In The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. Trans. and condensed by Harriet Martineau, 3 vols. London. Hill, Michael (1989) “Empiricism and Reason in Harriet Martineau’s Sociology.” In How to Observe Morals and Manners by Harriet Martineau. Sesquicentennial edition. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, pp. xv–lx. Hill, Michael (1991) “Harriet Martineau (1802–1876).” In Mary Jo Deegan (ed.), Women in Sociology: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. New York: Greenwood Press, pp. 289–97. Hill, Michael R. (1998) “Martineau in Current Introductory Textbooks: An Empirical Survey.” The Harriet Martineau Sociological Society Newsletter, 4 (Spring): 4–5. Hill, Michael R. (2001) “A Methodological Comparison of Harriet Martineau’s Society in America (1837) and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–1840).” In Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (eds.), Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodology Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 59–74. Hill, Michael. (ed.) (2004) An Independent Woman’s Lake District Writings by Harriet Martineau. Compiled, edited, introduced by Michael R. Hill. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Hill, Michael (2005) “Sociological Thought Experiments: Five Examples from the History of Sociology.” Sociological Origins 3 (Spring): 3–19. Hill, Michael R. and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (eds.) (2001) Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan (1992) Harriet Martineau: First Woman Sociologist. Oxford: Berg. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan (1995) “The Enigma of Harriet Martineau’s Letters on Science.” Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 2: 155–65. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan (1998) “Harriet Martineau (1802–1876): Kritische Sozialforschung: Theorie und Praxis.” In Claudia Honegger and Theresa Wobbe (eds.), Frauen in der Soziologie: Neun Porträts. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, pp. 28–59. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan (2001a) “ ‘Words on Work’: Harriet Martineau’s Sociology of Work and Occupations – Part I: Her Theory of Work.” In Michael R. Hill and Susan HoeckerDrysdale (eds.), Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 99–114. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan (2001b) “ ‘Words on Work’: Harriet Martineau’s Sociology of Work and Occupations – Part II: Her Empirical Investigations.” In Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (eds.), Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 115–51.

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Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan (2001c) “Harriet Martineau and the Positivism of Auguste Comte.” In Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (eds.), Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 169–89. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan (2002) “Harriet Martineau: The Theory and Practice of Early Critical Social Research.” In Mary Ann Romano (ed.), Lost Sociologists Rediscovered. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, pp. 67–98. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan. (ed.) (2004) Harriet Martineau’s Studies of America, 1831–1868, 8 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan (2007a) “The Nobleness of Labor and the Instinct of Workmanship: Nature, Work, Gender, and Politics in Harriet Martineau and Thorstein Veblen.” In Thorstein Veblen’s Contribution to Environmental Sociology: Essays in the Political Ecology of Wasteful Industrialism. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, pp. 161–97. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan (2007b) “Harriet Martineau.” In John Scott (ed.) Fifty Key Sociologists: The Formative Theorists. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 94–9. Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan (2008) “Witch Hunts and Enlightenment: Harriet Martineau’s Critical Reflections on Salem.” In Advances in Gender Research, vol. 12. Bingley: Emerald Group, pp. 7–21. Honegger, Claudia and Theresa Wobbe. (eds.) (1998) Frauen in der Soziologie: Neun Porträts. Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck. Hooper, Glenn. (ed.) (2001) Harriet Martineau: Letters from Ireland. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Houghton, Walter (1957) The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hunter, Shelagh (1995) Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Hutcheon, Pat Duffy (1996) Leaving the Cave: Evolutionary Naturalism in Social-Scientific Thought. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Laroche, Benjamin (2005) “Harriet Martineau: A Documentary Symposium. A French Perspective on Harriet Martineau’s Society in America” (1839, translation). Sociological Origins 3(2): 97–9. Lengermann, Patricia Madoo and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley (1996) “Early Women Sociologists and Classical Sociological Theory: 1830–1930.” In George Ritzer (ed.), Classical Sociological Theory, 2nd edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 294–328. Lengermann, Patricia Madoo and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley (1998) The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 1830–1930. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Lengermann, Patricia Madoo and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley (2001) “The Meaning of ‘Things’: Theory and Method in Harriet Martineau’s How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) and Emile Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method (1895).” In Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (eds.), Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 75–97. Levy, David (2003) “Taking Harriet Martineau’s Economics Seriously.” In Robert Dimand and Chris Hyland (eds.), The Status of Women in Classical Economic Thought. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 262–84. Lipset, Seymour Martin (1968) “Harriet Martineau: A Pioneer Comparative Sociologist.” In Revolution and Counterrevolution: Change and Persistence in Social Structures. New York: Basic Books, ch. 10. Lipset, Seymour Martin (1981) “Harriet Martineau’s America.” In Society in America by Harriet Martineau. Abridged and edited by S. M. Lipset. New York: Doubleday, Transaction, pp. 5–42.

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4 Alexis de Tocqueville LAURA JANARA

A MAN BETWEEN WORLDS Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris in 1805, taking his place as the third and youngest son of an aristocratic Norman family. These circumstances of birth situated him between the fading world of the ancien régime (what he calls “aristocracy”), and the emergent world that he calls “democracy.” Indeed, he came expressly to understand himself as a man located between these two distinct “social states”: Belonging to the old aristocracy of my homeland, I had neither hatred nor natural jealousy against the aristocracy, and that aristocracy being destroyed, I did not have any natural love for it either. … I was near enough to it to know it well, far enough away to judge it without passion. I would say as much about the democratic element. No family memory, no personal interest gave me a natural and necessary bent toward democracy. But for my part I had not received any injury from it.… In a word, I was so thoroughly in equilibrium between the past and the future that I felt naturally and instinctively attracted toward neither the one nor the other. (1985: 115–16)

Thus situated, Tocqueville became intellectually invested in understanding this grand historical transition from European aristocracy to democracy, and politically dedicated to the question of what would best serve France and his leading political value, liberty. He thus trained his gaze upon emergent democracy and what it portended in France, a question that informed his voyages to the United States and Canada (1831–2) and to England (1833, 1835), but also upon European colonialism, especially the French colonization of Algeria, which inspired his voyages to Algeria (1841, 1846). Tocqueville engaged these two large themes – European democracy and colonialism – in the French Chamber of Deputies where he served as elected deputy for Valognes (1839, 1842, 1846), in the Second Republic’s Constituent The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Assembly to which he was elected to serve for the Manche (1848), and as an elected member of the Legislative Assembly (1849). While working as a juge auditeur for the French government, the young man Tocqueville, with his close friend Gustave de Beaumont, sought permission from the minister of the interior to travel to the United States to produce a study of its penitentiary system (Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis et de son application en France [1833]). In fact, Tocqueville and Beaumont aimed to travel through the US to observe its democracy. On April 2, 1831, the two men set sail from Le Havre and on May 9 arrived at Newport, Rhode Island and thus commenced a nine-month journey through regions of New York, New England, the Great Lakes, Canada, the Midwest, US South, and Washington DC. The following year back in France, Tocqueville began composing the first volume of De la démocratie en Amérique (later translated into English as Democracy in America). In 1835 this text appeared in print alongside Beaumont’s novel Marie ou l’esclavage aux États-Unis, tableau de moeurs américaines, a tale of American racism featuring a love affair between a French traveler and a white American woman with remote black ancestry. This same year Tocqueville married Mary Mottley, a middle-class Englishwoman with whom he had fallen in love in 1828. Over the next few years Tocqueville published two “Letters on Algeria” ([1837] 2001) and undertook a second volume of De la démocratie en Amérique (1840). Further, as rapporteur for a Chamber of Deputies committee he submitted a report (1839), and as an anonymous citizen published unsigned letters in Le Siècle ([1843] 2001), to demand that the French government emancipate all slaves in the French colonies. A first journey to Algeria informed his “Essay on Algeria” ([1841] 2001) which recommended simultaneous domination and colonization by the French. Following his second journey, he prepared for the Chamber two reports (1847) that characterized the inadequacy of France’s colonial institutions in Africa. The Chamber was subsequently interrupted by the popular workers’ revolution that broke out in Paris (1848) – an event that Tocqueville had anticipated one month earlier. With the declaration of the Second Republic, and by way of the new universal male suffrage, Tocqueville won a seat in the new Constituent Assembly. Not long thereafter Tocqueville became afflicted with tuberculosis. He turned his efforts to his Souvenirs ([1893] 1995) which considers the 1848 revolution, and then to a study of the French Revolution. In the meantime, he resigned from the Conseil général of La Manche to protest Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1851 military coup. In 1856 the first volume of L’ancien régime et la revolution (1988b) appeared in print. This articulation of the historical forces that led up to the French Revolution was well received by the public as a liberal denunciation of Napoleon III. Tocqueville’s plan for a second volume, meant to focus on the Revolution and subsequent Empire, was thwarted by his deteriorating health. On April 16, 1859, Tocqueville died (for a full chronology see Zunz 2004).

TOCQUEVILLE’S MILIEU Tocqueville’s investment in the questions of democracy and colonialism reflects the broad outlines and paradoxes of nineteenth-century Euro-American politics. These politics were marked simultaneously by the valuation of European colonialism;

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by enslavement of non-Europeans, a practice serviced by burgeoning European sciences that imagined a hierarchy of human races; by the development of a new industrial economy and complementary bourgeois society fueled by resources extracted by Europeans abroad; and by pressures in Europe toward increasingly universal democratization. A friend of Tocqueville’s, Arthur de Gobineau, became known for a theory of human racial inequality that Tocqueville rejected as “wrong” for representing “a kind of fatalism” that undermines “human liberty.” For his part, he defended the competing European ideal of a universal human capacity for civilizational progress, believing that mores and other social and political practices determine a people’s advancement (1985: 297–9). This commitment, however, did not lead him to join the express anti-imperialism of French and other European intellectuals who had been writing at the fin de siècle (Pitts 2005). His travels in America, where he and Beaumont witnessed a moment in President Jackson’s removal of the Choctaw from their lands, drew his eye to the ongoing European conquest of indigenous nations in America, as well as to the ongoing enslavement of Africans in the US South. Although he never traveled to India, he also remained interested in British colonization, perhaps because as a politician he endorsed French colonization of Algeria. France’s presence in Algeria had begun in 1827 when Charles X mounted a naval blockade off the coastline, ostensibly to curb piracy against European trade ships in the Mediterranean. In previous centuries the Muslim-Arab region had been pulled under the control of the Ottoman Empire. By 1830 governance was somewhat fragmented; in this context the French invaded, meeting resistance that endured in various forms throughout their colonial project. By 1840, Europeans, largely French, began settling in Algeria, winning in time social, economic, and political power over the largely separate indigenous Algerians. In 1848, the same year that pressures for wider suffrage erupted across Europe, France declared Algeria its territory. Through the nineteenth century, European colonialism largely coincided with the logic of capital, which entailed the extraction of human labor power and other material resources at home and abroad to produce goods for the masses, especially the augmenting middle classes, in Europe. The US was still predominantly agrarian at the time of Tocqueville’s voyage to America. He was aware, however, that industrialization was transforming the economy in New England in a manner that yielded new social dynamics between an industrial class of owners and one of wage laborers. His subsequent travels to England granted him a view of the heartland of industrialization, its new factory system, and the kinds of poverty and subjugation they engendered. Another sign of this new economy, the rise of the middle-class conjugal household, was taken by Tocqueville as a marker of emergent democracy in part because of primogeniture’s displacement by a new middle-class practice of granting to sons equal inheritances. At the same time, unsettled by the eighteenth-century theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other European thinkers, the longstanding European conception of woman as morally inferior to man was being supplanted by a new ideal of woman as domestic moral bulwark, one whose devotion to mothering was the fulcrum on which civilization’s virtue and man’s liberty turned. Structural change coincided with this shift in ideology: as the new economy called men and workingclass women beyond the household it became less the site of productive activity than

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it had been in previous centuries and, for the middle classes, more a site of feminized familial care and reproduction. In the US and Europe, these ideological and structural shifts meant in many ways a decline in women’s social, economic, and political fortunes. In France, for instance, just a few years before Tocqueville was born, revolutionaries embraced the new ideal of woman and family and, accordingly, despite their purported commitment to universal political right, excluded all females from citizenship.

TOCQUEVILLE’S THEORY US and French democracy Two features of Tocqueville’s mind-set frequently organize his approach to social theory and history. First, perhaps reflecting his own location between worlds, Tocqueville commonly analyzes by tacking back and forth between binary points of comparison: aristocracy and democracy, France and America, the US North and South, government centralization and decentralization. Second, he tends to take a long view of history. These two modes of thinking inform Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy. As a concept, “democracy” may signal a self-evidently ideal form of governance that entails the people’s self-rule. Thus defined, “democracy” may be used as a yardstick with which to measure the value of actually existing polities and practices of government. Tocqueville’s disposition to think comparatively and historically leads him, instead, to approach “democracy” as an on-the-ground historical phenomenon that emerges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of an aristocratic and monarchical European past. He argues that the gradual advance of equality in the Western world is unstoppable due to conditions that have been fomenting in Europe over many centuries, and that democracy’s emergence is therefore a historical given (1988a: 12). Yet Tocqueville is no determinist. For him, democracy does not portend one fixed thing, nor does it necessarily serve what he values most, liberty, laced as it is with potentialities both dangerous and positive. Tocqueville travels to America to gain lessons about democracy’s disparate potentialities in order to instruct the French in their more recent and revolutionary encounter with it. Through his comparative-historical lens, Tocqueville produces an account of the dynamics of post-aristocratic democracy in France and America. European aristocracy’s elaborately defined and hierarchically structured class relations of command, loyalty, and duty meant that people were by birth embedded in a complex order of inter-relations. These class bonds promised personal security and social stability amid unalterable terms of mastery and subservience. For Tocqueville, democracy entails the disintegration of such a fixed social hierarchy, and thereby produces new forms of sociality and psychology (1988b: 31, 105). He fears, however, that emergent French democracy has not yet secured an alternative order that successfully limits social and psychic chaos and safeguards political liberty (1988a: 16). In contrast, an ocean’s distance from monarchical and aristocratic England, and familiarity with English practices of political liberty have helped safeguard the American colonies from such revolutionary upheaval, enabling democracy there to emerge in

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a more complete and revealing manner (1988a: 18). Tocqueville’s concern to educate French democracy signals that, in his mind, democracy manifests in diverse ways. First, as democracy disrupts old modes of social order, it threatens a maelstrom of social instability and license, what he sometimes calls the abyss (1988a: 487, 703; 1988b: 3). Second, democracy may be elevated to republicanism in which citizens in association actively govern themselves, exercising political liberty and thereby offsetting destructive democratic drives. Third, citizens may instead surrender to a democratic mode of despotism and servitude. He turns to America – specifically, the US North – as a site of democracy realized that, while boasting signs of republicanism, more broadly reveals important dimensions of democracy’s range of potentialities, particularly its drives for and against republicanism.

Individualism, liberty, and passion for equality As post-aristocratic democracy disintegrates social hierarchies in favor of the authority and freedom of the individual, Tocqueville argues, it also foments detachment from public life. While aristocracy’s social web of interdependencies linked individuals within and across classes, democracy’s individuals are inclined to abandon broader society for a small circle of similarly oriented family and friends. With the spread of social equality people thus exhibit little sense of obligation to fellow citizens (1988a: 506–8; see 1988b: 77, 61). What concerns Tocqueville is that this “individualism” leaves democrats politically weak and thereby facilitates a democratic form of “despotism.” As he argues, because the rise of equality of conditions leaves citizens without shared bonds, despotism, which thrives on such fragmentation, is a particular threat in democratic contexts (1988a: 510). Contemplating how to offset individualism, Tocqueville considers republican moments in France’s past. He recommends that the authority of the nobility in European aristocracy be reissued in democracy in modified form as free associations among citizens (1988a: 14; see 1988b: 88–9, 95–6). That is, that highest political good, liberty, may be achieved in democracy through republican practices of association. Newspapers help foster awareness of shared interest, and jury duty educates the citizen in a judicial and public mind-set. Although civil associations – commercial, religious, intellectual, moral, large and small – may also cultivate republican citizenship, collective political action is the certain school of republicanism. The most reliable antidote to democratic individualism is thus republican citizenship itself through which publicly engaged citizens take up the law as their common work and thereby recognize their interdependence. Tocqueville argues that local governing practices are especially apt at linking personal and shared public concerns, generating in citizens what he describes as “self-interest properly understood” (1988a: 526). The world view imposed by this doctrine molds individuals into moderate, reflective, orderly, self-mastered citizens inclined toward republican virtue. Anglo-American colonists arrived armed with such republican habits as England had instructed them in: the freedoms of speech and the press, individual liberty and rights, and trial by jury. In a democracy, however, healthy republicanism is never secure. The problem is that democracy’s leading passion is not for political liberty but for the idea of equality (1988a: 504). In France, at the opening of the revolution, the hatred of inequality and desire for freedom were equally ardent in the minds of

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the revolutionaries as they imagined for the country new political institutions. This balance soon waned, however, as the passion for the idea of equality gained precedence (1988b: 166–7). In democracy, Tocqueville argues, there is a “manly and legitimate passion for equality” which stirs men to be strong and respected, and which makes small men great. However, so too may love for the idea of equality destroy liberty as it manifests as envy of others: the human psyche also breeds a “debased taste for equality” which ignites in the weak a desire to “drag the strong down to their level” (1988a: 57) and embrace servitude in equality.

Majority tyranny and US “race” relations Though the centerpiece of healthy republican democracy, associational activity may also breed the democratic pathology of majority tyranny. Taking life in New England as the hallmark expression of US democracy, Tocqueville argues that Puritanism, a religious disposition found in the English middle classes educated in associational politics, in many ways itself embodied theories of democracy and republicanism. He also shows that the American colonial Puritans exercised their repressive social attitudes through their associational practices. He seems stunned by the fact that in 1649, Bostonians formed an association to disallow the earthy pleasure of long hair (1988a: 42). He also recounts the tale of a love affair between a married woman and a young man. Following the death of her husband, the lovers were married, several years after which the history of the relationship came publicly to light. For this history the couple were imprisoned and almost put to death. Tocqueville emphasizes that these and other tyrannical and absurd laws were not externally imposed but were the product of free agreement among the members of the society whose “mores were even more austere and puritanical” than terms dictated by law (1988a: 43). In general he fears that amid an involved citizenry, nothing may hinder the train of public opinion as it “crushes” some of those in its path (1988a: 248). How does this work? As democratic conditions promote a social valuation of equality and likeness, people prove unwilling to grant special authority to particular individuals; authority is assumed to belong to the majority. For this reason, in a democracy such as the US, the legislature, executive, juries, police, and even judges and religion are governed by the majority. Moreover, while the law is a useful tool of the majority, it is far from the only one: social disapproval by the majority, which isolates and overwhelms outliers, is power enough to force their conformity. As such, Tocqueville considers the US outstanding for how little it promotes and permits independent thinking and authentically free discussion (1988a: 254–5). This concern with majority tyranny exercised through mores as well as laws informs Tocqueville’s critique of race relations in the US North. He does not see the American South, where modified English aristocracy rode the vehicle of European slavery, as a site of the democracy he aims to study. One notable consequence of this perspective is that he tends to treat race issues as “like tangents to my subject, being American, but not democratic” (1988a: 316). Yet he also (like Beaumont) illuminates how in the US North, racism combines fatefully with the democratic forces of majority tyranny and public opinion. He distinguishes between the non-racialized slavery of antiquity where former master and freed slave were indistinguishable, and slavery in the modern context where the practice “is most fatally combined with

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the physical and permanent fact of difference in race. Memories of slavery disgrace the race, and race perpetuates memories of slavery.” He concludes that what makes this difficult to overcome is the stickiness of mores (1988a: 341, 361). In his novel, Beaumont also illustrates how in the US North, despite being outlawed, slavery shapes social life. His protagonist laments that “ ‘The people who hate the Negroes are those who make the laws; it is they who appoint the magistrates, and to please them every office holder must share in their passions … the people, with its passions, is the ruler’ ” (Beaumont 1999: 77). The protagonist wants to marry Marie, an apparently white woman with remote African ancestry; he finds himself confronted by the unyielding, cross-class, anti-black majority view that “dominates America, with no voice raised against it” (Beaumont 1999: 71). Tocqueville himself deploys a racialist world view. He proposes that three selfevident races populate the US while attributing the “afflictions” of American Indians and blacks not to biology but to the “tyranny” of the Europeans. His racialism combines with a republican sense of a people as a historical, linguistic, land-based community bound by shared memory. He is thus concerned that the Negro in the US “has lost even the memory of his homeland”; in losing the language, religion, and mores of his ancestors he is “left in suspense between two societies and isolated between two peoples, sold by one and repudiated by the other” (1988a: 317). Similarly, the tyranny of European colonization has disrupted the attachments of North American Indians to their land, “dispersed their families, obscured their traditions, and broken their chain of memories” (1988a: 318). Tocqueville’s analysis of democratic pride and envy helps account for the racial pride exhibited by his Euro-American whites. Whereas aristocracy’s social web had guaranteed everyone a life station, democracy breeds a psychic insecurity evident in democrats’ “debased” passion for equality that manifests as competitiveness, envy, materialism, and desire for elevated social status (1988a: 531, 198, 57, 503–4). In the democratic US North, Tocqueville reports, with the emancipation of Negroes, whites grow more and more “frightened by an imaginary danger” and anti-black prejudice grows. To reassure themselves psychologically amid the anxieties pricked by democratic flux, whites deploy post-slavery race categories to ensure they are not confused with free Negroes – a strategy that yields for whites race-based social, political, and economic security. In contrast, in the South, whites do not likewise segregate themselves from Negroes; the white master does not fear social familiarity with the slave because he can always repair to his social power over him (1988a: 343, 357).

Democracy, family, and gender Tocqueville recognizes family as a historical phenomenon: in aristocracy, it is informed by terms and sensibilities that organize the broader aristocratic culture, while in democracy it is informed by democratic terms and sensibilities. He therefore claims that changes afoot in prevailing family life are related to the broader political and social transition from aristocracy to democracy (1988a: 379), and thus uses political language to describe family formations. In European aristocracy, the broader society “controls the sons through the father; it rules him and he rules them” as he exercises “a political right to command” (1988a: 586). In US democracy, in relation to which

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Tocqueville takes white middle-class family ideals as his point of reference, the principle of the sovereignty of the people operates in family and politics alike as fathers apply it to their children (1988a: 397). While it is true that the American father wields the “domestic dictatorship” required by his son’s youth, as the boy matures, he comes to seize his “incontestable right” and the father “abdicates without fuss” to his fellow citizen (1988a: 585). The relative status of brothers is likewise transformed by the advent of democracy. Whereas in aristocracy the law of primogeniture fortifies the eldest son and ensures a dependent and unremarkable life for younger siblings, democracy promotes equality among sons and brothers (1988a: 587–9). Where Tocqueville deploys the political terms of citizen, equality, and incontestable right to characterize male family relations, he writes of “tyrannical passion,” “disorder,” and “control” when discussing female family members (1988a: 590). He argues that complementing the structured social order of the ancien régime in France was a timid education of girls – one that would leave these protected creatures vulnerable amid democracy’s social tumult. In US democracy, a girl instead learns independence in thought, speech, and action not unlike her brother’s. This is because Tocqueville’s Americans know that democracy demands individual freedom; they rely not upon social safeguards but rather upon a girl’s own capacity to judge effectively and conduct herself well. Religion is a key tool at her disposal and, with her reason well educated, she “never quite loses control of herself” (1988a: 591). While appreciating how the Americans use gender to promote social stability in democracy, Tocqueville also notes the paradox in how the American girl loses her independence for the rest of her life once she is “cloistered” in her husband’s home while he, in contrast, pursues his calling and citizenship (1988a: 592). The Americans believe that principles of democracy should not dissolve a husband’s authority because, in politics and the household alike, democracy’s aim is not to purge all power but “to regulate and legitimatize necessary powers” (1988a: 601). Democratic public opinion polices this gender economy. Reigning views about women’s role are so well rooted that a young woman comes to recognize the social and personal price she would pay were she to even momentarily flout social conventions. Yet so too is the American woman active in the reproduction of this cultural ethos as the main arbiter of mores and as the keeper of religion. Tocqueville suggests that American women guard these prevailing mores because marital unions are not arranged, as in aristocracy, but are understood in the democratic liberal individualist terms of contract. That is, the freedom of individual choice and equality presumed as a background condition to marriage inspires women to endorse the gendered terms of American marriage. Suggesting a complex psychology afoot, Tocqueville remarks that it is not public opinion alone that compels women to accept the changes brought upon them by marriage; in fact, they seem proud of the “free relinquishment of their will” (1988a: 593, 602). While Tocqueville enigmatically describes his American woman’s choice to marry as an act of freedom, despite it unfolding against the backdrop of an unrelenting public opinion, he also sees her as sad and resolute. Indeed, the terms of this American democratic marriage include the fact that, while her husband will be pardoned for sexual dalliances, a woman bears her new conditions with stoicism but no happiness. Notably, Tocqueville indicates that while these sexual norms may foster individual misery, they do “not prevent the body social from being strong and alert” (1988a: 598).

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Democratic commercialism, class life, and the tutelary state For Tocqueville, aristocracy’s fixed class structure ensures that people are unpreoccupied with their material conditions because they can little imagine another station in life. In contrast, as democracy’s autonomous individual apparently can and must make his own way, democratic passion for the idea of equality promotes individual ambition and popular desire for material comforts. Now the poor imagine and desire material comforts while the rich and members of the large middle class cherish and indulge in material comforts with anxiety, always aware they may lose them amid democracy’s social flux (1988a: 530–1, see 465–6). Such habits and sensibilities innate to modern democracy feed commercialism and the new industry. In the US, they also serve the European colonization of the continent. Tocqueville appreciates the immensity of the achievement of the Europeans who have transformed the landscape of North America into an agrarian and industrial new world. He also imagines that industrial undertakings can educate people in practices of association. In turn, political liberty instills a general inclination toward enterprise and thus industrial and commercial expansion. Yet republicanism is less instinctive to democracy than are the individualism and materialism that promote commercialism and industrialism; the latter are therefore not reliable signs of a democracy’s republican health. In fact, Tocqueville points to how excessive materialism threatens republican citizenship. Passion for the idea of equality ignites pursuit of material success among others imagined as equals. However, the structural inequalities of the new economy mean that not all can be rich. Commercial democracy thus produces a constant tension between the material desires stirred by the idea of equality and individuals’ capacities to fulfill those desires. The yearnings of democrats are never fully satisfied, and melancholy haunts the society despite its widespread wealth (1988a: 536–8). Tocqueville deems women’s morality and religiosity to be stabilizing counterpoints to materialism and the excesses of commercialism. In the US, he says, while for men religion often fails to counteract the lure of wealth, it “reigns supreme in the souls of women,” acting through reason, laws, and mores (1988a: 291). Yet while Tocqueville embraces the Americans’ gender, religious, and moral conservatism as forces for republicanism and stability, he nevertheless recognizes the American love of money as unparalleled by any other society. He argues that materialism and love of property in turn shape how citizens understand politics; here it is not civic excess but shallow middle-class self-interest that undermines political liberty. Although at first glance US politics appear volatile, this superficial flux is undergirded by a stable order that prioritizes private property rights. Tocqueville sees his Americans loving property keenly, more so than any other people, such that the majority disparages political views that interrogate the legitimacy of private property ownership. These passions for property are strongest among the middle classes where people want to protect the property they enjoy. Because they, unlike a landed class, are not immune to changes in fortune and the ravages of poverty, middle-class Americans chronically dread the loss of what they have. They therefore devote themselves to the service of their fortunes (1988a: 636–9). Fearing social upheaval that might implicate their possessions, they are prepared to surrender liberty by limiting the scope of public debate (1988a: 540). Tocqueville therefore worries that this middle-class love of

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wealth produces widespread conservatism that dissolves republican bonds as the preoccupation with material wealth and pleasure blinds people to their shared interests (1988a: 645). The new industrialism’s owner–worker class relations further threaten political liberty in democracy. Not only is Tocqueville concerned that the new industry will reintroduce hierarchy to the social world – one that lacks the interdependencies and sense of duty that protected members of all of aristocracy’s classes; he also argues that industrial labor undermines civic capacity. American agrarian life might demand that any one person be a house builder, tiller of fields, toolmaker, and weaver, with this very range of activities elevating the person’s intelligence. In contrast, the new industry’s acute division of labor reduces men to “machines” (1988a: 400). So employed, the worker repeats the same small activity day after day; as the worker hereby wins efficiencies for the system, the human being is reduced. Meanwhile, the owner performs “like the administrator of a huge empire” rather than as a citizen among equals (1988a: 556). The consequence is that, while the worker and owner must interact, they share no real associational bonds (1988a: 557–8). Tocqueville’s analysis of master–servant relations charts the psychology of the new ideology of individual choice and contract that both organizes marriage and serves the interests of industry. In aristocracy, a master sees his servants as an inferior appendage to himself, attending to their interests through the lens of his own selfishness. The servants may identify so strongly with the master that they take pride in his prestige. In democracy, in contrast, given the ideal of equality, the master’s right to command and the servant’s obligation to obey are founded in the new ideology of free contract. This contract presumes and proclaims that these men are equal fellow citizens (1988a: 574–7). Yet, Tocqueville clarifies, while the master locates his power and the servant his obedience in the contract, and while public opinion imagines the master and servant “near the common level,” it also generates “a sort of fancied equality between them,” despite “the actual inequality of their lives.” Indeed, the passion for the idea of equality penetrates “the thoughts even of those whose interest it is to fight against [this fancied equality]; it both modifies their judgment and subdues their will” (1988a: 577). Democracy’s ruling passion for the idea of equality and investment in the language of individual autonomy suggests that, despite structural inequalities, citizens enjoy equal opportunity. Yet, as Tocqueville perceptively notes, in France, where this new ideology is not yet entrenched, but where aristocracy has been shattered, servants take inequality for what it is: it is not clear why they themselves should not be the masters, and they consider the orders they are given to be evidence of the unjust usurpation of their rights (1988a: 579). Particularly with an eye to France, Tocqueville is concerned that a citizenry depoliticized in these various ways invites rule by a gentle but domineering centralized state. In The Ancien Régime he clarifies how, prior to the eighteenth century, the French nobility provided diverse local forms of authority that cared for those in need, administered justice, and oversaw other public matters, including the guarantee of order and execution of law. Even following the decline of the aristocracy, this local self-government continued in an active form in many cities. However, the monarchy, enabled by the subsuming administrative powers of the Royal Council, eventually abolished such local authorities and provincial republican liberties and leveled social relations to concentrate its own powers, thereby laying the groundwork for

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a democratic social state that shared a proclivity for concentrated powers amid relatively equalized social relations (1988b: 155–6, 163). As such, the French Revolution did not so much shatter political order as it seized and expanded the established powers of public authority. Though he sees the French as more vulnerable to centralized power, Tocqueville is concerned that the Americans, for their part, want a government that will indulge their materialistic desires and protect their possessions. Middle-class concern to safeguard private property, coupled with the authorizing of mass public opinion, helps to augment the powers of the central government, as citizens seek a stable agent to protect their material interests (1988a: 677, 96, see 436). Such fears lead Tocqueville to identify the dangerous moment in industrial democracy at which citizens surrender to a state that secures order (1988a: 541). In general Tocqueville regrets the state’s expanding domains of interest that render it an overarching, protective, absolute, orderly, gentle power concerned with the intimate details of its people and their immediate satisfactions (1988a: 680, 692). Under such conditions, democratic elections are but an occasional expression of political will that is little match for the unthinking passivity and dependence that informs such a citizenry.

Colonized America and genocide While Tocqueville sometimes praises the Americans for containing their democratic materialism, his account of the European colonization of the continent complicates this praise. He suggests generally that the Americans’ European origins, social state, and political institutions, and the American continent itself, the exploitation of which is their main aim, drive them toward industry and trade. As such, they master the continent on European terms, utterly transforming its landscapes and colonizing its terrain (1988a: 485). Tocqueville expresses moral distress at the human cost: while legalistic and “never bloodthirsty” like the Spanish, the Americans of the US are far more destructive, ensuring that no indigenous nation will survive in North America (1985: 71). At other times, he elides indigenous peoples’ achievements and embraces those of the Europeans, asserting that while Indians occupied the land they did not cultivate it, and thus did not own it. In fact, Tocqueville, though typically concerned to highlight historical agency, hints that fate itself is on the side of the Europeans, given that the topography of the American continent, with its wide rivers and natural ports, suggests “the yet empty cradle of a great nation” (1988a: 30). The imagined inevitability of this conquest seems partly related to drives that Tocqueville identifies as internal to Euro-American democratization. The anxiety spawned by the debased version of the passion for the idea of equality, which inflames the individual ego while weakening the man, leads him to look competitively in the direction of others. Such dynamics fuel the phenomenon of an entire people in ardent pursuit of material wealth, and presumably also the policies and practices designed to reduce and subordinate the continent’s first inhabitants (1988a: 536–8, 317, 318). As Beaumont’s character Nelson comments, the Indians’ land has already been taken from them; the new land to which they are exiled will be theirs only so long as the white Americans do not envy it (Beaumont 1999: 140). Dissolving the Indians’ entitlement to the continent can only reassure the anxious European American democrats of theirs. For his part, Tocqueville typically displays a progressivist humanism

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that casts Europeans as more historically advanced than indigenous Americans. He claims that while the American Indians have revealed as much “natural genius” as Europeans, men and nations alike “need time to learn” (1988a: 333). Concurring with Washington’s claim that Euro-Americans are the more powerful and enlightened people, Tocqueville appreciates his appeal to Congress to treat American Indians generously and kindly, and laments that, instead, American Indians are typically subject to both government tyranny and colonists’ greed (1988a: 334). Yet so too does Tocqueville occasionally disrupt the prevailing European conception of the value and goodness of “civilization” by associating American Indian “savagery” with nobility, self-mastery, and autonomy – that is, with values he embraces as a republican (1988a: 318–19). Subtly critiquing European life, he reports that the Indian tragically rejects civilization for fear of becoming like the Europeans (1988a: 319). To give voice to the indigenous Americans’ alternative historical-cultural perspective, Tocqueville cites at length a Cherokee petition to Congress: “When your ancestors arrived on our shores. … Everything the white man asked for to satisfy his needs, the Indian hastened to grant to him. Then the Indian was master, and the white man was supplicant.” Tocqueville argues that these claims are true, yet also accepts that the eradication of indigenous Americans is inevitable (1988a: 337–8).

Another colonialism: France in Algeria Given Tocqueville’s moral dismay over the dispossession and genocide of indigenous Americans, albeit unattended by recommendations for decolonization, one may expect from him some critical stance toward France’s colonization of Algeria and Algerians. In fact, he became a leading advocate of the French in Algeria. Having studied US democracy as an outsider looking in, Algeria provoked him immediately as a French political actor committed to his democratizing country’s greatness. Tocqueville’s commentary on the French in Algeria comes in three waves. First, before having visited Algeria, he anticipates its refounding as an amalgamation of two peoples of distinct civilizations, the French and Arabs. That is, while he saw in America three largely unassimilable peoples, he imagines Algeria differently. He recommends that the French temporarily abandon the quest for uniformity to gradually assimilate the various Arabs, French settlers, and Kabyles through an interim legal accommodation of group difference, ultimately to produce a unified “monument to our country’s glory on the African coast” (2001: 23, 24, 21–4). Second, subsequent to his first visit to Algeria, Tocqueville abandons this imagined amalgam civilization. Now deeming such a project unrealistic, he recommends two distinct legal systems for two distinct societies: “When it comes to the Europeans, nothing absolutely prevents us from treating them as though they were alone, since the rules that we make for them never have to apply to anyone but them” (2001: 111). The goal Tocqueville now sets is “partial colonization and total domination” of Algeria by France (2001: 66). Domination requires “unfortunate necessities” such as the burning of harvests and seizing of men, women, and children and their herds (2001: 70, 71). As a means to achieve colonization, to be pursued simultaneously, domination must center on Algiers, the territory of which should be encircled by a physical barricade. Land around Algiers must therefore be seized, and this will

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require violence. Most of the remainder of Tocqueville’s discussion is devoted to the French settlers and the governance that will best serve them. In light of his earlier commentaries on the republican value of decentralization, he uncharacteristically recommends that this government be centralized in Paris with administration centralized in Algiers. Third, following his second trip across the Mediterranean, Tocqueville observes that French domination of Algeria has never been more secure. Surveying his country’s accomplishments, he confirms that the French alone should wield political power, that inhabitants of the country should exercise secondary governmental powers, and that the French should make use of existing influences in Algeria. He also claims that French treatment of indigenous peoples has varied from “the extreme of benevolence to that of rigor,” and that both excesses must be avoided in the name of good government of the Algerians that serves not only French interests but also theirs (2001: 139, 141–2). Exhibiting some new sensitivity to the human cost and social degradation yielded by the French government’s and army’s harsh measures, Tocqueville charges that “Muslim society in Africa was not uncivilized” before the French arrived, and that the French have rendered it more “barbarous” by destroying Muslim forms of knowledge (2001: 141). At the same time, casting French–Arab relations in gendered and Orientalist terms, he reinforces the sort of hierarchical thinking that informs the domination: “It is victory that, establishing numerous and necessary connections between [the Arabs] and us, led us to penetrate their customs, their ideas, their beliefs, and finally yielded the secret of how to govern them.… Today, indeed, indigenous society has been unveiled to us” (2001: 130). In asking what impact the French should aim to make on the indigenous peoples, he concludes that no government could unite two populations of such distinct histories, cultures, religions, and laws. The French should not even hope “in so little time to destroy in the heart of the indigenous populations the blind hatred created and sustained by foreign domination. It is thus necessary, whatever our conduct, to remain strong” (2001: 145).

ASSESSING TOCQUEVILLE’S WORK As Tocqueville invests in the two large themes of European democratization and colonialism, he also engages the historically coinciding issues of nineteenth-century European capitalism, class relations, and gender relations. The degree to which he grasps the full implications of these various forces as they intersect historically – and theoretically in his work – is one means by which to assess that work. First, for instance, the question of how Tocqueville’s democratic theory sits with his colonialist impulses remains open to debate. On one hand, Tocqueville’s account of the value of republican self-government and political liberty may be turned critically against his endorsement of European colonization of non-Europeans. On the other hand, this seeming paradox in Tocqueville’s thought invites interrogation of the potential compatibility of modern liberal democracy and colonialism. For example, his views on French domination of the Algerians are not inconsistent with his account of the putative historical inevitability of European domination of America and indigenous Americans as a consequence of European democratization. Meanwhile, Tocqueville

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does not acquiesce to the common nineteenth-century view that, because history entails a linear course of development in which some societies are more advanced than others, colonization by the more advanced serves the progress of the colonized (1988a: 333 n.19). Given this, Tocqueville’s colonialism may be seen to resonate more with the older republican tradition that links the civic health of the home republic to imperial projects. Second, Tocqueville under-articulates the implications for republican democratic health of a capitalist economy and its class relations. He sometimes claims that, although the new industry means greater economic inequality, political inequality is decreasing in the discrete realm of politics because there, men seem more and more alike. Thus, while the “aristocracy” produced by industry is one of history’s harshest, it is contained, and thus relatively benign politically speaking (1988a: 556–8). Yet Tocqueville’s central concern for political liberty provides terms for a critique of the relations introduced by the new industry. His work also shows that, precisely because democracy boasts multiple potentialities, including for individualism and materialism, which coincide with the rise of the new industry and the flourishing of commercialism, democracy may fuel companionate historical forces that undermine its best version of itself. Third, we might ask which of democracy’s varied potentialities operate in the US form of family that Tocqueville analyzes and identifies as democratic. Despite his sensitivity to family as a historically and culturally contingent phenomenon, he generalizes as the democratic family a Euro-American, middle-class conjugal family ideal which was far from a universal expression of family practice in the US North at the time of his visit. On one hand, Tocqueville’s conception of political liberty may be brought to bear upon the gendered terms of this norm of family relations to interrogate its relation to democracy’s healthiest form of itself. On the other hand, the contrast that Tocqueville paints between the lives of the American girl and her brother, and between her and the American wife, suggests the complex social psychology of US democracy which embraces the idea of republican self-government while crafting historically new subjections between the sexes, just as between owners and workers, “races,” and colonizers and colonized peoples (Janara 2002: ch. 6). Though he fails fully to deploy it, Tocqueville arms himself with the insight that democracy embodies multiple potentialities with disparate value. By illuminating democracy’s varying manifestations, some of which coincide with or encourage colonialism, racism, economic exploitation, and sexism, Tocqueville may enable us to think beyond his particular views on these historical power formations. At the same time, Tocqueville’s claim that democracy embodies multiple potentialities also leaves us with the question of how fully the right kind of citizenship can subdue democracy’s pathologies, particularly in this age of advanced globalized liberal capitalist democracy. That said, his long historical view and illumination of the price of individualism and materialism can be deployed to shed light on the greatest crisis of our time which is fueled by this globalized capitalism: that of mass production and consumption and the resulting environmental destruction. The perspicacity of his observation that the breakdown of intergenerational ties that link past, present, and future detaches people from a larger view of a shared human good – that democracy makes “men forget their ancestors” and “clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries” (1988a: 508) – may be more evident today than ever before.

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laura janara Reader’s Guide to Alexis de Tocqueville

Most commentary on Alexis de Tocqueville appears in either French or English; this guide is for readers of English, a choice that conceals the value of attending to differences between French and American receptions of his writings. Two works that richly illuminate Tocqueville’s life in relation to his theory are Hugh Brogan’s Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (2007) and Sheldon Wolin’s Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (2001). For a set of important essays by leading Tocqueville scholars on a range of key topics, see Cheryl B. Welch’s edited volume, Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville (2006). Seymour Drescher (on Tocqueville, race, slavery, colonialism, poverty, and England), Melvin Richter (on Tocqueville’s intellectual and historical roots, liberty, race, and Algeria), Roger Boesche (on Tocqueville’s brand of liberalism), and Rogers M. Smith (on Tocqueville and civic inequality in the US) have all been influential commentators. Jennifer Pitts has opened important terrain for Anglophone scholarship by translating into English key essays by Tocqueville in Writings on Empire and Slavery (2001). This edited volume is complemented by her chapters on Tocqueville in A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (2005). On race in America, consider Margaret Kohn, “The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery” (2003) and Laura Janara, “Brothers and Others: Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism” (2004). On Tocqueville’s treatment of questions of political economy, see Irving Zeitlin’s critical reception in Liberty, Equality, and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (1971) and Richard Swedberg’s favorable reading in Tocqueville’s Political Economy (2009). In Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville, editors Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting (2009) provide a survey of scholarship on Tocqueville and issues of gender (which also broaches issues of race). On Tocqueville’s sense of history, consider Harvey Mitchell, Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised (1996).

Acknowledgment Sarah Pemberton and Lucas Guimaraes Pinheiro assisted variously with the preparation of the bibliography and with manuscript correction.

Bibliography Writings of Alexis de Tocqueville 1860. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Gustave de Beaumont. Paris: Michael Levy. 1958. Journey to England and Ireland. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faber and Faber. 1958–98. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Paris: Gallimard. 1971. Journey to America. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence. New York: Anchor Books. 1985. Selected Letters on Politics and Society. Ed. Roger Boesche. Trans. James Toupin and Roger Boesche. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1988a [1966]. Democracy in America. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. Reprint, New York: Perennial Library.

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1988b. The Ancien Régime. Introduction by Norman Hampson. Trans. J. Bonner. London: J.M. Dent and Sons. 1991a. Oeuvres, vol. 1. Ed. Françoise Mélonio and Lise Queffélec. Paris: Gallimard. 1991b. Oeuvres, vol. 2. Ed. André Jardin. Paris: Gallimard. 1995. Recollections. Ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr. Trans. George Lawrence. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. 2001. Writings on Empire and Slavery. Ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009. Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings. Ed. Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beaumont, Gustave de and Alexis de Tocqueville (1964) On the Penitentiary System in the US and its Application in France. Introduction by Thorsten Sellin. Foreword by Herman Lantz. Carbondale, IL: South Illinois University Press.

Further Reading Beaumont, Gustave de (1999) Marie or, Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America. Trans. Barbara Chapman. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press (1958). Reprint, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boesche, Roger (1987) The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Boesche, Roger (1988) “Why Did Tocqueville Fear Abundance? Or the Tension between Commerce and Citizenship.” History of European Ideas 9(1): 25–45. Boesche, Roger (1996) “Tocqueville: The Pleasures of Servitude.” In Roger Boesche, Theories of Tyranny from Plato to Arendt. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 201–36. Boesche, Roger (2006) Tocqueville’s Road Map: Methodology, Liberalism, Revolution and Despotism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Brogan, Hugh (1973) Tocqueville. London: Collins/Fontana. Brogan, Hugh (2007) Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Connolly, William E. (1994) “Tocqueville, Territory and Violence.” Theory, Culture and Society 11(1): 19–40. Craiutu, Aurelian and Sheldon Gellar (eds.) (2009) Conversations with Tocqueville: The Global Democratic Revolution in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Craiutu, Aurelian and Jeremy Jennings (2004) “The Third Democracy: Tocqueville’s Views of America after 1840.” American Political Science Review 98(3): 391–404. De Dijn, Annelien (2008) French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drescher, Seymour (1964) Tocqueville and England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Drescher, Seymour (1968) Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Drescher, Seymour (1992) “Why Great Revolutions Will Become Rare: Tocqueville’s Most Neglected Prognosis.” Journal of Modern History 64(3): 429–54. Drescher, Seymour (2003) “Who Needs ‘Ancienneté’? Tocqueville on Aristocracy and Modernity.” History of Political Thought 24(4): 624–46. Drolet, Michael (2003) Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Dumm, Thomas L. (1987) Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Eisenstad, Abraham S. (ed.) (1988) Reconsidering Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Elster, Jon (2009) Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gannett, Robert T. (2003) “Bowling Ninepins in Tocqueville’s Township.” American Political Science Review 97(1): 1–16. Geenens, Raf and Annelien de Dijn (eds.) (2007) Reading Tocqueville: From Oracle to Actor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hereth, Michael (1986) Alexis de Tocqueville: Threats to Freedom in Democracy. Trans. George Bogardus. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Holmes, Stephen (1993) “Tocqueville and Democracy.” In David Copp, Jean Hampton, and John E. Roemer (eds.), The Idea of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 23–63. Janara, Laura (2002) Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Albany: State University of New York Press. Janara, Laura (2004) “Brothers and Others: Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism.” Political Theory 32(6): 773–800. Jardin, André (1988) Tocqueville: A Biography. Trans. Lydia Davis and Robert Hemenway. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kahan, Alan S. (1992) Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kateb, George (2003) “Democratic Individualism and its Critics.” Annual Review of Political Science 6: 275–305. Kohn, Margaret (2003) “The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery.” Polity 35(2): 169–93. Kohn, Margaret (2008) “Empire’s Law: Alexis de Tocqueville on Colonialism and the State of Exception.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 41(2): 255–78. Lamberti, Jean-Claude (1989) Tocqueville and the Two Democracies. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lawlor, Peter A. (ed.) (1992) Tocqueville’s Political Science: Classic Essays. New York: Garland Publishing. Lawlor, Peter A. (ed.) (2004) Democracy and its Friendly Critics: Tocqueville and Political Life Today. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Lefort, Claude (1988) Democracy and Political Theory. Trans. David Macey. London: Polity Press. Lively, Jack (1962) The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, Jill and Eileen H. Botting (eds.) (2009) Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Maletz, Donald J. (2003) “Making Non-Citizens: Consequences of Administrative Centralization in Tocqueville’s Old Regime.” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 33(2): 17–35. Maletz, Donald J. (2005) “Tocqueville on Mores and the Preservation of Republics.” American Journal of Political Science 49(1): 1–15. Mancini, Matthew (1994) Alexis de Tocqueville. New York: Twayne Publishers. Manent, Pierre (1996) Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy. Trans. John Waggoner. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Masugi, Ken (ed.) (1991) Interpreting Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Mayer, J. P. (1960) Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Study in Political Science. New York: Harper and Brothers. Mill, John Stuart (1874) “M. de Tocqueville on Democracy in America.” In John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical. London: Henry Holt and Company. Mitchell, Harvey (1996) Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, Joshua (1999) Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nimtz, August H. (2003) Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The “Absolute Democracy” or “Defiled Republic.” Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Offe, Claus (2005) Reflections in America: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ossewaarde, Marinus R. R. (2004) Tocqueville’s Moral and Political Thought: New Liberalism. London: Routledge. Outlaw, Lucius T. (2009) “The Racial Nation. Race, Nation, and Nation-State: Tocqueville on (U.S.) American Democracy.” In Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), Pragmatism, Nation and Race: Community in the Age of Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 127–41. Persram, Nalini (ed.) (2007) Postcolonialism and Political Theory. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Pierson, George Wilson (1996) Tocqueville in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pitts, Jennifer (2005) A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rahe, Paul A. (2009) Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Reinhardt, Mark (1997) The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Richter, Melvin (2004) “Tocqueville and Guizot on Democracy: From a Type of Society to a Political Regime.” History of European Ideas 30(1): 61–82. Satz, Debra (1993) “Tocqueville, Commerce, and Democracy.” In David Copp, Jean Hampton, and John E. Roemer (eds.), The Idea of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–70. Schleifer, James T. (1980) The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Siedentop, Larry (1994) Tocqueville. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Rogers M. (1997) Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Swedberg, Richard (2009) Tocqueville’s Political Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tillery, Alvin B. (2009) “Tocqueville as Critical Race Theorist: Whiteness as Property, Interest Convergence and the Limits of Jacksonian Democracy.” Political Research Quarterly 62(4): 639–52. Vetter, Lisa Pace (2008) “Harriet Martineau on the Theory and Practice of Democracy in America.” Political Theory 36(4): 424–55.

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5 Karl Marx1 ROBERT J. ANTONIO

Karl Marx is a central figure in a broader theoretical tradition – modern social theory. In post-World War II American sociology he was constructed, along with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as the founder of one of the three major sociological traditions. Even thinkers who attacked this canon for being too narrow and Eurocentric have usually conceded Marx’s enormous importance across disciplinary, national, and cultural borders. His advocates and critics alike contend that he personifies, for better or worse, modern social theory. The roots of this tradition go back at least to the Enlightenment, and are a contested terrain. Marx is arguably the first of a generation of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorists who called for an empirical social science and who theorized about the erosion of traditional societies and rise of modernity. Before the emergence of specialized social science, modern theorists developed theories of society that engaged more systematically than ever before empirical-historical evidence and which addressed the socio-cultural rupture caused by the Second Industrial Revolution (i.e., the rise of mechanized production, corporate firms, national unions, the interventionist state, mass politics, culture, and warfare). Marx preceded most of the other first-generation modern theorists by about 20 to 30 years. He wrote his masterwork Capital after moving to England, the starting place of the Second Industrial Revolution, and spending years digesting socioeconomic and political information and theories in the British Museum. Marx founded modern theory’s “Critical Theory” tradition, which, breaking with theological and philosophical absolutism, aimed to anchor normative and political critiques in knowledge of contradictions, social movements, and developmental directions of society (Antonio & Kellner 1992a, 1992b; Antonio 2005). Perhaps no other modern social theorist has elicited more intense, contradictory responses among more globally dispersed audiences than Marx. His name is identified with some of the last century’s greatest emancipatory struggles and worst The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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repression. As capitalism spread from its original centers in Europe and North America, his ideas were engaged in nearly every corner of the globe, revised, blended with local traditions, and understood and applied in divergent ways. Different Marxisms bear the imprints of diverse cultures, times, and aspirations. The importance of Marx’s thought for labor movements and other types of resistance and insurgency, as well as for socialist and communist movements, parties, and regimes, has made it a topic of intense debate on the Left and the Right. However, his work is as analytical and sociological as it is political; it has generated diverse lines of social research and social theory. However, diverse thinkers have criticized or dismissed his fundamental challenges to mainstream theories and other heterodox approaches. Marx has been an oppositional reference point for very different types of theory. Later twentieth-century theorists (e.g., postmodernist, feminist, libertarian, New Right) have all portrayed Marx and Marxism as quintessential, fundamentally flawed modernism. Although pronounced dead many times, Marx always seems to rise again from the ashes. His thought has had increased relevance, free of the weight of communism, after the triumph of the neoliberal policy regime over postwar New Deal and social democratic forms of capitalism and expansion of a hyperexploited, feminized, transnational working class, who often toiled under nineteenth-century-like conditions. At the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade, major financial crisis, severe employment problems, sharp inequalities, and grave environmental risks appeared to undercut neoliberal regimes and bring the social-regulatory state back in. Because the issues of class, property, exploitation, poverty, ideology, planning, and, especially, capitalism are still intensely debated, Marx is still one of the most important social theorists and social critics.

MARX’S LIFE AND CONTEXTS Young Marx: Hegelian historicism and critical theory In 1815, three years before Karl Marx was born, his Rhineland birthplace of Trier was ceded back to Prussia. Previously, the town had been annexed by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the French regime began to dismantle the region’s semi-feudal institutions and to expand individual and constitutional rights. Because many townspeople supported the French Revolution’s reforms, reimposition of conservative Prussian rule generated political tensions. Economic problems and increased poverty made matters worse. Especially during the revolutionary years of 1830 and 1848, liberal and Left-leaning political opposition grew in the region. Even the utopian socialists Saint-Simon and Fourier had followers there (McLellan 1973: 1–2; Seigel 1993: 38–41). Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class household, the oldest male of six surviving children. His mother, Henrietta, was of Dutch ancestry, and his father, Heinrich, was a successful lawyer, who embraced Enlightenment ideals and liberal democratic politics. Both sides of Marx’s family had Jewish origins and rabbis as recent ancestors. Facing prejudicial restrictions, his parents converted to Protestantism. Jewish ancestry, however, still made the Marx family outsiders, and would have impeded Karl’s entry into German academe had he chosen that course.

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Marx received a mostly liberal humanist or Enlightenment-oriented high school education. The liberal headmaster and two other teachers were threatened by police authorities for their progressive political views. Several teachers were excellent, but the students were mediocre. Even among this group, Marx was hardly an exceptional student, graduating eighth in a class of 32. Ironically, he did poorly in history. Although Marx was a playful and energetic child, well liked by many of his fellow students, he was also feared and held in contempt by the targets of his sarcastic wit. His talent for cleverly and humorously skewering opponents earned him enemies throughout his life. Young Marx embraced Enlightenment ideals and reformist social views, which were nurtured by his friendly relations with the progressive Baron von Westphalen, his future father-in-law. Taking a liking to Marx, the Baron helped to stir his interests in romanticism and socialism (McLellan 1973: 3–16; Seigel 1993: 41–4). In 1835, Marx became a student at the University of Bonn. Although formally studying law, he spent much of his time “drinking and dueling,” overspending, and writing poetry. Unhappy with Marx’s behavior, his father forced him to transfer to the University of Berlin the following year. In a much more serious intellectual environment, he worked hard and became a committed scholar. His very intense study habits probably contributed to his contracting a respiratory disorder so serious that he was released from military obligations. Maintaining extremely strenuous work habits as an adult, he suffered recurrent bouts of illness throughout his life. Young Marx joined the “Berlin Doctors Club,” an informal group of Left-Hegelian, radical intellectuals. Hegel’s philosophy exerted enormous influence on many younger German intellectuals at this time. Its emphasis on humanity making itself historically was an attractive position to those wanting to put philosophy on more thoroughly secular grounds. Conservative thinkers embraced Hegel’s theory of the state, which seemed to justify the Prussian regime, while the Left was attracted to his secular philosophical emphasis on humanity’s creative labor powers. Marx’s Left-Hegelian ties exposed him to ideas and people that helped shape his later intellectual and political path. He completed a doctoral dissertation on the philosophies of Epicurus and Democritus, submitting it successfully at Jena in 1841. Marx gave up work on the second thesis required for entry into German academe when Bruno Bauer, his associate and a leading Left-Hegelian, lost his academic position for political reasons (McLellan 1973: 16–40; Seigel 1993: 65–75). Engels (1842: 336)2 portrayed young Marx, in rhyme: A swarthy chap of Trier, a marked monstrosity, He neither hops nor skips, but moves in leaps and bounds, Raving aloud. As if to seize and then pull down To Earth the spacious tent of heaven up on high, He opens wide his arms and reaches for the sky. He shakes his wicked fist, raves with a frantic air, As if ten thousand devils had him by the hair.

Marx became a journalist and soon editor at the progressive Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. An acerbic social critic, he attacked the remains of the aristocratic regime and unjust facets of the emergent capitalist order, especially the arbitrary imposition

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of political power and new forms of socio-economic inequality. Criticizing new laws that forbade peasants from gathering wood, Marx decried the monopolization of property by the rich and declared that the poor were “the elemental class of human society” (1842: 234–5). Also, he criticized Hegelian political theory, which portrayed the state as a neutral mediator and rational manifestation of the general will (a position that divided Right- and Left-Hegelians). Comparing Hegel’s rosy idea of the state to the grim reality of Prussian bureaucracy, Marx attacked officialdom’s crass pursuit of material self-interest and slavish service to aristocratic and emergent bourgeois elites. He also lambasted state censorship and authoritarianism, defending the free press and nascent democratic public sphere and inveighing against the chilling effect of the police state’s detainment and trial of vocal citizens for alleged “excesses” or “insolence” to officials. Favoring a free society that encourages open discussion and democratic procedures, he held that citizens often know more about the scope of socio-political problems and how to solve them than officials and that they should be allowed to criticize state functionaries publicly, especially their corrupt and arbitrary ways. More generally, he attacked the authoritarian regime for producing “passive uninformed citizens,” who quietly accede to “administration” (Marx 1843a: 343–51). His early views about bureaucratic power, free speech, local knowledge, and active citizens anticipated twentieth-century critical theory critiques of “total administration” and Left-liberal proposals for “radical” or “deliberative” democracy (e.g., by John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas). The circulation of the Rheinische Zeitung grew substantially under Marx’s editorship. A skilled editor and writer, he continued journalistic endeavors, on a part-time basis, throughout much of his life. However, in 1843, the Prussian state shut down the newspaper, largely because of its attacks on the monarchy and bureaucracy. That same year he married Jenny von Westphalen, and took another editorial position in Paris, where he engaged more directly the industrial working class and socialist and communist ideas and movements (McLellan 1973: 62–6; Seigel 1993: 65–75). In On the Jewish Question (1843c), Marx attacked Bruno Bauer’s plea to deny Jewish people political rights. However, Marx’s ambiguous and sometimes negative comments about Jews indicate that he had not come to terms with his own roots and identity. It is possible that he did not resolve this tension even in his later life. However, young Marx moved in a more radical anti-capitalist direction, away from his earlier progressive liberalism. He opposed capitalism’s “abstract” individualism, which stressed egoistic pursuit of “self-interest” by “isolated monads.” He argued that this liberal, or bourgeois, “freedom” dissolves feudal ties and extends formal, or negative, rights, which eliminate certain legal blockages to participation. However, he held that such freedom – “liberty” – ignores the crucial fact that activation of individual rights depends on access to material resources. For example, in Marx’s view, former slaves are not genuinely free if they lack opportunity to support themselves; and a right to education means little if one is denied the means to pay for it. He contended that, except for the old landholding elites and new business stratum, the vast majority of people – propertyless peasants and poor artisans and wageworkers – lacked the social and material means to participate in emergent bourgeois, or capitalist, society and to share its benefits. For Marx, liberty is not “human emancipation.” He thought that it obscured the unfreedom of the majority. Desiring a sweeping socio-political transformation that went far beyond establishment of negative

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rights and liberal reform, Marx called for “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” “practical struggles,” and “communism.” Revolutionary rhetoric aside, he argued that emergent capitalism’s exclusive emphasis on negative rights facilitates injustice, generates intense conflicts, and cannot sustain community. He held that substantive, or true, freedom means that people have access to the means of participation, which requires socio-economic equality as well as legal and political equality (Marx 1843b: 141–5; 1843c: 162–74). This fundamental issue of genuine inclusion remained a crucial issue in Marx’s later thought and is still a major problem in contemporary liberal democracies. For example, neoliberal policymakers continue to see capitalist free markets and legal rights as the primary measure of a nation’s freedom and democracy, regardless of levels of poverty, misery, and nonparticipation. In the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Marx attacked Hegel’s equation of the actuality of the Prussian state with its democratic constitution, arguing that the work justified the oppressive monarchy by attributing a more abstract logic to an already abstract document that concealed political reality. He objected strenuously to Hegel’s sanctification of the regime as “Rational” (1843d). In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx accused the Hegelians of not starting with real “corporeal” people in their actual social relations, but with “abstract nature” and “thought entities.” He held that their “idealist” views confuse legitimations with reality, and thereby encourage passive acceptance of unjust and repressive social and political conditions. Marx implied that all bourgeois thought is prone to this fatal error. He berated Hegel for framing his theory of human development and history in the idiom of “spirit,” as progressive evolution of consciousness. By contrast, Marx and other Left-Hegelians followed Ludwig Feuerbach’s “inversion” of Hegel, or shift to this-worldly explanations of theology and philosophy (i.e., religion is a human creation). This reversal of the primacy of spirit was aimed to avert the alienation from, and concealment of, human agency that Hegel himself decried. However, Marx also broke with Feuerbach, arguing that his “materialism” was too philosophical, dwelled too much on the critique of religion, viewed the material realm too inertly, and focused too exclusively on generic “Man” or the human “essence” (Marx 1845). In his view, Hegelians lacked the determinate historical focus needed to address real human problems. Marx said, in an earlier letter to his father, announcing his conversion to Hegelianism: “I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its center” (1837: 18). This comment expresses a Hegelian methodological theme that Marx retained long after his break with the Hegelians. He saw Hegel’s “historicism” as a bridge between the “is” and “ought,” which were split by Western religion and philosophy. For Hegel, the values that guide and give meaning to action originate entirely within historical experience. Rejecting transcendental views of such values and the consequent epistemological dualism between “subject” and “object,” Hegel argued that we are the authors of our world – as historical beings, we negate existing conditions, create new ones, and make ourselves in the process. However, he held that our self-creation is “estranged,” because we see our own “objectifications,” or ideas and creations, as alien, external objects and, thus, forfeit our agency. Yet, in the long run, he argued, we gradually overcome this alienation by coming to terms with historical experience’s contradictory facets through heightened self-consciousness, struggle, and

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labor. Hegel’s argument about “masters and slaves” was especially important for Marx. Hegel held that masters seek self-recognition by dominating slaves, but languish in the contradiction that coerced recognition from an unfree person is worthless. By contrast to the master’s falsity and inactivity, Hegel contended, slaves grow wiser and stronger through their struggles and labor and ultimately triumph over the master. Through such striving, he believed, humanity eventually will discover its authorship of the world and will be unleashed to create an emancipated condition of “Absolute Spirit,” or a state of total freedom and rationality, in which we make ourselves and our world according to our will and in a manner that each individual’s particularity and worth will be recognized actively by all others (Hegel 1807). Marx substituted historical productive practices, ruling classes and direct producers, and exploited labor for Hegel’s Spirit, metaphorical masters and slaves, and highly-generalized estranged objectification. However, Hegel’s idea of self-constitutive labor remained at the center of Marx’s thought. At the very moment of his break with Hegelianism, he argued that socialist humanity and world history are “nothing but the creation of man through human labor” (Marx 1844: 305, 332–3). Marx also called for a Hegelian-like “determinate negation” that preserves capitalism’s progressive facets (i.e., capacities to produce “real wealth” and a freer, more just society) and that fashions them into a new socialist world of genuine freedom and rationality. He wanted to turn capitalist legitimations, or modern democratic claims about freedom and rationality, against the reality of bourgeois inequality and exploitation and to pit what he saw as progressive facets of capitalist production against its backward features. In this way, he aimed to justify his critical standpoint toward capitalism on contestable historical grounds, rather than on the basis of dogmatic, irrefutable “Truths” of tradition, religion, and philosophy. Reframing Hegel’s method of immanent critique, Marx sought to anchor his theory in specific historical conditions rather than in abstract philosophical claims about humanity’s historicist nature. This move began the broader tradition of critical theory, which aims to root normative critique in knowledge about existent and nascent historical contradictions, social movements, and developmental directions of society. Although shifting from speculative philosophy to sociological materialism, Marx retained a strong Hegelian residue that is visible in his emancipatory arguments, efforts to link theory and practice, and attempts to frame empirical questions and inquiries. However, this core aspect of his thought and of later Marxism also is the source of distinct, often strong tensions between the tradition’s sociological and political sides.

Partnership with Engels: the materialist move In the mid- and late 1840s, Marx framed the analytical basis of his later theoretical program. Responding to early capitalist industrialization and creation of a heavily exploited, impoverished working class, young-Hegelians Moses Hess and Friedrich Engels became communists and shifted their focus from philosophical issues to economic inequality. Engels’ study of the English working class (1845) was an especially important work. Marx also addressed ever more intently capitalist economic inequality. Engels became his lifelong collaborator. Engels understated his role in the partnership, but he contributed substantially to their joint project through his theoretical and historical work and through the critical, editorial assistance that he gave

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to Marx. Also, he financially supported the spendthrift Marx and his family. With Engels’ help, Marx broke with Hegelian philosophy and developed a materialist approach to history. Political upheavals were an immediate stimulus to Marx during this period, but accelerating and spreading capitalist development became more and more his chief concern. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx shifted from Hegel’s philosophical historicism to a materialist theory of social development and critique of the capitalist “mode of production.” This unfinished work transformed Hegel’s abstract idea of estranged objectification into a model that advocated historically specific analysis of humanity’s productive, or creative, powers, and employed it to illuminate capitalism’s distinct form of estranged or alienated labor. Moreover, Marx began to formulate his views on class, class struggle, proletarian revolution, and abolition of private productive property. He saw the capitalist division of labor’s fusion of repressive class hierarchy with progressive productive forces to be a fundamental contradiction. In his view, capitalist development and property relations “fetter,” or sharply limit, social progress in the same stroke that they advance it. Marx held that we are social beings and that modernity’s “economic” transformation and problems have a “social character” (i.e., even liberal individualism and private property arise from capitalism’s social matrix). He held that overcoming capitalism’s limitations and injustices calls for a radical social transformation that engages directly the regime’s contradictory features and deploys its socio-cultural resources to realize its determinate potentials (1844: 298–9, 317–22). After expulsion from turbulent Paris in 1845, Marx’s decisive break from philosophy came in his unfinished collaborative effort with Engels, The German Ideology. They claimed to turn the Hegelian primacy of ideas and passive view of the material domain “right-side up.” This text articulated much more explicitly the bases for their later views of capitalism and proletarian revolution. This collaboration consolidated the partnership between Marx and Engels, and their ties to Moses Hess faded. Marx considered this work to be the start of their mature program. He also became engaged with communist organizations at this time (Marx & Engels 1845–6; Seigel 1993: 177, 181). Marx and Engels established “mode of production” and “class” as the fundamental analytical categories of their materialist method and as the conceptual keys to understanding capitalism. They argued that ruling-class extraction of surpluses from direct producers is decisive in shaping society as a whole, and their materialist method focuses especially on analysis of the extractive relations between different historical forms of ruling and producing classes. They also held that “large-scale industry” was enlisting the aid of “natural science” in production and was rapidly overturning the traditional world and creating a new global, capitalist order. They contended that capitalist factories, markets, and class relations supplanted traditional forms of production, social ties, and hierarchies and replaced local autonomy and particularity with centralized interdependence and homogeneity. In their view, the emergent form of capitalist big industry was creating “world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilized nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations” (Marx & Engels 1845–6: 73). The themes of large-scale industry, scientific production methods, and globalization became core foci of Marx’s much later Capital.

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Engaging political economy even more directly, Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy (1847) provided an early published version of this new materialist point of view and critique of capitalism. Marx and Engels’ famous political pamphlet Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) probed similar modernizing themes dramatically and eloquently. Originally the party platform of the “Communist League,” it became the political catechism for later communism. Circulated throughout the world by communist parties, revolutionary insurgencies, and labor movements, the Manifesto is probably the most widely read of Marx’s and Engels’ works and the one that has had the most political and social impact. Writing when the 1848 revolutions were sweeping across Europe (i.e., struggles for liberal democracy and formal rights), Marx and Engels hoped that the capitalist class would soon smash the remains of the old order and old elites, attain political power, and create global capitalism and worldwide liberal democracy, which they saw as the stage for proletarian revolution. Marx and Engels expressed their materialism lucidly and succinctly, applied it to capitalism, and located it vis-à-vis competing socialist and anti-capitalist positions. Their immanent critique pointed to capitalism’s nascent crises and revolutionary tendencies and outlined steps of a future communist transition. They held that capitalism’s newly created “colossal” productive forces were greater than those of all previous humanity and began a new age of exceptionally extensive global networks of social cooperation, or “universal interdependence.” Speaking as if their critique and political proposals were merely giving voice to intensifying historical contradictions and mounting opposition to capitalism, they argued that cut-throat economic competition drives the bourgeoisie to constantly revolutionize the productive forces, radically and untiringly transform society and culture, and create a worldwide proletariat that is destined to overthrow them and capitalism. Marx and Engels asserted that the entirety of traditional society’s “fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices,” were being “swept away” and “all new-formed ones” were becoming “antiquated before they can ossify.” Regardless of unparalleled material progress, they saw capitalism to be “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world … called up by his spells.” They were optimistic, however, that after “all that is solid melts into air,” people will come to their “sober senses.” Seeing things clearly, they argued, proletarians, especially their communist leadership, will distinguish the progressive from the reactionary facets of capitalism, assert their self-conscious collective agency and rational planning capacities, and thereby provide history a rational, emancipatory direction destined to culminate in a long communist transition and, eventually, a permanent emancipated terminus (Marx & Engels 1848: 487–9). The most decisive context for Marx’s future work was the Second Industrial Revolution, or the rise of mechanized production, large firms, mass labor unions, the interventionist state, modern urbanism, and the world market. Although these changes were barely getting underway in the late 1840s, he already detected an emergent profound alteration of everyday life caused by “large-scale capitalism,” which he inscribed later under the sign of “modern industry.” Marx was the first modern social theorist to address capitalist social change so radical and extensive that it promised to overturn nearly all accustomed modes of experience, identity, association, and organization. The first section of the Manifesto is still perhaps the

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most powerful representation of this sensibility by a social theorist. The consequent crisis of representation subverted the old ways of thinking and acting, and called forth new secular approaches to the emergent social world. Modern social theory was a key part of the fabric of a nascent distinctly modern world view. Later in the century, other modern theorists addressed the epochal rupture with the past by pitting the modern against the traditional. They wrote their major works when the Second Industrial Revolution spread beyond Great Britain and reached its height. Operating in Marx’s wake, they often criticized, tacitly, or overtly, his arguments about capitalism and modernity.

Marx’s mature project: the critique of capitalism Expelled from Belgium in 1848, Marx was invited back to France, and then went to Germany as editor of the radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung. When politics shifted rightward in 1849 after the defeat of the democratic forces, he was expelled from Germany with a passport good only for Paris. Because the new, reactionary French regime restricted him to Brittany, he fled to London. Living the rest of his life in the belly of the beast, the great critic of capitalism experienced directly the modern rupture in the birthplace of liberal individualism and the first nation to undergo the Second Industrial Revolution. The leading capitalist country, Great Britain was already experiencing sweeping changes that came later in the nineteenth century or in the early twentieth century in other parts of Europe and North America. Marx was active in working-class movements when the opportunity arose and he was receptive; he led the First International (1864–72). However, at times, when prospects for change looked dim, he withdrew from a direct role in politics. Although continuing his journalism, he and his family depended on generous financial support from Engels. Marx fathered eight children; four died before adolescence. He and the family maid had a son, who was given to foster parents and kept secret. Marx was generally an attentive, loving father, very supportive of his three daughters’ intellectual and cultural development. The Marx family apparently was closely knit and warm. Residing first in a poor neighborhood of London, they later moved to a middle-class area and lifestyle. However, Marx suffered from his children’s deaths, and from recurrent, painful, and probably work-related health problems (i.e., vision, stomach, liver, lungs, inflammations, headaches, boils). Although he left an enormous corpus of collected works, he was tormented by his inability to finish projects, especially his magnum opus, Capital. Also, he regretted his trouble with creditors, financial dependency, and the privation and humiliation that these problems caused his family. In a letter to Engels, he lamented, at 50 years old, that he was “still a pauper,” recalling his mother’s earlier admonition that he should have “made capital” instead of merely writing about it (Marx 1868: 25; McLellan 1973: 189–225; Seigel 1993: 195–9, 253–89, 375–87). Although reactionary forces held sway in Europe by mid-century, Marx at first remained optimistic that the bourgeois revolution would succeed on the Continent and that England’s liberal democracy, powerful bourgeoisie, and highly developed working class would soon sweep away all the precapitalist detritus and barriers to proletarian revolution. In 1850, Marx and Engels declared that a “new revolution can no longer be very far away” (Marx & Engels 1850b: 377). But Marx’s Class

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Struggles in France (1850) reported counter-revolutionary paralysis and internecine class and subclass conflict; a pessimistic tone replaced his revolutionary hopefulness (Marx 1850: 71–145). Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852a) was even more pessimistic. At the start of this scalding report on the rise of the second Napoleonic dictatorship, Marx recalled Hegel’s point that major historical “facts and personages” happen twice, stating that he “forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Marx’s opening paragraphs, among the most beautifully written and circumspect in all of his corpus, declared that we do not make our history of our own accord, or “just as we please”; rather, The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seemed engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battles-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.

After the “revolution,” Marx held, the French state returned “to its oldest form” based on “the shamelessly simple domination of the sabre and the cowl” (1852a: 103–4, 106). In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx reported how Louis Bonaparte became dictator, aided by the Parisian Lumpenproletariat, or underclass mob of easily bribed riffraff. In his view, the new regime echoed previous absolutism, but concentrated power much more totally and effectively, sweeping both bourgeoisie and proletariat from center stage. Anticipating facets of Max Weber’s famous argument about bureaucratization, Marx held that the earlier parliamentary democracy’s efficient, modernized, centralized, and rationalized bureaucracy was an ideal means for carrying out a coup d’état and usurping total power. He blamed the bourgeoisie for creating the conditions of their own demise; their manifestly selfish, one-sided pursuit of short-term, material interest had opened the way for creation of a Frankenstein’s monster, or total state, that appeared to be “completely independent” of the material base and bourgeois “ruling class.” Arguing that “state power” could not really be “suspended in mid air,” Marx contended that “the dictatorship represented the class interests of small-holding peasantry” (who voted heavily for Louis Napoleon before he ended the democracy). Marx considered the peasantry to be the most backward stratum in French society, living in what he called “stupefied seclusion,” isolated by their feudal productive forces (small-plot agriculture) and backward culture. Although still claiming that proletarianization and commodification of rural life would eventually undermine the new regime, the Brumaire reversed the Manifesto’s characteristic, modernist vision of progress and illustrated dramatically that capitalism’s supposed modernizing and rationalizing locomotive could lead to unexpected, dangerous fusions of modernity and tradition rather than to socialism’s promised land of freedom and rationality. Marx portrayed the French dictatorship as modernity morphing into a new nightmare barbarism that lacks a visible escape route (1852a: 147–51, 181–97). The Frankfurt School, which carried on and revised the Marxian tradition of critical theory, expressed similar pessimism a century later, reeling from the

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Holocaust and the Fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist dictatorships, which the Brumaire scenario portended. Engels also provided a highly pessimistic report about the complete failure of the bourgeois revolution in Germany, which he attributed to the nation’s backward class structure. He argued that the bourgeoisie were defeated more decisively in Germany than anywhere else in Europe and that the dissolution of the provincial and national assemblies and restoration of aristocratic power constituted the death of political liberalism in that nation. Rather than decisive bourgeois hegemony and liberal democracy on the Continent, he argued, the revolutions of 1848 stirred counterrevolution that forged new configurations of aristocratic and capitalist power. Engels held that Germany lacked the staging conditions for a class-conscious, revolutionary proletariat. Moreover, Marx observed that Britain’s economic growth and prosperity was creating “political indifference,” neutralizing progressive possibilities of its highly developed bourgeois institutions and advanced working class, and generating a conservative drift away from progressive democracy (Engels 1851–2: 5–13, 91–6; Marx 1852b, 1852c). This depoliticizing impact of affluence was later a major factor in the decline of socialist parties and labor-centered, Left politics in the rich European social democracies of the later twentieth century. Marx stuck to his materialist agenda, but he was no longer confident about capitalist modernization bringing us to our senses and making capitalism transparent, or open to straightforward empirical observation. In the Brumaire, he spoke about the Napoleonic regime’s “superficial appearance,” or state autonomy, as a veil covering the underlying reality of continued capitalist domination in everyday affairs. This idea of the blinding, fettering effects of ideological illusion, or alienation, can be found in his earlier work, but now he held that immanent critique must dig much more deeply and theoretically to grasp the factors that shape capitalism’s highly distorted socio-political surface (1852a: 127–8). As Seigel argues, the 1850s reversals caused Marx to doubt his former belief that “empirical experience” provides direct access to the “real truth” (Seigel 1993: 362; see also 193–216). This effort to distinguish surface from depth was later made much more complex and problematic by increased cultural differentiation and suffusion of mass media and mass propaganda, leading certain twentieth-century critical theorists and post-Marxists to speak of a “one-dimensional,” or “simulated,” world experienced exclusively as surface, blurring ideology and reality and immobilizing immanent critique. In the early 1850s, Marx studied economics intensively, but it was not until 1857, spurred by an international economic crisis and rekindled revolutionary hopes, that he began to formulate his later theory of capitalism in the posthumously published Grundrisse (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [1857–8a, 1857–8b], his unpublished outline for his later masterwork Capital), and in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859a). Stressing culture’s alienated ideological surface obscuring social relations, he declared that the “semblance of simplicity disappears in more advanced relations of production” (1859a: 275). He held that everyday experiences of the “economy” and “money” are hidden by a fundamental “mystification”; commodity exchange is treated as an independent realm of “things” rather than “a social relation of production.” Although “monetary crises” draw out “immanent” contradictions of capitalism, Marx argued, the money form’s illusory independence from social life “shrouds” these tensions, or manifests them in an

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indirect, distorted way. He said that “in the process of exchange, as it appears on the surface of bourgeois society, each gives only while taking, and takes only while giving.” However, he asserted that such exchange depends on “having,” or ownership. He claimed that the reigning concept of exchange ignores the question of how entrepreneurs attain the products of labor that they trade and earn a profit from in capitalist markets. In his view, the role of capitalist property and class inequalities and consequent bourgeois methods of appropriation are hidden by the ideological view of capital circulation as “free” and “equal” exchange. Marx contended that the systematically unequal exchange between capitalists and workers (i.e., wages for labor power) is the most profoundly mystified social relation and most pivotal to capitalist accumulation. His critique of everyday economic categories and bourgeois political economy aimed to demystify capitalism and make its modes of appropriation, or exploitation, visible. Marx’s “labor theory of value” held that the apparent relations between things (i.e., commodity prices) are shaped by expropriated labor time and unequal relations between people. He held that capitalists’ profits originate from their not paying workers the full value of their labor and that this “exchange” gives capitalist society a distinctive shape (1859a: 275–6, 289; 1859b: 433, 462). In his view, wage labor is the distinct capitalist form of the exploitative, extractive relation between ruling classes and direct producers that he stressed in his materialist theory of history and that he argued exerts decisive influence on overall socio-cultural development in all class societies. The first volume of Capital (1867a) appeared about a decade after Marx began his major effort to theorize capitalist political economy. He planned originally to complete six books (several of these were to include multiple volumes) of his magnum opus. Although writing thousands of pages of text and filling many notebooks for the broader study, he never finished it. After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels edited and assembled the two unfinished core volumes (Marx 1885, 1894). Karl Kautsky later edited the three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value (1905–10), Marx’s critical history of economic thought. Various thinkers have speculated about the reasons that Marx did not complete his masterwork. Engels held that his various bouts of ill health and political activism slowed the project. He also thought that Marx’s tendency to leave theoretical work to the late night and dim candlelight limited his output (his daytime hours were often occupied with journalistic, polemical and letter writing and with family activities). Seigel speculates that Marx was slowed by unresolved tensions between his Hegelian residue and his materialism, reservations about core aspects of his theory, and psychological problems rooted in his childhood experiences (Engels 1885: 1–5; Seigel 1993: 329–92). An obvious complicating factor was Marx’s dogged pursuit of an enormously complex project. Engels described how his “incessant study” and “unparalleled conscientiousness and strict self-criticism” led him to constantly broaden his project’s scope and search for ever more historical evidence (1885: 6). Marx’s effort to develop his theory fully, or to find capitalist development’s elusive, hidden, beneath the distorted surface “truth,” was more important to him than publication. Certain other first-generation modern theorists (e.g., Max Weber and George Herbert Mead) also demonstrated this type of intense commitment to the development of theory and tendency to leave major bodies of unfinished work to be published posthumously. Aiming to provide an empirical-historical alternative to religion’s received truths

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and the intuitive truths of philosophy, these theorists saw the establishment of their new method of knowledge creation to be a rocky and uncertain road that required enormous effort to attain the desired results. Their new social or cultural “science” was in infancy, but they believed that their efforts could yield major “discoveries” and exert decisive impacts on public life. Thus, they dedicated their lives to their theoretical practices. The material and cultural climate of today’s professionallyspecialized, academic theory circles is a very different terrain. “Doing theory” is now often equated with writing and entwined complexly with attaining tenure, prestige, and overall career advancement and security. Unpublished work usually is considered to be stillborn, or a dead letter. Few contemporary social theorists believe that they will “discover” ideas that will transform public life. Although earlier modern theorists’ sunny ideas of “science” and “truth” are often seen as passé or misguided, their theoretical practices should be read in the context of their very different institutional settings and ethical and social meanings. Reflection on these matters might provide insight into some of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of contemporary theory.

MARX’S SOCIAL THEORY Beyond liberal individualism: cooperation’s sui generis social powers Adam Smith is one of the most important roots of the liberal individualism criticized by Marx. Smith wrote before the Second Industrial Revolution and modern industry; his emphases on individualism and markets were pitched against the powerful monarchy and mercantile state. Opening the Wealth of Nations (1776), he illustrated his concept of the “division of labor” with his famous pinmaker example: a single worker, carrying out all steps of production alone, would be hard pressed to make 20 pins, or possibly even one pin, a day, while 10 specialized producers, working together, could produce 48,000 a day, or about 4,800 each. He implied that the division of labor increases productivity geometrically (i.e., specialization qualitatively enhances productive capacities), but he did not dwell on complex social cooperation in production. Rather, he stressed changes in the realm of exchange, or the market, as the prime source of productive advances and overall modern social progress. He held that the division of labor arises in an unplanned, unintentional manner, animated by individualistic human nature, or the universal “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” and the “natural” inclination of the individual to pursue his or her “interest.” In his view, competitive capitalist markets unleash people’s heretofore repressed self-interest, generating an ever more dynamic, efficient, abundant division of labor and a freer, more rational society. Smith claimed that competitive individualism generates spontaneous association and that capitalist markets produce, unintendedly, social harmony. He warned that this “invisible hand” depends on free markets, liberated from extensive state regulation (Smith 1776: 3–5, 13–17, 420–5). Paralleling Smith, Marx held that 12 cooperating masons accomplish much more than one mason working alone for the same number of hours. However, he argued that this difference derives from “the creation of a new power, namely, the collective

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power of the masses.” Describing the cooperating masons as being “omnipresent” and having “hands and eyes before and behind,” Marx implied that cooperative activity gives rise to new capacities that transcend the individual’s capacities. He also illustrated the point with a military metaphor: Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry … is essentially different from the sum of the offensive … powers of the individual cavalry … taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when many hands take part simultaneously by one and the same undivided operation, such as raising a heavy weight, turning a winch, or removing an obstacle. (Marx 1867a: 330–1)

Although agreeing that expanding markets stimulate growth and refinement of the division of labor, Marx’s view of the process differs sharply from that of Smith. Marx saw the modern industry’s spectacular productive advances to derive from its quantitative and qualitative expansion of cooperation and, thereby, much enhanced, irreducible, or sui generis, social powers. He saw the production of scientific and technical knowledge to arise from just such cooperation. Marx held that these social powers already existed in a formative state in early producers’ “simple cooperation” at the dawn of society (e.g., joint hunting and gathering), many millennia before markets. However, he argued that development of productive forces and related differentiation of the division of labor, which make cooperation wider and more complex, progressively enhance these powers. By contrast to Smith’s claims about the primacy of the individual, Marx believed that social cooperation is the most fundamental facet of human nature. He held that even “mere social contact” and consequent “emulation” and “stimulation” enhance individual powers, while active cooperation overcomes the “fetters of … individuality” and harnesses the “capabilities of the species.” In his view, capitalists created a new ultra-powerful “combined organism” based on much more extensive, elaborately organized cooperation. He saw the factory to depend on deliberate central planning, which he believed ought to be extended to other institutions and to the overall societal division of labor. Marx rejected the idea that modern specialized labor can be organized effectively only under capitalism, or even that it could be developed humanely and fully on that basis. He argued that capitalists separated the individual producer from his or her means of production, concentrated the appropriated productive forces in their own hands, demolished traditional forms of independent production, and imposed new types of complex, social cooperation by coercive, exploitative methods. Although the consequent “socialization,” or much increased mutual interdependence, greatly advanced social productive powers, Marx held, capitalists deploy these enhanced capacities for their private ends. Rather than the spontaneous harmony predicted by Smith, Marx claimed that the capitalist’s unrestrained pursuit of private interest in unregulated markets generates a profound tension between the individual and community, incurs great social costs, and leads to continuous and sometimes intense social conflicts. As Engels said, this “contradiction” appears as the fundamental “antagonism” between bourgeoisie and proletariat (Engels 1892: 311; Marx 1867a: 326–41, 359–62).

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Marx held that the human being is “at all events a social animal,” an “ensemble of social relations,” or product of “definite” social relationships. He argued that “sheep-like or tribal consciousness” dominated all early human groupings and that individualism is a much later social product, arising with more advanced forms of production and their complex patterns of association, cooperation, and linguistic interchange (Marx 1845: 4; 1867a: 331; Marx & Engels 1845–6: 43–5). Marx saw modern claims about an “inherent” split between the individual and society to manifest capitalism’s primary contradiction between private productive property, monopolized by the rich, and complex social cooperation, imposed on the working classes. He held that liberal individualism, naturalized and universalized as unchangeable human nature, is an ideological concept that reifies and hardens capitalism’s highly unequal division of wealth and burdens. By contrast, Marx thought that capitalism’s greatly increased productivity and material wealth derive from social forces that could be employed to reduce sharply the unnecessary misery and injustice that have heretofore accompanied capitalist development. He saw capitalist production’s cooperative facets as the matrix for a richer, freer social individuality attuned to mutual social responsibilities and to the collective benefits of a deliberately planned, socially just distribution of tasks and resources. Marx implied that such individuality was already emergent among proletarians and that their consequent, collective agency would someday end the state of alienation and forge an emancipated, postcapitalist order of associated producers.

Marx’s theory of history: sociological materialism “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history,” Engels declared after Marx’s funeral (1883: 467). He was speaking of Marx’s “historical materialism,” which for reasons explained in the last section I prefer to call sociological materialism. Engels helped Marx frame this approach in their early collaboration and continued to help refine it afterwards. For simplicity’s sake, I refer mostly to Marx alone, but readers should keep in mind Engels’ contributions. In Darwinian style, Marx wanted to specify, scale down, and make more precise earlier ideas of social science and social knowledge, which he believed spoke too generally about “Man” and paid insufficient attention to the actual collective practices and variations of historical peoples. He aimed to formulate general principles parallel to Darwinian theory, which would spur inquiry about the formative forces that shape distinctive features of specific societies and overall social development. With varying success, other early modern social theorists made similar moves stressing increased historical specificity. They aspired to go beyond Enlightenment philosophy’s schematic “science of man,” which made grand gestures about “Reason” and transcendence of superstition, but failed to generate much systematic inquiry or add much to knowledge about socio-cultural development. Marx retained facets of Hegelian historicism, but rejected its spiritual idiom, which he contended manifested taints of religion and metaphysics and thus stopped short of a “scientific” method. Although crediting classical economists’ emphasis on the importance of material conditions, he attacked their abstract, individualistic ideas of human nature and relative inattention to historical cooperative practices. Marx wanted to transcend dialectically Hegelianism and bourgeois political

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economy, retaining some of their important innovations, yet breaking with many facets of their arguments, and creating a new materialism that could illuminate historical social life. Marx and Engels (1845–6: 37) asserted that “it is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.” Like Darwin, they stressed the fundamental centrality of material activities and struggles. In particular, they held that a genuine social science would engage the uniquely creative and diverse ways that human groups produce for their basic animal needs and, in the process, give rise to new exclusively human needs and capacities and distinct patterns of social development, or history. They argued that history, or culture, began when prehistorical humanity fashioned its earliest tools and that their refinement is a decisive formative force in cultural development. However, friends and foes, alike, have often interpreted Marx’s and Engels’ materialism to mean reductionist determination of social life by narrowly conceived technical and economic practices and conditions. Responding to critics and vulgar interpreters, Engels asserted, after Marx’s death, that “the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I ever asserted” (Engels 1890b: 397–8). Marx’s and Engels’ social materialism focuses on “human society” or “social humanity.” However, they considered the “historical life-process” to be “twofold,” or “natural” as well as “social”; our biophysical needs link us to nature, but the ways and means by which we meet them are mediated and structured socially (i.e., by historically variable forms of cooperation, organization, language, ideas, and customs fashioned to fit changing environmental contexts). By contrast to other animal species’ material practices, they argued, humanity’s mindful social labor advances in the long run, frees us from our original, total subservience to nature, and makes possible liberation from our “second nature,” or domination of person by person (Marx & Engels 1845–6: 31–2, 36–75, 41–5; Marx 1845: 5). Marx did not elevate material practices above cultural practices, as many critics argue. Rather, he implied that human groupings attain a relative autonomy from unmediated nature as their productive progress reduces the proportion of their labor time devoted to direct subsistence activity and increases that expended in socio-cultural production. He held that it is precisely our productive practices’ socio-cultural nature and consequent historical development and variation that distinguishes human societies from other animal groupings. However, he objected to the ideological separation of culture from the material realm and the consequent concealment of the importance of material practices. He understood that humanity, regardless of its distinctive creative powers, was still part of nature and dependent on it. Marx hoped that, in the long run, people could be freed from drudgery and nurture higher, more distinctively human, cultural wants and practices. He dreamed of a time when ordinary people could focus on art and science and cultivation of their “individualities” (Marx 1857–8b: 91). Marx stressed “real,” “active,” or “definite individuals,” entering “definite social and political relations,” producing themselves in specific ways, and, thus, acting as agents of their own history. As stated above, however, he argued that we do not create ourselves of our own accord. Rather, people operate “under definite material limits, presuppositions, and conditions independent of their will” (Marx & Engels 1845–6: 35–6; Marx 1852a: 103). Like other modern social theorists, he stressed

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that we are born into ready-made, hierarchical socio-cultural worlds, which fix our ideas and actions in innumerable ways. However, Marx saw class to be the most pervasive source of this systematic social constraint. In his view, a class is an aggregate of people who share a common social location in a society’s system of extraction and property relations and, consequently, experience common material limits and possibilities for their individual development. Marx and Engels contended that class has an “independent existence as against individuals” – it determines many of the conditions under which we make ourselves, regardless of our conscious identity, will, or effort (Marx & Engels 1845–6: 77–9). For example, under feudalism, peasant producers were tied by law to their plots and to endless toil, while lords ruled by military means and appropriated peasant surpluses. The class relation between lord and peasant reproduced, generation after generation, distinct types of superordinate and subordinate social beings. The vast majority of these individuals were born into these class positions, and could not imagine alternatives or choose roles freely, especially those that did not mesh with their parents’ class location. Such class relations did not preclude individual differences or unexpected individual moves (e.g., peasants who fled to towns or squires who joined the clergy). Notwithstanding, Marx thought that class establishes definite, unavoidable socio-cultural limits and opportunities for individuals and incurs substantial hardships, risks, and costs for those striving to escape their location. The distinct “structural” thrust of his sui generis idea of class stresses pervasive socio-material conditioning of individual and collective lives. Marx held that as soon as a society’s productive powers are advanced to a level where surpluses are large enough to free a significant portion of the adult populace from labor, a class split arises between ruling classes, who govern politically and culturally, and direct producers, whose labor activates the productive forces. This is the most fundamental social relationship of class societies and the central focus for Marx. He argued that ruling classes exert effective control over productive forces, subordinate direct producers, and appropriate their surpluses. Marx contended that ruling classes and direct producers vary historically, especially between societies with fundamentally different productive forces. For example, under capitalist manufacture, capitalists and wageworkers replaced the feudal manor’s lords and serfs and the medieval guild’s masters and journeymen. Seeing these two types of class location to be all-important and nearly universal sites of structural constraint, Marx argued that inquiry into their social patterning in different cultural and historical settings provides decisive insight into socio-cultural development. Although holding that major socio-cultural transformations are usually rooted in productive force changes, he saw class struggle to be the effective mobilizing force in such shifts. He contended that “class-conscious” class struggle sometimes forges new class structures, substantially reshapes the social and political orders, and can even, as in the case of capitalism, ignite epochal ruptures that transform social life in toto. However, Marx also stressed that class struggle is more often haphazard, sporadic, local, and disconnected from overt class identity and conscious collective agency (e.g., individual serfs hiding surplus or stealing from lords). Marx and Engels’ declaration that the “history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” does not mean that these battles are always readily visible, politically organized, or societally transformative (Marx & Engels 1848: 482). Rather than revolution, they saw class struggle, in most cases, to have mundane impacts that simply prevented clockwork regimentation.

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Marx thought that the development of advanced productive forces frees more and more people from subsistence labor and thus gives rise to larger and more diverse intermediate classes and more complex, multi-sided class relations. His point that, in advanced capitalist societies, “middle and intermediate strata … obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere” and deflect class consciousness made problematic his hopes for working-class solidarity and an imminent, final political showdown between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (Marx 1894: 870). He understood that diverse classes and subclasses often engage in internecine conflicts and complicated alliances. These relations are made more complex by cross-cutting, status-based, cultural splits and ties (e.g., based on ethnic, racial, gender, or religious factors), which segment and fragment classes and subclasses internally and enhance or diminish opportunities for exploitation and domination. By contrast to the Manifesto’s linear scenario of proletarian ascendance and bourgeois defeat, Marx and Engels later understood that capitalist class relations are usually far more convoluted, fluid, and hard to predict. Their lack of transparency and contingency are prime reasons why Marx and Engels thought that a materialist social science is needed to unravel them. Marx understood that productive force progress had been extremely slow or static for very long periods of time before capitalism, and had been characterized by frequent setbacks and much unevenness. However, he still argued that, in the very long run, incremental productive advances accumulate, are diffused regionally and globally, and thus progress. Consequently, Marx held that “surplus product” (i.e., that exceeding minimal subsistence) increases relative to “necessary product” (i.e., that required for minimal subsistence). He implied that the employment of higher and higher levels of “surplus labor” in socio-cultural production generates ever more technically enhanced powers of production for physical needs, higher standards of subsistence, more differentiated socio-cultural orders, and more varied, richer cultural wants and needs. As explained above, however, he held that this materially driven civilizing process has been class-based and thus has operated nearly everywhere in a highly unequal way. Ruling classes, with the assistance of allied intermediate classes, have appropriated direct producers’ labor and product and employed these resources to develop productive forces, built environments, and symbolic culture. For example, the spectacular and highly complex cultures of “great civilizations” have been based on huge divides between “mental” and “physical” labor and tyrannical ruling classes’ relentless extraction of surplus labor and surplus product from usually impoverished, brutally oppressed slaves and serfs. Marx addressed conditions that were “overlooked” by historians and philosophers – that even Athenian “democracy’s” free citizenry were a ruling minority who relied on coercive power and systematic extraction from unfree masses. In Marx’s view, material and cultural progress has been and continues to be inextricably entwined with systematic forms of class violence, coercion, and domination, or legal and cultural hegemony. According to Marx’s materialist “guiding principle,” knowledge about production and extraction is necessary to understand the fates of individuals as well as the development of social orders (Marx 1859a: 262–4). In particular, he stressed the need to study the most veiled social process: how ruling classes appropriate labor and product and ideologically obscure the process. Marx saw the historically specific ways “in which unpaid surplus labor is pumped out of direct-producers” to be the “hidden basis of the entire social structure” (Marx 1894: 777–8). He argued that

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ruling classes and their allied intermediate strata (e.g., priests, intellectuals, politicians) create ideologies that mystify this class exploitation, presenting it as a reflection of God, nature, or inherent right and making it moral, inevitable, and legal. For Marx, ideology originates from unintentional class-blinders, or people defining reality passively in accord with the limits of their unquestioned, parochial class situations, as well as from political and cultural elites’ conscious, strategic, efforts to distort reality and dominate. Marx saw his materialism as a tool to resist this ideological mystification; used properly it lays bare systematically suppressed “real bases” of society and their agents, structures, dynamics, and forms of reproduction. Marx spoke of a society, or a social formation, as being characterized by interdependence and systematic internal relations between its parts. Its primary, albeit nonexclusive, structuring factor, Marx argued, is the mode of production, which is composed of an interrelated ensemble of productive forces (i.e., natural resources, tools, labor power, technology/science, modes of cooperation), or factors that contribute directly to creation of necessary and surplus product, and property relations, or class-based social relationships that determine who has effective control over the productive forces and the disposition of necessary and surplus product and who must engage in productive labor. He considered the mode of production to be the “base,” or ultimate determinant, of social life; it is the primary locus of production and of ruling-class extraction from direct producers. However, as explained above, he saw the “material factor” to be largely a socio-cultural construct, which includes biophysical facets. Even the simplest productive forces, such as the earliest prehistorical stone tools, require application of rudimentary technical ideas, communication, and social cooperation. Overall, Marx’s materialism focuses more on social relationships oriented to material factors than on material conditions per se. Marx’s materialist analyses stress most centrally class struggles over the forms of productive property. Marx held that social formations also are composed of superstructure, which entails modes of intercourse and ideology, which do not contribute directly to the creation of necessary product or surplus product, but reproduce the conditions needed to perpetuate the mode of production. For example, Marx saw the state’s military, police, legal, and administrative arms to be primary means of perpetuating class power and the existent productive forces and property relations. However, he also argued that other types of organization and association (e.g., families, voluntary groups) control, socialize, indoctrinate, or otherwise fashion people to fit the existing mode of production. Marx sometimes spoke too sweepingly about the scope of this reproduction and other times left it vague, but he did not imply that all organizations, associations, and culture beyond the mode of production play an equally important role in the process. For example, Marx knew that, in liberal societies, counter-hegemonic labor organizations and political parties, like his own, found their way into public life. Also, he recognized that “ruling ideas” refer to the delimited areas of culture that justify the mode of production in a reasonably direct manner (e.g., leading public ideas about the economy and state). For example, his claims to distinguish depth “realities” from surface “illusions” implied that he distinguished his materialist point of view from ideology. More generally, he often had high praise for literature, art, and science, and did not reduce them to a mere reflux of class society. Marx saw certain facets of society and culture as playing a very direct role in reproduction of the mode of production and others having little to do with the

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process and thus having a relative autonomy from class structure. However, he still thought that all parts of a society and culture bear the imprint of its mode of production. For example, the specific features of today’s communication and information technologies have been shaped by many divergent factors, but, in varying degrees, neoliberal capitalism had formative impacts on them. Many new technologies were refined explicitly to address various new features and new technical needs of this regime, or new opportunities to enrich lifestyle in its interstices. The boundaries of superstructure are much more complex and problematic than Marx could have imagined in contemporary capitalism’s highly segmented class structures, differentiated organizations and associations, variegated popular cultures, and niche markets. However, the aspects of state organization and of political economic thought that Marx pointed to as key aspects of superstructure are still easy to identify and perform similar functions today. Marx also spoke of relations of correspondence, which facilitate the reproduction of a mode of production, and relations of contradiction, which undermine this process. For example, he held that feudal laws and customs that bound serfs to lords and journeymen to masters and that forbade the free movement of peasants, unrestricted sale of property, and market competition “corresponded” to, or reproduced, the productive forces and property relations of the manor and guild. However, he argued that new capitalist forms of labor organization and technology were “fettered” by the feudal mode of production and its complex of laws and customs. The technical and socio-cultural contradictions intensified class conflicts and led eventually to political conflict between the bourgeoisie and the feudal aristocracy and guild masters. The victorious bourgeoisie captured the state, and forced, or promoted, the creation of political, legal, and socio-cultural forms that “corresponded” to, and helped develop, the emergent capitalist mode of production. Marx saw class struggle to be an immediate “motor” of change, but he argued that major shifts of productive forces are the “ultimate causal agent” of fundamental transformations of modes of production and overall social formations. For example, Marx stated, The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.… At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or … with the property relations.… From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. (1859a: 263)

The issue of the “primacy” of the material factor, or its status as the “ultimate determining” force, has been one of the most enduring and intense topics of Marxist debate and of anti-Marxist criticism. However, Marx was somewhat ambiguous about the topic. Like Adam Smith and other early economists, his moderate materialist view implied that overall socio-cultural development depends on the level of material production and types of appropriation. For example, from this standpoint, today’s popular culture could not be grasped adequately without reference to advanced capitalism’s vast productive powers, global division of labor, new

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communications technologies, and highly differentiated and polarized class structure. Today, Marx’s argument that epochal transitions are rooted in fundamental qualitative transformations of production is a relatively uncontroversial position, embraced by many non-Marxist anthropologists and comparative sociologists (who stress sweeping innovations of production methods in their discussions of the shifts between hunting and gathering, horticultural, agricultural, and industrial societies). However, Marx usually qualified that such changes were mediated by class struggles and other socio-cultural factors, which made their adoption uneven and contingent. Also, he did not argue that all substantial social change must originate in a shift in productive forces. His view of the relation of culture to physical nature is complex, because he saw the “material” realm to be social as well as natural. For example, he considered science/technology and forms of cooperation to be part of the “determining” productive forces, and these socio-cultural elements also depend on, and are embedded in, a social formation’s overall culture system. Thus, causality is a complicated matter in Marx’s moderate materialism. The claim that capitalism “determines” culture’s overall complexity and the quality, quantity, and diversity of its goods does not deny that the goods have relative autonomy from the economy, or that they are shaped by a multiplicity of causes. Marx’s moderate materialism treats the mode of production as a matrix that sets material limits and exerts a general influence, but it does not reduce politics and culture to epiphenomena. However, Marx also suggested at times a totalizing materialism. For example, he asserted that “social relations are very closely bound to productive forces” and that specific technological innovations alter all social relations (e.g., “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist”). He also declared that a social formation is never “destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society” (Marx 1847: 166; 1859a: 263). This totalizing approach also appears in his claims about the “inevitability” of certain tendencies of capitalist development and of proletarian victory and communism. Such points imply that politics and culture are mere “reflections” of material dynamics. “Scientific,” “mechanical,” or “orthodox” Marxists have often emphasized the more totalizing position, while “critical,” “Western,” or “cultural” Marxists have usually stressed the moderate approach. By contrast, late twentieth-century cultural theorists, who attributed politics and culture sweeping, or even total, autonomy from material conditions, usually portrayed Marx exclusively as a totalizer, and, on that basis, scathingly rejected his ideas in toto. Although rigidly determinist passages exist in Marx’s texts, he suggested much more often a complex, historically contingent materialism, which is not reducible to the totalizing position’s “technological determinism” (i.e., social change arises only from technical change) or to “reflection theory” (i.e., ideas are mere emanations of physical reality). He frequently pointed to changes arising from diverse sources (e.g., cultural and political as well as material), which can either heighten or deflect class struggles. After Marx’s death, Engels criticized the totalizing materialism of younger Marxists. Although admitting that heated debates with opponents led Marx and him to sometimes overstate rhetorically “the economic side,” he insisted that they intended to create “above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the

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manner of the Hegelian.” Embracing a moderate view of material primacy, he held that the various facets of culture and society exert their own effects. He insisted that he and Marx always believed that “history must be studied afresh,” different societies must be “examined individually,” and the relations between the various conditions are contingent and cannot be deduced in advance (Engels 1890a: 396; 1890b). Later Marxist splits over determinism have been primarily between positions that provide warrants about “inevitable” change or indubitable historical truths and approaches that employ it as a heuristic principle pointing to likely sources of tension, conflict, and change and to distinctive types of questions about contingent historical processes. However, as Engels implied, Marx treated materialism primarily as a heuristic device that poses foci, problems, and issues for a distinctly Marxist sociology and to enrich political savvy. Even in the most complex premodern civilizations, productive forces usually have developed incrementally over many hundreds or even many thousands of years, and major innovations have tended to diffuse very slowly, if at all, between different regions. By contrast, as Marx and Engels argued rightly in the Manifesto, modern capitalism generated, with lightning speed, a nascent world market, a global division of labor, and a greater variety and number of powerful productive forces than all preceding civilizations put together. Marx’s materialism bears the marks of this peculiar time and his approach is perhaps best understood as an effort to come to terms with this unique, new capitalist world, rather than with history as a whole. The primacy that he gave to material factors arose from his experience of the radical changes wrought by the revolution in productive forces, which, as at no previous time, advanced sweepingly and altered everyday life profoundly. Max Weber (1904–5: 181) later held that capitalist productive conditions “determine the lives of all the individuals born into this mechanism … with irresistible force,” and will likely continue to do so “until the last ton of fossilized coal is burned.” Late twentiethcentury and early twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalism made capital accumulation the measure of nearly everything, vastly increased the pace and intensity of material and socio-cultural change, and, arguably, gave rise to a more narrowly economic, exactly calculated, and global form of material determination than even Marx could have imagined. We still live in the wake of the world-historical transformation that he analyzed – capitalism’s dominant classes, revolutionary productive forces, and characteristic problems are ongoing. Thus, his materialist framework is today a valuable and provocative heuristic that poses questions too often ignored. Though framed in the capitalist context, it is also a useful optic to help analyze the distant past.

Marx’s theory of capitalism: labor, value, and extraction Along with sociological materialism, Marx’s theory of capitalism is a major contribution to modern social theory. He held that the core materialist dynamic of all previous class societies is still operative – capitalist development is animated by the appropriation of unpaid labor and product and by class struggle over this extractive process. By contrast to most contemporary economists’ view that market competition, supply and demand, entrepreneurship, and consumer choice are decisive, Marx stressed capitalism’s complex fusion of powerful, new productive forces with top-down,

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precisely planned, complex social cooperation and systematic, exactly-calculable methods of extraction. But he emphasized most strongly the relationship between the historically-specific ruling class and the class of direct producers – capitalists and wageworkers (or bourgeoisie and proletariat). He saw the consequent extractive process to be the secret of capitalism’s unparalleled economic growth and ultimate source of the epochal modern rupture. Marx’s conception of capitalism as a “social formation” opposed liberal individualism’s dissolution of the social world into an aggregate of competing, calculating, trading monads. He believed that bourgeois ideology’s emphases on competitive market relations, individual interest, and individual economic success conceal the fecundity of the labor process’s complex cooperation and the exploitative social relations between capitalists and workers. Marx contended that “the specific social character of each producer’s labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange” and that even there it appears in the distorted form of monetary relations between commodities, or as “a relation between things.” Capitalism’s unique, exceptionally extensive, highly impersonal forms of cooperation and extraction are invisible to average people (Marx 1867a: 83–4). Marx employed the word “social” repeatedly, stressing emphatically that the economy is a product of culturally mediated, collective labor practices that can be redirected by class-conscious, collective agency. He rejected the bourgeois view that capital is a “mysterious and self-creating source of interest” (1894: 388–90). He thought that this mystified viewpoint that capital is the self-contained motor of economic growth typified the reigning, gravely distorted commonsense view of capitalism’s commercial surface. Marx referred to this type of estrangement as the fetishism of commodities – markets, prices, and commodities appear to be “independent beings,” with their own extrahuman motions and interrelations, or to be detached from socially organized production and extraction. This idea of fetishism has roots in Marx’s youthful, Left-Hegelian critique of religiously rooted alienation, but in his later work he referred specifically to capitalist mystification, or the collective hallucination that posits finance and investment to be autonomous drivers of accumulation and wagework to be based on commensurate exchange. He compared this fetishism to medieval historians’ equation of “the middle-ages with spirituality,” which hides the “secret history … of its landed property.” In Capital, Marx declared that under capitalism the “appearance of simplicity vanishes” and that immediately-given experience of the economy is a gravely, distorted refraction of material forces. Every commodity, he asserted, is transformed into a “social hieroglyphic,” or “secret” for us to “decipher.” Marx wanted to bring to light these ideologically shrouded, social “conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode-of-production” (1867a: 83–5, 90–4). Marx formulated the conceptual core of his general theory of capitalist development – the labor theory of value – to illuminate capitalism’s central process of class exploitation, or extractive relation, which he argued drives overall capitalist accumulation. He held that capitalism’s structure and dynamics can be brought into view only by analyzing it as a system, or “organic whole.” Just as early Copernican and Galilean science, Marx implied, his approach needed the counterintuitive “force of abstraction” to help overcome a profoundly mystified everyday reality backed by the most powerful classes and institutions. He also argued that fetishistic beliefs about the character of money have exceptionally deep roots that predate capitalism,

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carrying baggage of more than “2000 years” of ideological distortion. Although his theory of value is stated abstractly, he did not claim to capture timeless economic truths. Rather, he held that he employed rational argument to isolate the decisive facets (i.e., from secondary and accidental conditions) of an emergent capitalism that was, at the time, substantially developed only in England. He theorized historical “laws,” or the animating principles, of a nascent social formation still early in its development. Marx acknowledged, however, that those awash in capitalism’s fetishistic reality would find the theory of value hard to grasp (1867b, 1873). Marx said that capitalist wealth appears as an “immense accumulation of commodities.” Thus, he began Capital by defining the commodity. Commodities are products that meet some need or want and that are produced for exchange, rather than for direct consumption by the producer. They are traded either directly or by money. Commodities exist anywhere market exchanges occur, but capitalism is the only mode of production in which commodity exchange dominates material provision of daily life (i.e., almost everyone fulfills material needs through purchases on the market, rather than through independent production). Marx explained that commodities have use value, or qualitative properties that satisfy human wants and needs, and they have exchange value, or a quantitative side expressed in the rates by which they trade against each other. Under capitalism, he said, the study of use values produces “commercial knowledge” (e.g., information about commodities’ highly variable, intrinsic qualities is needed to estimate consumer demand and to run a successful business). Rather than inform business practices, however, Marx aimed to explore capitalism’s hidden structures and dynamics. Arguing that capitalism subordinates use value to exchange value, Marx held that his inquiry must start with the question of what factors regulate exchange values. Marx rejected commonsense notions that the proportions in which commodities trade against each other are determined by their use values’ highly divergent, intrinsic qualities. He argued that these exchange values must have a more systematic cause that derives from some common attribute. Revising earlier arguments by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx saw the only relevant commonality of commodities to be that they are all products of “social labor.” Consequently, he declared that exchange values are surface manifestations of value, or the “crystallized social labor” contained in commodities. Marx argued that this common “social substance” is the time that it takes to find, mine, refine, fashion, assemble, or otherwise make the object. He held that the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the “labor time” that it takes to produce it (i.e., from the acquisition of raw material to the delivery of the finished product). His reference to the twofold nature of the commodity refers to the fundamental polarity between use value and value (i.e., exchange value is merely a phenomenal form of value). From this vantage point, the proportional rates by which gold watches trade, in kind or in monetary units, against jade rings, linen sheets, or paper boxes are determined by their respective differences in value, or crystallized labor time. Marx stated that exchange value is “simply the form under which certain social relations manifest themselves” or “the material envelope of the human labor spent upon it.” He saw appropriated labor time to be the hidden social determinant that gives shape to the market’s apparent animistic, or apparently self-governed, surface of circulating market exchanges, prices, and products (1867a: 45–81, 101; 1865: 120–4).

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Marx qualified his theory of value in a number of ways. Rather than concrete producers’ labor time per se, he stipulated that value is set by socially-necessary labor time, or the average intensity of labor characteristic of a society’s and an industry’s overall level of development. This means that the value of commodities is fixed by producers who operate with average efficiency, rather than by slow, inefficient producers or by the fastest, most efficient ones. Other factors being equal, Marx held, values and prices tend to fall as capitalist competition eliminates slower, backward producers and replaces them with more efficient producers (i.e., commodities take less time to produce). However, he also stated that supply and demand have substantial conditioning effects on prices and cause them to deviate from their values. For example, when a commodity is in great oversupply or is no longer in demand (e.g., out-of-style clothing) it can be priced at far less than its value or even be worthless. The converse is true when a highly desired or essential commodity is in very short supply. Marx stressed that “competition” is an important facet of capitalism, which mediates value relations in many ways, but that this complex matter requires a separate study. He acknowledged that myriad, particular historical circumstances and subjective factors, impacting supply and demand, play an important role in setting prices of individual commodities, but he argued that these variations equilibrate, or cancel each other out, over time, and thus do not explain the central tendencies of prices. Marx understood that knowledge of supply and demand is important for entrepreneurs, and, if he were alive today, he might even concede that bourgeois economists provide some good tools to analyze these matters. However, he argued that such approaches fail to grasp the causes of general price patterns, and, thus, cannot explain the bases of exchange value or the factors that drive overall capitalist accumulation. Recall his point that the logic of capitalism is visible only when we analyze it as an organic whole. Following from the above, Marx’s theory of value presumed market competition, or conditions that approximate the free market. He held that prices set by monopolies or states manifest organizational power or politics, rather than pure value relations. Depending on the situation, such managed prices may be set far below, or far above, their values. In his view, the more monopoly or state organizations set prices, the less his theory of value applies. As will be seen below, Marx implied that monopoly capitalism and the interventionist state depart from capitalism per se, or from the unregulated English capitalism that his theory of value modeled. These conditions aside, he argued that aggregate prices of commodities in a capitalist industry or overall capitalist economy gravitate toward averages set by their socially-necessary labor times, or values (1865: 126–7; 1867a: 45–81, 276; 1885: 292; 1894: 189–98, 234, 434–6). Marx saw the commodification of labor power, or the institution of wage labor, to be the most important factor in capitalist accumulation. He contended that it was a unique commodity that held the secret to the entire capitalist system. Like all other commodities, he held, the value of labor power is set by the labor time needed to produce it, which is the time needed to produce “the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the laborer.” He stressed that subsistence standards vary with a society’s level of development and culture and with different social groups and occupations. He argued that capitalists organize the hours and intensity of wage labor to insure that much more value is transferred to products than is returned in wages; the wage pays for only part of a day’s exercise of labor power. Marx held that

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the capitalist keeps the unpaid portion and this “surplus labor time” is realized in the form of money when the items are sold. In contrast to all other commodities, he asserted, labor power produces regularly and systematically more value than it commands in exchange. As stated above, he recognized that a wide variety of variable conditions can impact on individual commodity prices and therefore affect profits. However he contended that such circumstances result in losses as often as profits and thus cannot explain overall profits and the capitalist class’s great accumulated wealth. Marx contended that the unequal, wage–labor exchange and consequent appropriation of surplus labor time, or surplus value, is the basis of general capitalist profitability and interest (1867a: 177–86; 1865: 127–33). However, he did not treat capitalist accumulation as an automatic process. For example, he argued that the class struggle between capitalists and workers and the respective power of capital and labor, which vary historically, determine how closely wages approximate subsistence and thus have a major impact on the rate of surplus value and profitability. Also, Darwinian economic competition between capitalists requires them to employ a multiplicity of strategies to maximize the rate of surplus value, such as increasing labor discipline, reducing real wages, extending work hours without added compensation, finding new pools of workers accustomed to lower levels of subsistence, and engineering the work process and overall factory regime to maximize the speed and intensity of labor per time unit. In this fashion, Marx theorized capitalism’s specific form of unpaid labor and core site of class conflict. Marx argued that serfs knew that their surplus was being appropriated when they had to perform corvée labor in the lord’s fields or when they were forced to give him a portion of their crop. He also contended that slaves feel that even the paid portion of their labor is unpaid. He knew that feudal and ancient ruling classes made no pretense about the inequality and unfreedom of their direct producers; ruling-class extraction of unpaid labor was usually an unadorned facet of personal dependency relations, and thus was transparent to direct producers. By contrast, Marx argued, capitalist wageworkers’ unpaid labor appears to be paid (1867a: 88–9, 177–86). He held that the ideological portrayal of wage labor as a voluntary contract and commensurable exchange between equals veils the extraction. Marx saw the wage exchange to be compelled by the force of hunger; capitalist workers of his day lacked productive forces to support themselves, sometimes were forbidden to organize collectively, “chose” from among equally poorly paid and unstable jobs, and had little, or no, welfare safety-net. He believed that capitalism’s political, legal, and everyday cultural views of individual freedom and free labor operate along with commodity fetishism to cloak the unequal wage–labor relation and exploitation with legitimacy. Marx saw this ideological estrangement to be manifested in the commodity’s contradictory sides. He distinguished the “concrete labor” that produces use values from the “abstract labor” that is crystallized in commodities and later realized in capitalist wages, profits, and accumulation. He held that these opposed concepts amplify a more fundamental polarity between real wealth, or the use values that meet basic wants and needs, and abstract wealth, or the monetary profits and accumulated capital that derive from unpaid labor and devolve to the ruling class and the intermediate strata who serve it. Marx held that bourgeois ideology conflates, or confuses, these two fundamentally different types of wealth. For example, political economists claimed that modern production and continued socio-cultural progress

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can be perpetuated only by means of capitalist accumulation and that investors and entrepreneurs “create wealth” per se. These points still tend to be treated as verities by today’s capitalists and their political leaders. Marx rejected this equation of private fortune with social wealth. He held that the two types of wealth need to be decoupled analytically and socially to help people liberate themselves from capitalism’s mystified, unnecessary drudgery and misery. Marx wanted to create a postcapitalist society where use value is the goal of production and where surplus labor is appropriated only communally for humane purposes, rather than for class-based, private enrichment.

From manufacture to modern industry Marx saw the state’s employment of violent and coercive means as a crucial factor in all class-based societies. He criticized sharply Adam Smith’s portrayal of the origin of capitalist property relations, in which the emergent capitalist class supposedly gained control of the productive forces peacefully through their “diligent,” “intelligent,” “frugal” ways and their ability to organize “lazy rascals,” or the proletariat, into a disciplined workforce. Marx pointed out that Smith and other political economists omitted the most important part of the story – the “conquest of social power” that began before the rise of capitalism and that continued under its dominion. For capitalism to arise, feudal and guild relations had to be dissolved. Expropriation of serfs, the vast majority of the feudal populace, was the most important event. Marx asserted that peasants were “robbed of all their means of production” and “hurled as free and unattached proletarians on the labor market.” This removal of the peasantry from the land, he argued, was “written … in the letters of blood and fire.” Marx held that capitalism presupposes a “complete separation” of direct producers from their productive property; peasants and craftsmen had to be compelled by coercion and material necessity to become wageworkers and to sell their labor power (1867a: 704–7). Destruction of the feudal manor and medieval guilds and forced proletarianization of independent producers cleared the way for capitalism, which Marx saw in two broad phases. According to Marx, the dominant type of production in the early phase of capitalism, manufacture, arose gradually, in piecemeal from the mid-sixteenth century through the late eighteenth century in more developed or market-oriented parts of Europe, especially England. The labor force of mostly propertyless peasants and displaced craftsmen usually worked in small factories, owned by capitalists. The primary innovations were the institution of capitalist property relations and sweeping transformation of the social organization of the work process. Separating labor from the household and family and employing it within a regime of impersonal authority, capitalists forged a distinct, specialized, social space for wagework. The clear demarcation of work from family and community activities, development of a strictly “economic” relationship between capital and labor, and monetary compensation for labor time provided capitalists with the calculable, purely workaday environment needed for precisely and systematically organizing the intense extraction of surplus labor time. Marx held that capitalists created a “deliberate plan,” exercised careful oversight, and, overall, forged a heretofore unparalleled, rationally calculable organization of labor. He also stressed that Darwinian competition between

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capitalists pressed them to continually improve the efficiency and coordination of production and appropriation. Marx explained that capitalism, “as a pumper-out of surplus labor and exploiter of labor power … surpasses in energy, disregard for bounds, recklessness and efficiency, all earlier systems of production based on directly compulsory labor.” However, he also stated that, “At first, capital subordinates labor on the basis of the technical conditions in which it historically finds it” (1867a: 314). Technical transformation of production was modest in the phase of manufacture. Marx explained that manufacture combined separate handicrafts into a single, multiphase process and decomposed generalized craft production into specialized detail operations. He held that the new regime simplified work routines (e.g., closed temporal gaps between steps in the labor process and reduced the number of steps), focused and intensified labor, and thus reduced the socially-necessary labor time and increased the rate of surplus value. Hailing the start of a new era of cooperative production, Marx conceived of the move from isolated, independent production to more centralized, differentiated, socialized manufacture to be a fundamental progressive material advance. Recall his glowing points about the sui generis, social powers of cooperation. He asserted that manufacture transfers intelligence and agency from the individual worker to the “workshop as a whole,” or to the collective laborer (much more powerful and rich in productive capacities than individual crafts workers). In his view, manufacture’s enhanced production of use values derives from its “cooperative character.” Stressing that the cooperation is coercive and oppressive, however, Marx described the deskilled wageworker as an “automatic motor” and “crippled monstrosity.” Under manufacture, average workers were tied to a single detail operation of their old handicraft. Repeating the same motions over and over, they were reduced to cogs in the cooperative process. Marx also held that manufacture multiplies cooperative linkages between more numerous producers, and gives rise to a societal division of labor. However, he saw increased interdependence to be neutralized by capitalism’s unplanned competitive ways. He concluded that manufacture creates “despotism” in the workshop and “anarchy” in the wider society. The contrast with Smith’s “invisible hand” is emphatic. Overall, Marx contended that manufacture was fettered by its incomplete break with handicraft and by a work process that was still mostly by hand. He argued that manufacture created an uneven, unscientific specialization, leaving substantial numbers of partially-skilled workers and pockets of highly-skilled ones. If they quit or were fired, owners had to find workers with similar skills and sometimes train them. The skilled workers’ leverage in the labor markets provided them with resources to resist workplace control and discipline (1967a: 349–50, 359–60, 364–74). Marx argued that modern industry began a new phase of capitalism that severed the ties to handicraft production and that overcame manufacture’s fetters. He said that, “In manufacture the revolution in the mode of production begins with the labor power, in modern industry it begins with the instruments of labor” (1867a: 374). Here he is referring to the mechanization of production that began in England during the late eighteenth century. As early as the German Ideology and Manifesto, Marx and Engels already implied the importance of this technical shift in their emphatic points about the great modernizing rupture caused by “large-scale industry’s” revolutionary productive forces. However, Marx did not address the topic closely until the 1850s, after his move to England. When he wrote Capital, modern

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industry was relatively advanced only in England, and it was not diffused widely in Western Europe and North America until later in the century, after his death. Marx stressed that mechanization brings “science” into production, employing it to execute a much more systematic, calculated, and thorough type of specialization than that of manufacture, and to substitute “natural forces” for labor power (1867a: 389). By contrast to manufacture’s limited rationalization and traditionalist roots in handicraft, Marx argued, modern industry’s scientific labor process uproots production from traditional methods and organizes it by “objective” criteria. He contended that modern industry makes cooperation “a technical necessity dictated by the instrument of labor itself,” and increases greatly its scale, complexity, and reflexivity (i.e., it is planned much more deliberately) (1867a: 383, 389). Marx’s hopes about modern industry’s emancipatory potentialities flow, in large part, from his belief that its technical basis is creative social intelligence (i.e., “science”) and that this cultural resource is both the product and the agent of extremely advanced material development, based on extensive, reflexive cooperation. He still criticized science’s linkage to exchange value. For example, he explained that political economists advocated the industrial application of science to undercut unions and control militant workers; mechanization was driven as much by desire to discipline labor as it was by desire to improve the technical efficiency of production. Marx still believed that modern technology’s stunning capacity to produce use values could be employed to serve all people and thus to generate equally amazing progress in the socio-cultural and political realms. However, he held that as long as science and modern industry remain subordinated to capitalist property relations, their technological powers will be used to complete the separation of workers from their means of production and to expedite the extraction of their surplus value and the accumulation of abstract wealth in ever fewer hands (1867a: 439–40). According to Marx, the mechanized labor process is broken down into microscopic steps, which eliminate all thought and decision from the worker. He contended that the vast majority of modern industrial workers are reduced to factory operatives, performing exceptionally simple, robotic routines and becoming “mere appendages” to a collective machine. Hyperspecialization and extreme deskilling sped up production, overcame bottlenecks, and minimized worker decision, training, and turnover costs. The consequent radical split of manual labor from mental labor forged a much more top-down regime than manufacture in which owners often came from the old handicraft and operated on the shop floor with the workers. By contrast, in modern industry, managers and technical personnel, often distant from the workplace, planned and organized the entire operation more systematically to maximize surplus value. In the “automatic factory,” Marx argued, workers were increasingly controlled technically by the machinery’s design, operation, and pace; consequent continuous, simplified motions greatly increased the intensity of their labor (1867a: 420–30). Most importantly, he held that mechanization reduced sharply socially-necessary labor time. Producing much more per time unit, modern industrial workers, under normal conditions, receive back in wages, even when they rise, a much smaller proportion of their value (i.e., crystallized labor time) than manufacturing workers, operating by hand. Marx also argued that modern industry shrinks the costs of reproducing workers; productive efficiency drops the value of necessary goods for worker subsistence and deskilling greatly increases the supply of

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potential workers. Thus, wage costs fall. Marx understood that mechanized industries were huge, rich operations, exerting enormous political and social power and greatly increasing capital’s leverage over labor. He explained that traditional restraints on the exploitation of labor were eroded; for example, workdays were extended, extremely unsafe and unhealthy work conditions became the norm, women and children were pushed into the labor force, and a “reserve army” of poor and often desperate underemployed and unemployed workers multiplied (1867a: 397–462, 607–42). Marx acknowledged that modern industry produces an enormous array of new use values, or real wealth. However, he argued that its main role, under capitalism, is to pump out surplus value from workers with historically unparalleled speed and intensity. Marx held that unnecessary misery and drudgery were increasing as rapidly as capital and commodities. He asserted that “official pauperism” grows with the “lazarus-layers” of the working class and the reserve army and that this trend is “the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation” (1867a: 638). Marx saw machinery as a form of “crystallized labor” that speeds up the transfer of value from labor to commodities and that contributes even more directly to the creation of use value, or real wealth. However, he contended that machines cannot create value or be the motor of accumulation. He argued that the commonsense idea, voiced by political economists, that “profit” derives from technology per se obscures the “secret of capitalist production” (1885: 201). He insisted that the only systematic source of overall capitalist profit is the unequal wage relation, or the unpaid portion of labor time. Because of modern industry’s huge scale, Marx held, it initially increases the overall mass of unpaid labor and surplus value. Also, he argued, mechanization provides windfall profits to the first capitalist to mechanize an industry or develop new types of machinery that produce substantially faster than the industry’s socially-necessary labor time. This producer is able to sell his or her commodity far above its value and make windfall profits. Yet profits equalize and values fall when other competitors adopt similar technologies. Marx held that competition drives modern industrial producers continually to seek new technological advantages and surplus profits, stimulating an upward spiral of labor-saving technology and a trend toward automated production. He also acknowledged that cut-throat competition and high barriers to entry (i.e., massive costs of very complex machinery) reduce the number of producers in an industry and lead to monopoly or oligopoly markets. These firms boost their profits by bureaucratic pricing, but the break with value relations generates contradictions and problems in the capitalist system. Marx held that modern industry increases the organic composition of capital – the proportion of “constant capital” (i.e., machinery, tools, land, and raw materials) increases relative to “variable capital” (i.e., “living labor”) (1867a: 607–23). He thought that the trend toward automated production caused a relative decrease in the active portion of the working class and thus would increase unemployment and poverty. However, recall his point that capitalist accumulation depends on “increase of the proletariat” (1867a: 609). Consequently, Marx contended that widely spread automation would undercut the very wellspring of value and thus must lead eventually to an accumulation crisis. Marx formulated his “law” of the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” to address this expected crisis tendency (1894: 209–30). He contended that gains made by the increase in absolute numbers of factory workers would, in the long run, be

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neutralized by the proportional shrinkage of living labor and of unpaid labor time. He asserted that the rate of surplus value and profits must fall. However, Marx pointed out “counteracting influences,” or capitalist strategies that avert or slow this tendency – namely, intensifying labor, sinking wages below subsistence, lowering the costs of machinery and raw materials, increasing the size of the reserve army, and raising stock-market capital. Especially important, Marx held, modern industrial capitalists seek surplus profits by foreign trade with less developed regions of the globe, which have much higher rates of socially-necessary labor time for many commodities and lack the technological means to produce others. According to Marx, selling commodities far above their value in these places can generate huge windfall profits. Capitalists take advantage of “backward” regions’ lower living standards, lower costs of subsistence, and thus cheap labor power. The consequent wage savings can offset the advantage of more efficient, costly types of automated production in the home country. Marx saw profitability crises at home and the search for surplus profits abroad to be a major impetus of uneven capitalist globalization: he thought that intensifying efforts to stave off falling profits would generate a backward, dependent type of development in other parts of the world (1894: 230–9). He warned of a “new and international division of labor” refashioning the globe according “to the requirements of the chief centers of modern industry” and instituting one-sided development and backwardness in peripheral regions (1867a: 454–5). The law of falling profits was an important part of Marx’s overall theory of capitalism; he considered it a keystone of his crisis theory. However, he knew that verifying empirically system-wide falling profit would be extremely difficult or impossible because of the limited and unreliable data on profits, and myriad technical problems in computation of overall profit. He also understood that the various counteracting forces, mentioned above, might slow the process interminably. Engels had more serious doubts about the theory than Marx. In a section that Engels added to the third volume of Capital, he held that new technologies do not necessarily cause modern industry’s profit rates to fall. He also thought that such innovations do not even have to increase the ratio of constant capital costs to variable capital (Engels 1894; Seigel 1993: 336–47). Marx’s own uncertainty about his theory of falling profits is manifested by his reference to it as a “tendency” as well as a “law.” The debate about falling profits continues today in some Marxist circles and problems of measurement remain daunting. However, Marx’s related points about the future of modern industry and of capitalism have more theoretical and cultural significance than his problematic theory of the falling rate of profit. For example, it is much easier to gather evidence related to his prescient arguments about scientific production, poverty, unemployment and the “disposable” underclass, centralized capital, monopoly, financial speculation, cyclical economic crises, and globalization (Marx 1867a: 607–42). Marx implied that the tendency of the automatic factory to “equalize and reduce” all work, below the nascent, salaried elite of technicians, engineers, and managers, to machine tending has divergent consequences (1867a: 423). On one hand, he held that homogenization of labor smashed manufacture’s skill hierarchy and facilitated a top-down rationalization; on the other, he claimed that it created conditions for proletarian class consciousness and politically organized, proletarian class struggles. He believed that workers would develop increased solidarity and militancy in the

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face of crises arising from the intensifying economic cycle, growing workplace despotism, increasing unemployment, and polarizing wealth. Marx held that workingclass unity is “organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself” (1867a: 455–7, 748–51). He thought that proletarians’ experience of the combined effects of participating in a highly socialized, cooperative productive process and of being leveled downward together in authoritarian workplaces and impoverished lives at home was an objective basis for shared class interest and revolutionary class consciousness. However, in Capital, Marx did not dwell on the victorious proletarian scenario that he and Engels stressed in the Manifesto. Marx acknowledged that modern industry’s increasingly complex class structure and class relations and ideological mystification blunted proletarian solidarity. He gave much more attention to structural bases for emancipatory change, than to political revolution per se. Marx stressed especially capitalism’s contradiction between the much more socialized and thus enhanced technical capacities for the production of use value, or real wealth, and the ever more frenzied, privatized, capitalist drive for expanded value, which generated high levels of poverty and drudgery along with a great deal of abstract wealth concentrated in few hands. Marx argued that a progressive socio-political transformation was already underway in the most advanced type of capitalism. He pointed to the English Factory Acts as the “first conscious and methodical reaction of society” against unregulated capitalism, and argued that state intervention was a “necessary” facet of modern industry. Although Marx railed against the paltry nature of the Acts (which did more to justify than to eliminate extreme exploitation), he treated them as a precursory sign of more profound changes (e.g., justice and participation for women and children, safer and less monotonous workplaces), which he believed were called forth by advanced capitalism’s socialized, interdependent nature (1867a: 483–508). He contended that modern industry’s concentrated and centralized features, in addition to their various deleterious consequences, forge “cooperation on a large scale” (1867a: 616–23). He equated the trend toward monopolistic collusion, managerial control, and state intervention with “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself … which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production” (1894: 436). He argued that the corporate operations reduce owners to “mere money capitalists,” who receive stock dividends, but relinquish effective control of the firm to managers. According to Marx, these huge firms generate “associated production” on a society-wide scale; the entire populace comes to depend on the continuous coordinated activity of the various corporate operations and, consequently, demands “state interference” to insure that interdependence is maintained. He held that these big stock companies were transforming capitalist productive property into “social capital” and creating the condition for elimination of private productive property. In his view, monopoly or oligopoly producers’ efforts to control markets manifest, albeit in a distorted form, “socialization.” Marx anticipated Adolf A. Berle’s and Gardiner C. Means’s Depression Era argument about corporate capitalism’s collectivist tendencies and break with unregulated free markets. Marx held that corporate planning, the separation of management from ownership, employment of knowledge-based technologies, interfirm cooperation, and increased state regulation were “transitional forms” to a future post-capitalist order. His vision of advanced capitalism as “a self-dissolving

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contradiction” implies the possibility of a peaceful communist transition, but also acknowledges that the emergent form of monopoly capitalism gave the stock-owning “financial aristocracy” great power and allowed them to determine how “social labor” was utilized, to appropriate its surpluses, and to cause intense speculative crises and increased instability by their gambling on the stock market (1894: 265, 432–9; Berle & Means 1932). The relations Marx portrayed in his value theory were rooted ultimately in laborintensive manufacture and competitive markets. Systematically appropriating unpaid labor, he contended, capitalism replays human “prehistory.” Following his dialectical method, however, Marx held that basic structural contradictions intensify with mechanization and initiate the conditions for a determinate negation of capitalism. He thought that modern industry’s deeply contradictory fusion of systematic exploitation with greatly enhanced collective intelligence contained seeds of an entirely new historical dynamic. In his view, the vastly increased importance of technical knowledge in the production of use value made applied science an increasingly autonomous social force opening new horizons beyond capitalism and value relations and, ultimately, eroding the class and property relations that originally conjured it up. He argued that modern industry’s application of science made productive activity more reflective, deliberate, and ever more social, refining and advancing qualitatively and quantitatively the cooperative capacities of associated producers (1857–8b: 92). Marx stressed emphatically, however, that only severance of the ties between technological knowledge and capitalism and societal socialization of science and other advanced forces of production could diminish applied science’s destructive tendencies and, finally, decouple production from extraction, coercion, and devastation. In Capital, Marx declared that “modern industry … makes science a productive force distinct from labor and presses it into the service of capital” (1867a: 366). As suggested above, his core argument about modern industry holds that as automation advances, production of use values depends more and more on accumulated technical knowledge. In the notebooks for Capital, he said that “the creation of real wealth becomes less dependent on labor time and the quantity of labor employed,” and “depends, rather, upon the general development of science and the progress of technology or application of science in production.” He stated that the worker becomes “overseer and regulator,” rather than the “main agent’ of the productive process, and that the “general intellect” controls production and social life. Marx implied that the combined powers of “general scientific work” and related intricate, systemwide cooperation could dissolve capitalism (1857–8b: 86, 90–2). In a regime characterized by scientifically orchestrated continuous-process production, Marx thought, capitalist accumulation would be based on a profoundly contradictory, vestigial property relation and perpetuation of unnecessary and repressive forms of labor, while use value, or real wealth, would depend on the “objectified power of knowledge.” Under this endgame capitalism, Marx declared: “production based upon exchange value collapses, and … material production … is stripped of its form of indigence and antagonism.” Referring to the final decoupling of real wealth from abstract wealth, he said: Free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labor time in order to posit surplus labor, but in general the reduction of necessary labor of society

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to a minimum, to which corresponds the artistic, scientific, etc., development of individuals made possible by the time thus set free and the means produced for all of them. (1857–8b: 91)

Domesticated by associated people’s communal democratic ends and power, Marx believed, science could be deployed to complete an epochal, emancipatory rupture with all pre-existing modes of production and, afterwards, to maximize the time and resources needed to facilitate cultural and individual development as well as provide for bodily needs. Society and culture based on ruling classes appropriating the surplus product of direct producers would end. Marx dreamed of this moment when his modes of production and value theories would have merely historical relevance.

After capitalism: dictatorship or democracy? Marx’s materialist method and theory of capitalism constitute his main legacy in social theory. His enormous public significance, however, has derived largely from his political impact. He has been an inspirational figure for communist, socialist, and social democratic parties, regimes, and movements, anti-colonial insurgencies, radical student movements, radical-Left terrorism and revolutionary regimes, Leftleaning labor movements, and certain post-Marxist movements. Their identification with him likely has been rooted in their beliefs about what he stood for (e.g., social justice, revolution) rather than his social theory per se or even its explicit political facets. Marx advocated the unity of theory and practice, but he did not elaborate a detailed theory of post-capitalism, even though he embraced communism as a normative ideal and participated in the early communist movement. According to his historicist method of immanent critique, the prospects for fundamental change depend on the socio-cultural conditions and level of material development in specific places and times. In his view, divergent social contexts require different types of agency and strategy, which forbid a comprehensive, general blueprint of postcapitalism in advance. His emphasis on local knowledge and local conditions was ignored by the later twentieth-century critics who treated him as the prototypical “totalizer.” Even in Marx and Engels’ most famous programmatic statement about communism – the Manifesto’s 10-point program on the “transitional” proletarian dictatorship – they stated that the “measures will of course be different in different countries” (Marx & Engels 1848: 505). In a new preface, about 25 years later, they repeated the qualification emphatically, saying that “practical application” of their principles depends “everywhere and at all times, on the obtaining historical conditions.” They added that times had changed and that their 10-point program needed to be revised and should no longer be stressed (Marx & Engels 1872). They said that they left the work unrevised to preserve it as a “historical document.” It is ironic that these two pages have been stressed most by many of their political followers and perhaps even more by their critics. Images of post-capitalism can be gleaned from the mostly brief statements and asides in various parts of Marx’s and Engels’ writings. Generally, they held that capitalist ownership, investment, and profits would be eliminated and that public administration would perform functions provided formerly by capitalist markets, firms, and states. They argued that a substantial amount of surplus would be held

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back for social purposes and that the rest would be apportioned according to a person’s contribution and need. They also suggested that a full communist regime would be a “community” or “association”; people would be conscious of their interdependence and act in concert and even sacrifice to sustain it, but they would cultivate their individualities as well. Marx and Engels identified fully developed, collective agency with effective social planning. In Capital, Marx said that “a community of free individuals” would operate their productive forces “in common” and that each person’s labor would be “consciously applied” (my emphasis) as part of the community’s “combined labor power” (i.e., “a definite social plan” would coordinate work with wants). Although qualifying that programs and methods would vary according to a community’s “productive organization” and “historical development,” he stressed that, in any setting, freely associated people would treat labor and product as part of a social process and as shared wealth, rather than as individual activity and private property (Marx 1867a: 89–90). His point is that a social plan devolving from such views would have a transparency, efficiency, and justice lacking under capitalist commodity fetishism. Similarly, Engels held that “systematic, definite organization” would end the anarchy of production and war of all against all, raising society above “mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones.” He said that people would make their history “more and more consciously”– their social interventions would be more intelligent and directive and, consequently, the “social causes” they unleashed would increasingly have their intended consequences (Engels 1892: 321–4). Marx held that the “settled plan” of a highly developed, fully socialized regime would evaporate all traces of capitalism’s “mystical veil.” But such a regime, he asserted, requires “a certain material groundwork” arising from a “long and painful process of development.” He did not suggest that this condition, or emancipatory moment, was near at hand (Marx 1867a: 90–1). In the 10-point program of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that a communist revolution must first seize control of the state from the bourgeoisie and allow the proletariat to organize itself as the ruling class. This strategy would provide the proletarian leadership the political and administrative apparatus to end capitalist property relations, suppress counter-revolutionary opposition, and initiate a transition to communism. Marx and Engels held that the leadership would centralize the primary means of production and infrastructure (e.g., banking, communication, transport), “increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible,” and create “industrial armies.” Although suggesting other reforms (e.g., free education, progressive income tax), they called for a near total centralization of power in a much enlarged state, which they acknowledged would have to employ “despotic” force to expropriate the capitalists and modernize society. They held that, at the end of the transition, “class distinctions” will be eradicated totally, society will be a “vast association,” and “public power will lose its political character.” They imply that the huge public apparatus would have sweeping legitimacy; debates would focus on policy implementation, rather than on the system’s very existence (i.e., the entire publicly owned productive system and social welfare operation would be accepted like public roads today). Marx and Engels suggested that the state would be transformed from a means to enforce class domination into a benign system of administration. They conclude that communism would be “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” In

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the revolutionary times when the Manifesto was written, young Marx and Engels were not inclined to warn their readers that this emancipatory moment might be a very hard road fraught with dangers and reversals (Marx & Engels 1848: 503–6). In the much later Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx spoke of the communist transition in a coldly realistic even gloomy tone. He said that the transitional regime, or “first phase of communism,” would be “in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” He also spoke very briefly of a “higher phase of communist society” in which productive force development will have freed people from the division of labor, and a consequent cultural renaissance will have nurtured “allround development of the individual” and prepared people for participatory, selfmanaged association. Marx thought that full communism required a radical rupture with capitalism and an epochal transformation of institutions, culture, and selves. All this presumes a much higher level of material and socio-cultural development, requiring a very long period of gestation (1875: 85, 87). He explained that communism has to be built initially on capitalist foundations. For example, sweeping planning capacities cannot be created de novo, but must draw on resources of the former capitalist regime. Planners would have to borrow methods employed by capitalist firms and states, especially their uses of science and technology in production, distribution, and administration. Marx thought that these partially socialized facets of capitalism would be greatly enhanced after capitalists were expropriated and productive property was socialized. However, he knew that planners would still face the very hard task of remaking science and technology incrementally and experimentally to fit the new regime’s emergent conditions. Marx scolded socialist politicians who promised full communism and copious benefits to workers as soon as their party came to power. He argued that their promises would be deflated quickly and end in certain political failure (1875: 81–8). By contrast, he held that a major portion of each worker’s surplus product would have to be held back to pay for expanded public administration, schools, welfare, and other public services as well as to cope with crises. Marx also contended that the new regime would have to reinvest huge amounts of surplus in scientific/technological development and expanded production to create a material base for fuller emancipation. He argued that the labor process could not be revolutionized immediately and that people would still be paid unequally. He believed a transitional regime would eliminate some terrible bourgeois abuses, but he stressed that it would retain many of capitalism’s “defects.” He also thought that it would face opposition and would not easily achieve the popular legitimacy that he and Engels referred to passingly in the Manifesto. Three years after the aforementioned qualification about the Manifesto’s program of transition, Marx reasserted the need for a transition to communism “in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” (1875: 95). And now he stressed emphatically that full emancipation was definitely not on the near horizon. Explaining the need for the “strictest centralization” a few years after the Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that communists should not “be misguided by the democratic talk of freedom for the communities, of self-government etc.” (1850a: 285). They were responding to the counter-revolutionary climate that followed the1848 revolutions and the ideological use of democratic rhetoric to derail radical

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labor movements and justify top-down bourgeois rule. More generally, however, they saw liberal democracy and civil society to be so distorted by bourgeois money, power, and culture that they were devoid of resources for progressive socio-political and cultural reconstruction. As early as Marx’s Jewish Question (1843c), he held that capitalism’s possessive individualism ruled in the state and civil society. He saw bourgeois democracy and the remains of traditional associations (e.g., Judaism) as barriers to proletarian solidarity and emancipation that needed to be swept away. In the Gotha Program essay, Marx spoke in a totally disparaging way about the “democratic republic” and bourgeois “freedom of conscience.” His idea of “capitalist society” (my emphasis) implied that bourgeois property relations and mystification suffused civic associations and political institutions and culture (1875: 94–8). However, he did not reject democracy per se. Stressing that full communism would be free of top-down rule, he held that it would be self-managed by associated producers. The problem is that he saw liberal democracy to be so bankrupt that mediating institutions to build participatory habits and values would be absent at the start of proletarian rule. Then what prepares the way for radical democracy? Neither Marx’s view of revolutionary proletarian politics transforming into transitional communist dictatorship, nor his idea of late capitalist economic rationalization morphing into a material foundation for communism articulates historical bases for nurturing democratic association and culture. Marx did not explain how the demos could possibly constrain the “transitional” dictatorship, how the party leadership would avert seduction by carte blanche power, or how they could plan for, or even visualize, democracy. How could such a centrally administrated regime be a matrix for the types of citizenship, associations, values, selves, and imagination needed for a self-regulating, emancipated society of “associated producers”? In this light, Marx’s “higher stage” of communism would, at some point, have to be created de novo. A sharply opposing scenario to nearly everything said above appears in Marx’s impassioned report on the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France (Marx 1871: 328–43). In this essay, he enthusiastically embraced the two-month insurgency, celebrating its “positive form of the Republic,” or its decentralized, participatory features, which his comments about the need for a transitional dictatorship seemed to rule out. Marx said that the Commune reduced officials’ pay to the level of workers’ wages and began to abolish private productive property and establish full “cooperative production.” However, he did not dwell on economic matters or stress the material bases and material limits of the new regime. Rather his ebullient portrayal emphasized the new regime’s self-managed political and social relations. He held that the Commune working class did not expect “miracles” and that their greatest achievement was the regime’s “working existence,” which was forged pragmatically by average people employing participatory means, rather than by a political vanguard and scientific planning elite asserting total power in the name of a hoped-for communist utopia. Marx described how the Commune reduced social inequality, dismantled capitalist and clerical power, instituted short terms of office, extended suffrage, established governance by a participatory assembly, exercised public openness about its problems and defects, and even created “cheap government” by disbanding the army and debureaucratizing administration. Contradicting his idea that radical democracy requires a long gestation, he portrayed “plain” working people, who lacked political and administrative experience, rising to the

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occasion immediately, harmonizing prudence with radical democratic ideals, and undergoing personal transformation in the process. He implied that they were committed to their duties and motivated by social ends, rather than private interests. Marx reported similar tendencies among “all the healthy” elements of other classes, including some functionaries of the old regime. Finally, he spoke graphically of the “self-sacrificing heroism” of men, women, and children,” defending their new democracy against the national army and paying with “heaps of corpses” (Marx 1871: 348–55; Marx & Engels 1971). Leaving aside questions of historical accuracy, Marx’s Paris Commune essay expresses a side of his later political thought, appearing in scattered places throughout his work as well as in this essay, that clashes with his passages on dictatorship and which expands the democratic ideas of his youthful, pre-communist days. Here, he converges with radical democrats (e.g., John Dewey), who argue that emancipatory goals can be reached only through active employment of democratic means and through direct, local democratic participation, which cultivate the type of human being capable of building democracy on a wider scale. However, Marx’s essay leaves problematic questions. Was the Commune initiating an immediate leap to the “higher stage” of communism, or was it a transitory moment of revolutionary solidarity? Could radical democracy have been sustained? Regrettably, the Commune was too short-lived to address such questions, being crushed brutally by the national army. Moreover, how can this essay be harmonized with Marx’s advocacy of the transitional dictatorship? Overall, Marx’s political writings manifest the inherent complexity and ambiguities of instituting revolutionary change and radical democracy together. Are these two goals compatible? Are they possible? No political theorist or movement has yet resolved these problems. Marx and other radicals may well be right that we can only find out the answer through practice and experimentation. And critics are right to ask, at what costs? Neoclassical economists and other neoliberal critics claim that social planning is doomed to bureaucratic inefficiency and that only competitive markets could effectively process vastly complicated information about production and consumption and harmonize supply and demand. They also contend that political control of the economy leads inevitably to authoritarianism; the expansion of the state and abrogation of productive property rights undermine other political and cultural rights. These critics were prescient about Soviet-style, total-planning regimes, but they failed to anticipate the successes of twentieth-century mixed regimes; thus post-World War II social democracies placed substantial limits on private productive property, nationalized some industries, redistributed income, and established large social welfare systems, and have usually been considered global leaders in human rights, political rights, and democratic inclusion. Their decommodified public goods, at least for a time, attained broad legitimacy, and debates over them shifted to instrumental matters of cost, efficiency, technique, and scope. However, postwar-era advances in social rights, substantive equality, and living standards, ironically, weakened the impetus of labor’s struggle for full socialism and even led to political reversals (Przeworski 1985). Similar taming of labor’s political goals also occurred in less extensive welfare states. Nevertheless, postwar social democracy demonstrated that partly socialized regimes can work efficiently and democratically. Later twentieth-century, neoliberal critics have yet to confront the failure

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of market-centered institutions to provide for the basic needs of the poor, cope with economic inequality, foster social solidarity, or provide adequate regulation. Marx referred to proletarian dictatorship infrequently in his overall corpus of work. Moreover, his comments on the topic were brief. Some thinkers argue that these points were a sidetrack and that his overall work was fundamentally democratic (Draper 1987). However, Marx’s highly affirmative view of the capacities and potentialities of capitalist modernization’s concentrated, rationalized features and argument that early communism must build on the structure of late capitalist firms and states have an affinity for centralized authority. Twentieth-century Communists deployed these comments to justify forced modernization, top-down planning, and general oppression. Moreover, Marx did not address the very complex technical issues involved in creating a substitute for markets. His optimistic comments about the future of applied science and planning, under communism, manifested a somewhat uncritical faith in “science” and in the emergent strata of technicians and planners. His critics argue that these themes favor technocracy. He left vague the political processes by which “associated producers” would create and implement the plan. Who would plan? How would they be selected? By what political means would they be regulated? How would the demos be represented? Radical democrats argue that upholding democratic goals by undemocratic means deflates the original principles and ends in despotism of some sort. Marx did not focus on this profound problem of how to mesh democratic means with his ultimate democratic principles and to thereby avert the problem of democratic formalism, which he dissected so brilliantly in his youthful critique of Hegel’s theory of the state. But there is still a deeply democratic side to Marx’s work. He stressed repeatedly and emphatically the need for universal provision of the means of participation and of substantive freedom; he urged the elimination of unnecessary suffering, and he insisted that there can be no peace without justice. More than any of his analytical tools, these egalitarian values, which suffuse his texts and are inscribed in his very name, have animated interest in, and often passion for, his ideas across the globe. Neoliberalism’s silence about and disregard for matters of social justice created the conditions for Marx to be rediscovered.

MARX’S PLACE IN SOCIAL THEORY The changing historical context: twilight time for neoliberalism? In 1989, the collapse of Eastern European communism and China’s brutal suppression of the reform movement in Tiananmen Square were benchmark events in the erosion of global communism. Also, Third World national liberation movements faltered, and socialist and social democratic parties lost ground and shifted rightward. Anthony Giddens (1994: 79) declared, “The Promethean outlook which so influenced Marx should be more or less abandoned in the face of the insuperable complexity of society and nature. A drawing back from the ambitions of the Enlightenment is surely necessary.” He was justifying his “Third Way” abandonment of the egalitarian redistribution and public planning facets of postwar Labor Party and New Deal politics with which Marx was often loosely identified. Along with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, Giddens supported market-oriented reform and

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neoliberal globalization. On the Left, Marxism had been widely challenged, radically revised, or rejected (e.g., for its connection to authoritarian regimes, bloody revolutions, terrorism, dogmatism, inefficiency, materialism). The ascendant “cultural left” espoused post-materialist and post-class politics, centered in the new social movements and identity politics; they embraced a “linguistic turn” and declared Marxism to be repressive and moribund. Attacking Enlightenment ideas of rationality, science, and progress, postmodernists undercut Marxism’s and modern social theory’s epistemological and normative bases; they portrayed culture as an aleatory surface that bankrupted depth models and neutralized the ideology–reality polarity. Decrying a “retreat from class,” “absolutization of language,” and “randomization of history,” Marxists conceded that they had been displaced (Anderson 1983; Wood 1986). Diverse thinkers announced a dawning “end of Left and Right” (Bobbio 1996). At the moment communism was crashing, neoconservative Francis Fukuyama posed his widely publicized “end of history” thesis, holding that “the monumental failure of Marxism as a basis for real-world societies” vindicated Hegel’s vision of the “liberal state” as the highest possible realization of “rationality and freedom.” Fukuyama declared that we may now be “at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially different than our own,” where it does not seem possible that we could ever make a “fundamental improvement over our current order.” In his view, American neoliberalism’s full retreat from social democratic egalitarian aspirations and from preference for substantive democracy (which supposedly caused policy overreach) over formal democracy put American-led modernization back on track and returned US capitalism to the lead regime and model for all other nations that wanted to be modern. History stood Marx, rather than Hegel, “right-side up,” declared Fukuyama (1989; 1992: 43, 51, 62–7). Clinton Democrat Thomas L. Friedman (2000) later argued that neoliberal globalization’s “golden straitjacket” generated meteoric growth of wealth by reducing political choices to “Pepsi or Coke.” He portrayed neoliberal deregulation, securitization, privatization, and financialization as constituting a worldwide “democratic revolution” that empowers an “Electronic Herd” of small and large investors to tear down the postwar welfare state’s regulatory and redistributive “Berlin Wall” and prudently limit public policy. The consequent growth of steep economic inequality, or “winners take all society,” he held, is the necessary cost of the only political-economic regime that could escape abject poverty, reactionary traditionalism, and corrupt bureaucracy. Friedman expressed the widespread effusive optimism about the 1990s stock-market boom and “New Economy,” which were alleged to create wealth so effectively that a post-scarcity culture was in sight. Many pundits and policymakers acclaimed the virtues of the resurgent, unrestricted type of capitalism that Marx framed his theory to address (i.e., employing state power to secure corporate hegemony and insure the free reign of property rights and other “free-market” policies). The dot-com bubble burst in the year 2000. The stock market plummeted, and soon after, 9/11, the Iraq War, and corporate scandals (e.g., Enron, WorldCom) dimmed the optimism. The Bush Administration’s unilateral War on Terror and hardline neoliberalism generated opposition in many quarters. Center-Left and Left parties won major elections against the Center-Right in South America and made significant gains in Europe. Protests in Seattle, Davos, and Washington DC began a

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wave of resistance against the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other US-dominated global governance organizations that enforced the neoliberal “Washington Consensus.” These protests and the World Social Forum (which has met in Brazil yearly since 2001) brought together diverse factions of the new social movements (e.g., women, labor, racial and ethnic minority, First Peoples, and environmental organizations) into an “anti-capitalist” bloc. Seeking alternatives to militarism and neoliberalism, the plural left showed signs of solidarity, which 1980s and 1990s cultural theorists and pundits had claimed to be in permanent eclipse. This “post-Marxist Left” generally abandoned postwar Marxist theories and politics. Their diverse backgrounds, interests, and identities led many of them to stress deliberative democracy, which had been embraced by key advocates of the earlier cultural and linguistic turn. However, this new version of “post-Marxism,” by contrast to the late twentieth-century cultural left, no longer pitted cultural politics against class politics and actively took up materialist issues (e.g., protesting global poverty, expropriation of peasant lands, environmental justice, sweated labor, repression of labor unions, militarism and state violence). Strong taints of Marx’s original spirit reappeared. The 2008–2009 financial crisis and deep recession threatened the neoliberal regime. The Obama presidency and actions by governments around the world pointed in a new direction toward increased regulation and state intervention. Although the depth of the economic downturn was uncertain, it appeared that a new, or substantially revised, policy regime was in order. But its outline was unclear and very contingent. In a New York Times op-ed, Friedman (2009) asked: “What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more.’ ” A few years prior, it would have been hard to imagine neoliberal globalization’s leading advocate ever expressing such serious doubts about the policy regime that he once saw as an inevitable, nearly universal benign force. Yet restored growth in finance capital remained a top priority for many in the US leadership and moneyed strata, who flourished under neoliberal hegemony, and even for many middle-class people, whose retirements, children’s education, home payments, and even jobs depended on it. And there were many complex problems and a dearth of vision of where to go. Nearly 40 years of neoliberal drift eroded the sense of the ensemble of public and private institutions and culture that would constitute robust democracy, and the will to experiment to find them. Neoliberalism dies hard.

The current state and prospects for Marx and Marxism Göran Therborn argues that today’s conditions favor a Marx revival, but that Marxist politics and Marxist theories have a highly uncertain fate. Portraying a theoretical field where the borders between Marxism and post-Marxism are blurred, he asserts that left-leaning social theory is now “a big house with many doorways” (Therborn 2008: ix, 163, 178–81). Concurring, Fredric Jameson (2009: 134) says that “A Marx revival seems to be underway, predating the current disarray on Wall Street, even though no clear-cut political options yet seem to propose themselves.

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Sensible opportunists have welcomed any sign of sympathy for Marxian positions, without wanting to alienate the new converts (or returning fellow-travelers).” Consequently, Marx-related or -inspired theories are too diverse to map or summarize. Some examples from literature available in English provide insight into the breadth of this work. Marxists and post-Marxists have made neoliberal globalization a critical focus (e.g., Desai 2002; Wood, 2003; Harvey 2005; Davis 2006; Sassen 2006; Brenner 2009; Fraser 2009); provided fresh readings and applications of Marx (e.g., Dyer-Witheford 1999; Foster 2000; Mészáros 2000; Rockmore 2002; Ollman 2003; Arrighi 2007; Harvey 2007); revived the idea of Marxist sociology (e.g., Burawoy & Wright 2006); analyzed and theorized democracy, civil society, and inclusion (e.g., Kent 2000; Fraser & Honneth 2003; Habermas 2006; Roemer 2006; Shefner 2008); posed media criticism (McChesney 2008; Kellner 2005); addressed global political trends and violence (Kolko 2009; Wallerstein 2003; Žižek 2008; Balakrishnan 2009; Negri 2009); offered transnational class analyses (Sklair 2001); framed new theories of alienation (Dahms 2005); analyzed financial and ecological crises (Foster 2002; Foster & Magdoff 2009; Mason 2009); and advocated revived “utopian” thinking (e.g., Wallerstein 1998; Jameson 2005; Wright 2010). Closely related to today’s conditions, other new work underway on Marx focuses on his extra-canonical writings, including his obscure texts on global cultures and dynamics. A team of scholars has been engaging his late manuscripts about the cultures capitalism encountered as it expanded outward. David Norman Smith has been working on an English-language version of Marx’s “ethnological notebooks,” and Smith, Jürgen Rojahn, and Kevin B. Anderson are assembling volumes of his hitherto unpublished manuscripts on multicultural themes from the same period. Moreover, “Marxist” journals and annuals (e.g., Monthly Review, Socialist Register, Science and Society, New Left Review, Rethinking Marxism, Capitalism Nature Socialism) still flourish, but many of them have trended toward more plural approaches and foci. Two pressing crisis tendencies of neoliberal capitalism are impacting new rereadings, critiques, and applications of Marx and may eventually stir a broader revival of his thought. First, can neoliberal globalization be sustained economically and politically? The wake of the 2008–2009 financial crisis and recession led many analysts to question whether the later twentieth-century expansion of financial wealth was driven by a speculative economic bubble and whether deregulation, securitization, privatization, and financialization ever could produce “real” growth and avert crisis. Immediate concerns involve multiple failures of the neoliberal “system of regulation,” especially shortsighted, corrupt, predatory management by the leadership of the private and public institutions that constituted the era’s capitalist system. Debates ensue about restoring fairness and rationality to governance (e.g., curbing corporate malfeasance, lobbyist/contributor influence, crony-capitalist state bailouts/favors, and imprudent deregulation; re-regulating the economy; restoring ethics, legality, and prudence to finance; increasing taxation of the wealthy). But more fundamental change may be needed. Recall Marx’s argument about the growth of a “reserve army” of unemployed and underemployed. Neoliberal globalization’s worldwide proletarianization, combined with ever growing computer-guided continuous-process and automated production, has produced an enormous reserve army and masses of contingent and low-wage workers, paid below the standards of

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subsistence for their locality (e.g., American minimum-wage workers). Also, in the US, competition for well-paid professional middle-class occupations in polarized labor markets is exceptionally intense and complicated by privatization of public higher education and class polarization of the entire US educational system – growing inequality in the means of participation has become a taken-for-granted feature of American life. Some critics argue that American society is a plutocracy with increasingly caste-like features. Although varied in form and intensity, similar class polarization is occurring in many parts of the world. Second, can growth be restored without severe resource and ecological crises? Postwar modernization theorists usually assumed that scientific/technological knowledge gave culture de facto autonomy from nature’s limits, or that “science,” mediated by markets, solves “temporary” environmental and resource problems. Unlimited growth had become an imperative feature of politics and a transparent driver of the American way of life. Enthusiastic globalization advocates saw the creation of “fast capitalism” (e.g., aided by revolutionary innovations in communication and transport technologies, new financial instruments, open borders, and other neoliberal policies) and its global division of labor, much extended world market, and transnational consumer culture to produce unparalleled opportunities for growth of abstract wealth and real wealth. They praised the imminent universalization of the growth imperative and American-style consumer society. However, neoliberal globalization’s spatial-temporal compression also greatly accelerated the speed and volume of the throughput of natural resources and creation of wastes. Climate change and other catastrophic ecological threats and related resource problems have been greatly exacerbated by neoliberal globalization, which made the world smaller, faster, and fuller, and thus magnified the existent contradiction between capitalism’s unplanned, exponential growth and culture’s material foundation in the biosphere. Retaining taints of precursor approaches, framed when hinterlands and natural resource stocks seemed unlimited, few globalization theorists, pundits, and policymakers acknowledged the scale of the ecological risks. The neoliberal Right, supported by the major energy industries, libertarian/neoliberal think tanks, and other corporate interests, built a disinformation machine that bolstered a general state of denial about ecological degradation and fortified public opposition to the first tepid steps to begin mitigating the problems. Consumption cannot grow exponentially ad infinitum. Capitalist economics and policies have presumed a growth imperative, which is a lived reality, not merely a theory; jobs, public and private sector institutions, and even ameliorative programs all depend on continuous growth. Efforts to improve the lives of poor segments of developing nations and elevate the “bottom billion” poorest people out of abject poverty require even greater expenditure of natural resources and production of wastes. Even if neoliberalism is reformed or replaced by a new capitalist regime, the ecological problem may remain and grow worse. By contrast, major investment in new energy sources, transportation, built environments, and other green technology and infrastructure could spur renewed growth of a re-invented capitalism. However, many scientists argue that much, or all, of the world must be weaned from the carbon-based economy by midcentury to escape catastrophic ecological consequences. Harsh impacts (e.g., forced migration) are already being felt in many poorer parts of the world. New technologies and energy sources could diminish the problems, but the multi-sided, extreme

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nature of the ecological crisis possibly requires moving beyond capitalism as we have known it and even as it has ever been imagined.

Marx’s enduring legacy today Holding that “great philosophers never die,” Therborn (2008: viii–ix, 120) states that, “Marx himself is bound for the long life of alternating winters, springs, summers, and autumns undergone by so many of the great thinkers of humankind, from Confucius and Plato onward.” A major root of Marx’s enduring legacy is his sociological-materialist historicization of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology; i.e., we create ourselves and our worlds by our own labor and are compelled to work and struggle to transcend our alienated self-productions (typified by polarized regimes of masters and slaves). By contrast to Fukuyama’s right-Hegelian “end of history” argument, Marx’s left-Hegelian optic would treat neoliberalism’s socio-economic and ecological wreckage as a prime example of humanity’s alienated self-production. Destruction of the biosphere on which we all depend materially and for this-worldly spiritual consummation is arguably the extreme limit of collective self-estrangement. Marx’s theory and modern social theory per se presume the capacity to distinguish surface from depth. Their related idea of social science stresses the ability to identify and map obdurate socio-cultural “realities,” so obscured, or veiled, by convention, habit, and ideology that the consequent regimentation, distortion, and damage seem to be, and in practical terms are, invisible. Marx-inspired critical theory opposes both the neoliberal idea that the cultural surface of American capitalism manifests its essence (the democratic ideal), and the postmodernist argument that culture’s aleatory, or totally contingent, surface evaporates depth completely and permanently. From the standpoint of critical theory, neoliberal essentialism and postmodernist relativism converge in reifying the status quo and neutralizing utopian imagination and even progressive reformism. By contrast, critical theory’s ideas of surface and depth, on a normative level, counterpose the state of alienation with the hope and will to transcend it by imagining, fighting for, and building alternative realities. Marx’s scientific trope implied that efforts to overcome alienation and realize emancipatory prospects are matters of inquiry to be confirmed or falsified by engaging determinate realities and employing mindful practices to bring the desired future into being. In Marx’s best moments, communism is a vanishing ideal, which envisions a direction rather than a terminus of human possibilities, leaving both the current and future socio-cultural worlds open as collective works in progress. The idea of alienation was a central theme for Vietnam-era (mid-1960s to mid1970s) critical theorists and New Left theorists, and arguably was a watchword of that tumultuous yet hopeful historical moment. Diverse thinkers read Marx through the lens of his Hegelian roots and ideas about alienation (e.g., Avineri 1968; Israel 1971; Ollman 1971; Schacht 1971; Mészáros 1972). Defenders of Marxist orthodoxy demurred that this move abandoned the mature, real, true, materialist Marx. They sensed rightly that their opponents’ focus on alienation manifested a desire to transcend existing Marxism and communist movements, parties, and states as well as bourgeois socio-economic theories and a postwar capitalism plagued by inequalities and governed by corporate power and the bureaucratic welfare/warfare state. The alienation discourse was eclipsed by the “end of alternatives,” “end of left and

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right,” and “end of history” sensibilities, which manifested the era’s dimmed utopian imagination and curtailed progressive reform. The darkening was powerful enough to lead even unreconstructed “68ers” to opt for pessimistic realism. Ascendant neoliberalism quieted talk of ending poverty or reducing the class divide. However, the economic and ecological crises and shipwrecked neoliberalism now might favor recovery of the enduring and once inspiring Hegelian side of Marx’s thought. The resumed talk of utopias hints at this prospect, as do younger people’s post-Marxist global resistance efforts. Marx called for combating capitalism’s combination of “anarchy” in society and “despotism” at work with socialized public planning. Today’s twin crises necessitate planning of some sort and raise the question of whether neoliberalism, and perhaps capitalism per se (i.e., as we have known it), can be sustained. Marx’s points about the tension between “abstract wealth” and “real wealth” have renewed pertinence in light of global capitalism’s economic polarization, substantial expansion of propertied wealth’s power and privilege, and ecological devastation. His normative argument, suggesting that the benefits of the real wealth generated by capitalism’s scientifically mediated productive practices should be extended to much wider circles, challenges views that treat unnecessary misery, drudgery, and insecurity as inevitable and tolerable. Applied today, this principle would oppose neoliberalism’s global “shareholders society,” which has emboldened and given singular primacy to property rights. By contrast, Marx’s normative, or critical, thrust favors a “stakeholders society” that stresses justice in the distribution of the means of participation and ecological sanity and justice. Moreover, the post-Marxist fusions with approaches from the new social movements and neopragmatism provide resources to frame richer, more inclusive, post-capitalist conceptions of civil society and deliberative democracy and more pacified, aesthetic culture/nature relations. As these fusions demonstrate, one does not have to embrace Marx’s theory in toto to appreciate its heuristic value. Today’s emergent crises and forms of resistance are making Marx’s specter visible again; his social theory remains a vital source of alternative ways of seeing, thinking, inquiring, and struggling to change the world.

Reader’s Guide to Karl Marx Readers seeking a short introduction to Marx should consider Etienne Balibar’s (2007) The Philosophy of Marx or Tom Rockmore’s (2002) Marx After Marxism. Shlomo Avineri (1968) provides an excellent introductory discussion to Marx’s social and political thought through the optic of the intellectual, political, and historical contexts that shaped it. David McLellan’s (1973) biography elaborates the interplay of Marx’s ideas and his life. Istvàn Mészáros’s (1972) study of Marx’s theory of alienation and G. A. Cohen’s (2000) study of Marx’s materialism explain the roots of two major and sometimes opposed threads of Marxist thought. David Harvey (2006) offers what is arguably the best interpretive and critical account of Marx’s masterwork, Capital. Leszek Kolakowski’s (2005) magisterial Main Currents of Marxism provides a lucid, critical account of the development of Marxism from its ancient premodern roots through the later twentieth-century “New Left.” Donald Sassoon’s (1996) equally comprehensive, accessible study of the Western European socialist- and socialdemocratic-related parties, movements, and currents through from Marx’s time until the early

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1990s illuminates another important side of Marx’s impacts. Mészáros’s (2000) Beyond Capital re-engaged the socialist alternative at the turn of the twenty-first century. Martin Jay’s (1996) and Rolf Wiggershaus’s (1994) histories of the Frankfurt School elaborate an important tradition rooted in Marx’s thought. Seyla Benhabib’s (1986) and Moishe Postone’s (1993) engagements of Marx and Jürgen Habermas provide important later twentieth-century reinterpretations of the critical theory tradition. Craig Calhoun (1995) and Göran Therborn (2008) provide analyses of the Marxist and post-Marxist left in the later twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Notes 1

2

This essay is a major revision of my earlier “Karl Marx” which appeared in G. Ritzer (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to the Major Social Theorists (2000), and, in somewhat revised form, as the “Introduction” to my edited Marx and Modernity (2003). My colleague David Norman Smith provided astute criticism and many fruitful suggestions that improved the earlier version. Original dates are used in citations for works by Marx and Engels and other earlier theorists; these refer to the time of publication, or to the time the work was written. The aim is to inform the reader about the sequence in which the works were developed and their historical context.

Bibliography Writings of Karl Marx Unless otherwise indicated, references to works by Marx and/or Engels are to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 50 volumes, published by International Publishers, New York, from 1975 on. 1837. “Letter from Marx to His Father: In Trier.” In Collected Works, vol. 1, pp. 10–21. 1842. “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly.” In Collected Works, vol. 1, pp. 224–63. 1843a. “Justification of the Correspondent from Mosel.” In Collected Works, vol. 1, pp. 332–58. 1843b. “Letters from the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher.” In Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 133–45. 1843c. On the Jewish Question. In Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 146–74. 1843d. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. In Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 3–129. 1844. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 229–346. 1845. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In Collected Works, vol. 5, pp. 3–5. 1847. The Poverty of Philosophy. In Collected Works, vol. 6, pp. 105–212. 1850. The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850. In Collected Works, vol. 10, pp. 43–145. 1852a. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In Collected Works, vol. 11, pp. 99–197. 1852b. “Political Consequences of the Commercial Excitement.” In Collected Works, vol. 11, pp. 364–8. 1852c. “Political Parties and Prospects.” In Collected Works, vol. 11, pp. 369–72.

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1857–8a. Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [First Installment]. In Collected Works, vol. 28, pp. 3–561. 1857–8b. Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Second Installment]. In Collected Works, vol. 29, pp. 3–255. 1859a. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In Collected Works, vol. 29, pp. 257–417. 1859b. The Original Text of the Second and the Beginning of the Third Chapter of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In Collected Works, vol. 29, pp. 430–507. 1865. Value, Price, and Profit. In Collected Works, vol. 20, pp. 101–49. 1867a. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, The Process of Capitalist Production. Ed. Frederick Engels. In Collected Works, vol. 35, pp. 43–807. 1867b. “Preface to the First German Edition” [Capital V. I]. In Collected Works, vol. 35, pp. 7–11. 1868. “Letter from Marx to Engels: In Manchester.” In Collected Works, vol. 43, pp. 20–5. 1871. The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association. In Collected Works, vol. 22, pp. 311–59. 1873. “Afterword to the Second German Edition” [Capital V. I]. In Collected Works, vol. 35, pp. 12–20. 1875. Critique of the Gotha Program. In Collected Works, vol. 24, pp. 75–99. 1881. “Letter to Vera Zasulich.” In Collected Works, vol. 24, pp. 370–1. 1885. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. II, The Process of Circulation of Capital. Ed. Frederick Engels. In Collected Works, vol. 36, pp. 26–534. 1894. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Ed. Frederick Engels. In Collected Works, vol. 37, pp. 25–912. 1905–10. Theories of Surplus Value, 3 vols. Ed. Karl Kautsky. Moscow: Progress Publishers (1963–71).

Writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1845–6. The German Ideology. In Collected Works, vol. 5, pp. 19–608. 1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Collected Works, vol. 6, pp. 477–519. 1850a. “Address of the Central Authority to the League: March 1850.” In Collected Works, vol. 10, pp. 277–87. 1850b. “Address of the Central Authority to the League: June 1850.” In Collected Works, vol. 10, pp. 371–7. 1872. “Preface to the 1872 German Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In Collected Works, vol. 23, pp. 174–5. 1971. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Writings on the Paris Commune. Ed. Hal Draper. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.

Writings of Frederick Engels Engels, F. (1842) “The Insolently Threatened yet Miraculously Rescued Bible or: the Triumph of Faith.” In Collected Works, vol. 2, pp. 313–51. Engels, F. (1845) The Condition of the Working-Class in England. In Collected Works, vol. 4, pp. 294–583. Engels, F. (1851–2) Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany. In Collected Works, vol. 11, pp. 3–96. Engels, F. (1883) “Karl Marx’s Funeral.” In Collected Works, vol. 24, pp. 467–71.

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Engels, F. (1885) Preface. In Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. II, The Process of Circulation of Capital. In Collected Works, vol. 36, pp. 5–22. Engels, F. (1890a) “Engels to Conrad Schmidt.” In Lewis S. Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books (1959), pp. 395–7. Engels, F. (1890b) “Engels to Joseph Bloch.” In Lewis S. Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books (1959), pp. 397–400. Engels, F. (1892) “Socialism: Scientific and Utopian.” In Collected Works, vol. 24, pp. 281–325. Engels, F. (1894) “The Effect of Turnover on the Rate of Profit.” In Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Ed. Frederick Engels. In Collected Works, vol. 37, pp. 73–80.

Further Reading Anderson, P. (1983) In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. London: Verso. Antonio, R. J. (2003) Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Commentary. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Antonio, R. J. (2005) “For Social Theory: Alvin Gouldner’s Last Project and Beyond.” In J. M. Lehmann (ed.), Current Perspectives in Social Theory: Social Theory in Politics and Knowledge, vol. 23. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 71–129. Antonio, R. J. and D. Kellner (1992a) “Metatheorizing Historical Rupture: Classical Theory and Modernity.” In G. Ritzer (ed.), Metatheorizing. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, pp. 88–106. Antonio, R. J. and D. Kellner (1992b) “Communication, Modernity, and Democracy in Habermas and Dewey.” Symbolic Interaction 15: 277–97. Arrighi, G. (2007) Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso. Avineri, S. (1968) The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. London: Cambridge University Press. Balakrishnan, G. (2009) Antagonistics: Capital and Power in an Age of War. London: Verso. Balibar, E. (2007) The Philosophy of Marx [Student Edition]. London: Verso. Benhabib, S. (1986) Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Berle, A. A. and G. C. Means (1932) The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World (1967). Bobbio, N. (1996) Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brenner, R. (2009) The Economics of Global Turbulence, 2nd edn. London and New York: Verso. Burawoy, M. and E. O. Wright (2006) “Sociological Marxism.” In J. H. Turner (ed.), Handbook of Sociological Theory. New York: Springer, pp. 459–86. Calhoun, C. (1995) Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Chandler, A. (1977) The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, G. A. (2000) Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence [Extended Edition]. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dahms, H. F. (2005) “Globalization or Hyper-Alienation? Critiques of Traditional Marxism as Arguments for Basic Income.” In J. E. Lehmann (ed.), Current Perspectives in Social

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Theory: Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge, vol. 23. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 205–76. Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Desai, M. (2002) Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism. London: Verso. Draper, H. (1987) The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: From Marx to Lenin. London: Monthly Review Press. Dyer-Witheford, N. (1999) Cyber-Marx; Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Foster, J. B. (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, J. B. (2002) Ecology Against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, J. B. and F. Magdoff (2009) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences. New York: Monthly Review Press. Fraser, N. (2009) Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. New York: Columbia University Press. Fraser, N. and A. Honneth (2003) Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange? London: Verso. Friedman, T. L. (2000) The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor Books. Friedman, T. L. (2009) “The Inflection is Near. The New York Times, March 7. (Accessed March 8, 2009. www.nytimes.com.) Fukuyama, F. (1989) “The End of History.” The National Interest 16: 3–18. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin Books. Giddens, A. (1994) Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Habermas, J. (2006) Time of Transitions. Cambridge: Polity. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2006) The Limits to Capital (Updated Edition). London: Verso. Hegel, G. W. F. (1807) The Phenomenology of Mind. New York: Harper & Row (1967). Israel, J. (1971) Alienation: From Marx to Modern Society. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Jameson, F. (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Jameson, F. (2009) “Sandblasting Marx.” New Left Review 55: 134–42. Jay, M. (1996) The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kellner, D. (2005) Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War, and Election Battles. New York: Paradigm. Kent, R. J. (2000) “Dewey and the Project of Critical Social Theory.” Social Thought and Research 23(1 & 2): 1–43. Kolakowski, L. (2005) Main Currents of Marxism. New York: W.W. Norton. Kolko, G. (2009) World in Crisis: The End of the American Century. London: Pluto Press. Mason, P. (2009) Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed. London: Verso. McChesney, R. W. (2008) The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press. McLellan, D. (1973) Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. New York: Harper & Row. Mészáros, I. (1972) Marx’s Theory of Alienation. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Mészáros, I. (2000) Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition. New York: Monthly Review Press. Negri, A. (2009) Empire and Beyond. Cambridge: Polity.

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Ollman, B. (1971) Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. London: Cambridge University Press. Ollman, B. (2003) Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Postone, M. (1993) Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Przeworski, A. (1985) Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rockmore, T. (2002) Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx. Oxford: Blackwell. Roemer, J. E. (2006) Democracy, Education, and Equality: Graz-Schumpeter Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sassen, S. (2006) Territory Authority Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassoon, D. (1996) One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Press Left in the Twentieth Century. New York: New Press. Schacht, R. (1971) Alienation. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Seigel, J. (1993) Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Shefner, J. (2008) The Illusion of Civil Society: Democratization and Community Mobilization in Low Income Mexico. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sklair, L. (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, A. (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York: Modern Library (1937). Therborn, G. (2008) From Marxism to Post-Marxism? London and New York: Verso. Wallerstein, I. (1998) Utopistics, Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century. New York: New Press. Wallerstein, I. (2003) The Decline of American Power. New York: New Press. Weber, M. (1904–5) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons (1958). Wiggershaus, R. (1994) The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wood, E. M. (1986) The Retreat from Class: A New “True” Socialism. London: Verso. Wood, E. M. (2003) Empire of Capital. London: Verso. Wright, E. O. (2010) Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2008) In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

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6 Herbert Spencer MARK FRANCIS

THE PERSON AND CONTEXT Herbert Spencer was born in Derby in 1820, the only surviving child of a school teacher, George Spencer. The father was the honorary secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, an organization founded a generation before by Erasmus Darwin. Herbert’s early education was strongly directed towards the scientific interests furthered by the Society. He was educated in Derby by his uncle William until the age of 13, and then studied for four years at Hinton Charterhouse in Gloucestershire with his uncle Thomas. This second uncle was an Anglican clergyman who took in boarders to prepare them for college. At this time, such preparation was largely an education in classics, but, since Herbert was strongly resistant to learning ancient languages, he was allowed to focus exclusively upon modern subjects. When Herbert was 17, his family found him a position with an engineer engaged in railway building, and, for the next 11 years, his life alternated between railway surveying and writing short articles on scientific and political topics for progressive periodicals. His family politics were decidedly left-wing. Herbert remembered that, “My father was a pronounced Whig, or something more” (Spencer 1904, vol. I: 47). An extreme political posture was also adopted by Thomas Spencer whose pamphlets and public speaking aligned him with radical causes such as Chartism and democracy. It was family political connections which helped Herbert to secure a position in 1848 as sub-editor of The Economist, then a weekly radical newspaper strongly committed to the abolition of the Corn Laws and the establishment of free trade. During the 1850s Spencer slowly began to abandon journalism. In its place he wrote lengthy philosophical pieces for the quarterly reviews. This was a period in which he also published his first major books, Social Statics and The Principles of Psychology. The first of these advocated land nationalization, a doctrine he later The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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abandoned, while the evolutionary theory of the second book became the cornerstone of his later social theory. In 1859 and 1860 Spencer inherited money from his uncles, and was able to give up journalism as a profession. In 1861 he embarked on a hugely ambitious survey of knowledge which he called “A System of Synthetic Philosophy.” This survey included metaphysics, biology, psychology, sociology, and ethics, the subjects comprising the kinds of knowledge that Spencer believed were determined by evolutionary development. Each subject dealt with a different set of principles, but all concerned organic phenomena or living things as distinct from material objects. In the field of sociology Spencer was the English pioneer. His combination of evolutionary theory and empiricism caused him to be admired by the scientificallyminded while being detested by the religiously orthodox. He enjoyed the latter reaction as he felt that it was his duty to upset conventional opinion on both small and large matters. It was for this reason that Spencer avoided ceremonial occasions and formal attire. He also refused honors because he felt that they were redolent of aristocratic claims to privilege. His hostility to the aristocracy led him to see their participation in parliament and the military as a malign force in favor of empire and war. To Spencer the expression of patriotic enthusiasm for colonies and the army was a class-based demand for employment by members of the upper class. However, the middle classes were also subject to Spencer’s censure. He felt that they encouraged praise of the work ethic and industriousness which was profoundly mistaken. In the place of virtuous labor, Spencer substituted leisure and enjoyment; he believed that only these would allow individuals to escape from the illness and early death that were brought about by excessive toil. Though Spencer’s political values were strongly egalitarian, he rejected socialism because he believed that it would inhibit genuine reforms. These would involve social and psychological developments that could not be imposed by political means. Spencer believed that it was essential for good mental health for an individual to have a well-balanced life. To him this implied that each person should aim for the goals of leisure, pleasure, and the procreation of children. However, he himself was successful only in the pursuit of the first two of these, not in the third. That is, he experienced leisure and pleasure on holidays, at dinner parties, and in practical jokes, but he did not experience parental affection. He died a childless bachelor in London in 1903. True to his beliefs he insisted on being buried without ceremony.

SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND BIOLOGY Spencer’s political and social theory has often been portrayed as libertarian individualism combined with a popularization of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection in which struggle and competition are seen as causing social progress in industrial societies. Much of this interpretation was manufactured from the 1940s onwards; it has little foundation in Spencer’s works or in the reception of his ideas by contemporaries. The revisionist account presented here will attempt to alter this twentiethcentury image, and present a more accurate and nuanced picture of how Spencer’s use of biology affected his social theory. This will demonstrate that Spencer was not an individualist, but a corporate theorist who combined anti-socialism with a disapproval of the capitalist work ethic. Further, it will be shown that he considered that

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progressive social evolution was not usually Darwinian, and that, in modern societies, aggressive competition would militate against progress. Spencer’s theories of biological evolution underpinned some of the structure of his sociology. However, of equal importance was Spencer’s work on psychology which emphasized brain over mind, and which insisted that human intelligence should be regarded as an evolutionary development. While Spencer’s social evolution had a biological character that drew heavily from physiology and morphology, its more materialistic qualities came from his ideas of neurophysiology. These provided the language of reflex action which gave him a way of interpreting social change as developmental without having to have recourse to non-scientific discourse that relied upon goal-directed or teleological change. It would be mistaken to reduce Spencer’s social evolution to either biological or psychological precepts because his language and ideas were subordinate to the masses of empirical data that he compiled for each discrete study. That is, Spencer’s first principles were not axiomatic, nor were they a series of mechanistic and closelylinked propositions about cause and effect, as Jonathan Turner (1985: 43) would have it. In other words, Spencer’s theories of social evolution were not deduced from philosophical premises he had laid down in a foundational text (Gondermann 2007: 33), but were inductively constructed from a host of specific analyses drawn from the scientific findings of each discipline. This meant that Spencer’s principles of biological evolution, psychological development, and social change were not only all relatively independent from their philosophical beginnings, but that they were also partly insulated from each other. This implies that one should not reduce Spencer’s theory of social change to earlier biological or psychological precepts. Social evolution, in particular, was complex in operation because Spencer believed that human evolution had taken place on three dimensions: the level of the individual psyche, the social level, and the “super-organic” level. The third of these was a broad category including international relations, political institutions such as parliaments, and codes of law considered traditional sources of normative behavior. Spencer found the first two levels easy to resolve in terms of biological evolution, but the third was more challenging. When he observed super-organic phenomena developing in ways that were closely analogous to organic ones, he regarded it as unlikely that they could be satisfactorily explained in terms of the general theories of integration which he employed on the other levels. This should be taken as a warning that, in his sociological writings, Spencer avoided employing a strictly causal form of explanation such as one could find in the contemporary works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, where changes in individual beliefs were determined by shifts in social behavior so that ideology could be completely explained by reference to changes in social and economic activities. This was historical materialism, and, while Spencer can be categorized as a materialist, he did not believe that social change was a historically progressive process which caused changes in motivations and individual behavior, such as increased or decreased altruism or egoism. Also Spencer did not believe that social changes explained the presence or absence of moral virtues such as generosity or veracity. In a broad sense, he thought that human evolution included changes in the individual psyche as well as those in social formation, such as the decline in the military class or the rise of industrial classes. These, as well as growth in such “superorganic” entities as political and legal institutions, interacted with each other in

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what Spencer regarded as a series of “reflexive” interactions. His reflexive analysis was scientific because it was based on the findings of contemporary neurophysiologists, but it was not dependent upon evolutionary speculation about the origin of the species. This is an important point to stress because recent secondary literature of social evolution is excessively focused on the initial cases of development rather than on the functioning of established evolutionary systems. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Spencer’s complex and multi-level theories seem difficult to grasp because of the contemporary habit of labeling all evolutionary theory as Darwinist. This habit is, however, a recent phenomenon, and despite the confusion caused by Richard Hofstadter in his much reprinted 1944 work Social Darwinism in American Thought, it is now clear that neither Spencer nor Spencerians were Social Darwinists, and that they did not believe that social evolution and progress were caused by struggle for survival. It is also apparent that Spencer’s well-known anti-socialist views did not cause him to give excessive praise to industry and capitalist competition. The term “Social Darwinism” was scarcely ever applied to Spencer before 1944: Thomas Leonard reports that it only happened twice. Leonard notes that references to Spencer as a prophet of laissez-faire capitalism were also very scarce before the second half of the twentieth century (Leonard 2009: 40). In both human biology and social policy Spencer’s evolutionary theories supported reform and progressive politics, not harshly competitive individualism (Taylor 2007: 5). Rather than foreseeing the advent of more perfect social adaptation through the natural elimination of less competitive types, Spencer feared that portions of society – especially the poor and indigenous people in the colonies – were too well adapted to their conditions, and, therefore, would not evolve (Gondermann 2007: 34). This problem was not an occasion for rejoicing over the benign effects of evolutionary adaptation: Spencer had no solution to the problem of negative outcomes, and, on moral grounds, he tried to prohibit powerful European states from attempting to justify their occupation of weaker countries by reference to their tutorial role (Francis 2007: 287). Rather than civilizing savages and forcing less advanced nations to adopt modern institutions, Spencer believed that advanced countries should simply abandon the pretense that imperial governance benefited the backward subjects of distant territories. It is significant that the greatest nineteenthcentury critic of empire, J. A. Hobson, was a Spencerian. In general Spencerians believed that imperial conquest might be a natural phenomenon among ancient states, but it was not for modern ones, so should be prohibited as an immoral activity. Spencerians were alert to careless political uses of “natural” in natural selection or evolutionary progress. They implored their audience to see evolution as a form of development that was characterized by the emergence of non-selfish feelings and behavior. Spencerian politics were progressive and the successive alterations of behavior meant that what was natural in an earlier generation did not have to be replicated in the next. This idea could lead to progressive social and economic policies such as the establishment of co-operatives or even birth control through the use of contraceptives. This last suggestion severed the old Malthusian link between pleasure and procreation, and was particularly important because it rejected the notion that constraints on population expansion were artificial: a civilized society possessed different natural evolutionary mechanisms than an uncivilized one (Renwick 2009: 52–3).

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Impact and interpretations of Spencer’s theory of biology Spencer’s legacy was felt strongly in Europe. For example, his ideas were significant to Pareto in the area of welfare economics (Miller 1972: 228), and while the name Pareto is not one associated with progressive politics, many of the intellectuals and politicians who were influenced by Spencer were on the left. For example, anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin drew upon his ideas. In France, Spencer was much admired by the republican movement, and, later, was the inspiration of Leon Bourgeois’s “solidarisme” which, after 1901, became the official doctrine of the Third Republic. This form of socialism was based upon a combination of scientific method and the “moral idea.” Bourgeois’s theory posited the idea that social laws were a manifestation, at a higher level, of the physical, biological, and psychological laws that directed all living forms (Beck 2004: 49–50). In Italy, Enrico Ferri created a doctrine of scientific socialism which was a blend of the theories of Marx, Darwin, and Spencer. Though more militant than Bourgeois’s doctrine, Ferri’s ideology was based on the Spencerian claim that competitive struggle became more attenuated over time while the law of solidarity and cooperation became more efficacious (Beck 2004: 53–4). In North America, Spencer’s political influence had a more mixed effect. Americans who had noticed Spencer’s reaction against socialist doctrines in The Man “versus” the State (1884) attempted to recruit him as an individualist (Mackay 1891). Others focused more on Spencer’s faith in increasing the scientific basis for cooperative and non-aggressive behavior, a thesis which formed the basis of the more scholarly volumes of Spencer’s philosophical system – especially Principles of Biology, Principles of Psychology, and Principles of Sociology. It is noteworthy that the first American socialist party, the Socialist Labor Party, was Spencerian in language (Mackay 2008: 36). Working-class and left-wing intellectuals found in Spencer answers to big questions that could not be found in Christian churches or in the texts of Marx and Darwin. Since Spencer’s ideas were so pervasive in the United States, it would be unprofitable to attempt to establish whether they were more influential on the Left or the Right. It is more likely that they were influential on anyone who referred to science and who had faith in progressive development. Since these beliefs were common to many intellectuals in the Empire Republic, Spencer could be heard as echoing American aspirations. In England, despite the progressive activities of Spencerians such as J. A. Hobson and Patrick Geddes, Spencer was often represented solely as an anti-socialist thinker who had increasingly adopted extreme individualism as he became elderly. However, much of this interpretation was rooted in the fact that some of the English socialists and sociologists of the 1880s were hostile to Spencer because of the empiricism that underpinned his philosophy not because of his theories of social evolution. The English philosophical establishment was enamored with idealism and Platonism, and, consequently, was as repelled by Spencer’s empiricism as the French had been attracted by it. Henry Sidgwick simply saw Spencer as typifying popular accounts of optimism (Collini 1979: 196, 150), and neglected Spencer’s more nuanced and, occasionally, regressive accounts of social change. The moralist Bernard Bosanquet, who believed that natural selection had moral outcomes (den Otter 1996: 100), should have had some empathy with Spencer, but hated him because of the false assumption he must be a libertarian. D. G. Richie, well known for his

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philosophical account of the social organism, believed he knew enough to refute sociology after he had read Spencer’s polemical The Man “versus” the State (den Otter 1996: 95). Spencer himself was partly to blame for the fact that many English writers did not explore the complex theories contained in his major works. To some extent he had fostered their hostile reaction because he himself had been unhesitatingly argumentative in The Man “versus” the State (Collini 1979: 154). Since idealist philosophers such as L. T. Hobhouse had been instrumental in creating an academic sociology in Britain, this caused Spencer’s version of sociology to be regarded with hostility. As Philip Abrams once remarked, modern British sociology was built as a defense against Spencer (Abrams 1968: 67; Peel 1971: 238). This judgment is too extreme because it overlooks the fact that seminal figures of British social science were influenced by Spencer (Stocking 1995: 184, 305–6; Groenewegen 2001: 50). However, it does suggest why British sociology often adopted a phenomenological rather than an empirical approach to social change. While the careless use of the terms “Social Darwinism” and “Darwinism” has largely been confined to writers who wish to castigate Spencer for being responsible for laissez-faire capitalism, more sophisticated commentators on Spencer often label him as Lamarckian. However, this interpretation is scarcely more accurate, and causes Spencer to be dragged into a debate about the origins of species where he does not belong. Lamarckianism also does not help explain the working of Spencer’s theories of social evolution. Essentially the problem here lies in the fact that social scientists have relied upon a crude reading of the impact of biology upon the development of their various disciplines. They are conscious only of a simple reading of Darwinian natural selection which assigns the causes of all social change to aggressive and competitive behavior. Any hint of biological causation which does not explain matters in this way is referred to as Lamarckian. That Darwin’s arguments were more complex than this caricature, and that Lamarck was not adequately represented by the criticisms leveled at him by Darwin and other mid-nineteenth-century scientists, is beside the point. Lamarck has been scripted as a thinker who believed that permanent biological change could be caused by individual numbers of a species passing somatic changes on to their descendants through willing these to happen. Following this line of argument, Spencer is believed to have propagated Lamarckian evolution as development guided by intuition. By extension, Spencer is said to have a theory of “immanent” change because a subsequent development is supposed to have existed in embryonic form before it was called forth by the will, or was stimulated by the forces of natural selection. At times, another piece of theoretical apparatus is added to Spencer’s supposed Lamarckianism: this happens when Spencer’s theories are referred to as teleological in the sense that change is directed towards a goal (see Kuklick 1991: 81). For this to happen, a life form or a social organism would have to be conscious of an evolutionary process and capable of directing it. From the perspective of the social sciences this is damaging to Spencer’s credibility. The charge that Spencer’s evolutionary theory is Lamarckian in a teleological sense undermines his theories because he is grouped with early Christian writers who instead of seeing change as development from a primitive beginning saw it as directed by God towards a future end. Sociological accounts of Spencer are often accompanied by abbreviated theoretical statements of the above kind to the effect that Spencer portrayed change as

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teleologically progressive, that he saw change as resulting from “immanent” forces, and that he was Lamarckian. A prime example of these propositions is Robert Perrin’s statement that secondary literature on Spencer can be represented by the assumption that social change comes about through the working of some inherent process built into society (Perrin 2000, vol. II: 509). However, despite this being representative of commentators on Spencer, it is mistaken to assume that a theory of inherent process (as immanent change) was at the heart of Spencer’s philosophy of biology, or that it governed the biological aspects of his sociological theories. On the contrary, Spencer was an empirically-minded opponent of the idea that biological change was an unfolding of inherent possibilities. This was the cause of his hostility to the scientific writings of Goethe and to the Platonism he saw underlying the scientific work of Richard Owen. For Spencer, as for his early mentor T. H. Huxley, biological evolution was not a matter of directed growth, but a blind materialistic progression starting from earlier forms of life. This empirical feature of Spencer’s philosophy was noted by contemporaries, and it is not accidental that one of his first European critics was the Platonist philosopher Terenzio Mamiani (Beck 2004: 43). A claim that Spencer was a social Lamarckian is mistaken as that would indicate he believed in directed social evolution, a proposition Spencer would have thought implausible. Compared to contemporaries such as Durkheim, Spencer’s functionalist theory was distinguished by not being directed. Whereas Durkheim believed that social change was directed by an integrative function – which was the moral good of society – Spencer’s functionalism had no future good in mind (Turner 1985: 51). In any case, Spencer’s social evolution could not have had a moral good in view, because, as I shall discuss below, his theory of social change operated on a different level than his moral theory. The latter he saw as part of psychological evolution, not of social change. Finally, it could not have been the case that Spencer’s social evolution was a directed process, because, strictly speaking, that would imply that his social evolution was linear and uni-directional instead of complex. As he reminded the readers of his Principles of Sociology near the end of his life, “Like other kinds of progress, social progress is not linear, but divergent and re-divergent” (Spencer 1896: 325).

SPENCER’S SOCIAL THEORY Society as organism The biological features of Spencer’s evolutionary theories have always fascinated sociologists – sometimes excessively so – but a balanced understanding of his social theories should consider how his biological theories supported and conflicted with factors that were less biological, and how they interacted with his metaphysical theories. Spencer himself could limit a social inquiry to strictly biological matters (for example when he focused on the way a straightforward biological force such as population pressure caused social change), but for him this did not imply that human beings would become more aggressive or less competitive. The analysis offered below will focus primarily upon Spencer’s explicitly sociological writings but will also pay some attention to his theories of biological and psychological development. It will not attempt to derive his theories of social evolution from his metaphysical theories.

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Jonathan Turner, who has produced a worthwhile and stimulating account of Spencer’s sociology, focused on the way in which Spencer’s metaphysics in First Principles (1862) structured the whole of his evolutionary philosophy (Turner 1985: 32–3, 45, 66). At first sight, Turner’s approach seemed to be a sensible one as Spencer himself had placed his metaphysics at the beginning of his “synthetic philosophy” as a kind of foundation stone upon which he could safely erect his scientific edifice. However, philosophical foundations do not function like architectural ones in determining what can be built upon them. While Turner was insightful in observing that Spencer’s foundational text borrowed a set of ideas from contemporary physics on the correlation of forces, this should not imply that subsequent writings on biological and social change were an unpacking of these “physical” materialist premises. On the contrary, the varied direction of the arguments in Spencer’s volumes on biology, psychology, sociology, and ethics often bore little relation to Spencer’s opening salvo: First Principles was not the logical basis of Spencer’s systematic ordering of knowledge in the life sciences, but was the first shot in his campaign to destroy the notion that there could be a divine basis of knowledge of living entities or that this knowledge had originated in the recognition of intelligence or identity. This last point was particularly trenchant because it worked against conventionally-minded religious philosophy as well as against the kind of spiritualism offered by German philosophers such as Hegel. Spencer refused to allow his opponents to retreat to the safety of philosophical self-knowledge because, for him, such a strategy had no basis; it was merely to refer to an evolved form of intelligence, which was something which had been produced by the same evolutionary mechanisms that had shaped all living organisms. For Spencer, there was no absolute knowledge even of oneself or one’s feelings, only relative knowledge of our own psyches and external organs. Superficially, this sounds like any conventional objection to absolute knowledge, except that Spencer’s idea of relative knowledge was not subjective, but objective and scientific. He claimed that we know nothing special about ourselves or our consciousness that we do not glean from the outside world by the same methods we acquire knowledge about material objects. Spencer concluded, “If, then, Life in all its manifestations, inclusive of intelligence in its highest forms, consists in the continuous adjustment of internal relations, the necessarily relative character of our knowledge becomes obvious” (Spencer 1875: 85). Turner’s belief, then, that the materialism of Spencer’s First Principles had provided axioms which structured his evolutionary arguments (Turner 1985: 53–4, 87–91) is too restrictive an interpretation. Spencer’s initial arguments in First Principles do not subject biological changes to the laws of physical science. Instead, he expounded the kind of materialism that was intended to confound religious explanations of reason and the meaning of life. Instead of being deduced from primary principles, his theories about biology, psychology, and sociology were guided by general statements to the effect that development was always a matter of differentiation and/or integration. In social terms, this suggests that he expected that, over time, societies would display increasing patterns of specialization, and, further, that they would become more integrated. He did not predict particular patterns of development, nor did he erect a monocausal explanation to predict future evolution. Spencer was not certain that future social outcomes would be progressive, or even functional. He remarked that every institution had an instinct for self-preservation

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that soon became dominant over everything else, “and maintains (the institution) when it performs some quite other function than that intended, or no function at all” (Spencer 1873: 19). Self-preserving institutions did not have to be sovereign states; Spencer believed his comments would be apt when applied to the Society of Jesus or the East India Company. As Gondermann has observed, Spencer’s evolutionary theory encompassed regression as well as progression, and even when social adaptation was successful, it might possess regressive features. The subordination of Spencer’s evolutionary theories to empirical findings is nicely illustrated in his remarks about the persistence of pauperism. (Victorians made a distinction between the poor and paupers on the basis that the former were only temporarily impoverished.) Rather than placing paupers in a survivalist tableau in which the fittest live, and the unfit become extinct, Spencer noted that, in fact, the latter did not disappear, but were directed by social evolution to a different and less pleasant destination – making them even less fit. Spencer’s empirically-based speculation here was that the permanently poor were too well adapted to their environment to evolve (Gondermann 2007: 33–4). The environment could act to limit evolution, or as a stimulus for it, but its frequent appearance as a factor in Spencer’s theories should not be read as a sign that he was a materialist in the sense that Darwin and some eighteenth-century philosophers were. That kind of materialism was based upon the idea that physical reality was a chaos filled with randomly colliding particles; the universe was disordered and without organization. In distinction, Spencer’s universe was not threatening, because of the weight he put upon the division between lifeless physical reality and living organisms. The latter were, to a limited extent, the product of self-organization. As was explained above, this feature of Spencer’s evolution has been confused with Lamarckianism because it is taken as akin to genetic theories which are not Darwinian. When he pushed aside Darwin’s focus upon spontaneous variation (Spencer 1867: 501n.), Spencer was not siding with Lamarckianism; he was simply expressing his opinion that spontaneity was not of much importance to ongoing evolutionary processes that were self-organizing. The self-organizing features he saw in biological and social growth were drawn from his readings of neurophysiology, not from speculation about extinct animal species. Spencer’s conclusions were based upon his belief that the different nervous systems of animals and humans could be classified in terms of an ascending and developmental order – either for an individual organism or across a number of related organisms. Spencer never forgot that he had been an evolutionary psychologist before he theorized about social change, and his early predisposition to take reflex actions as the key to understanding organization was carried through to analyses of non-psychological subjects. Societies, like psyches, were to be explained in terms of how they organized themselves. The explanation of each was a matter of classifying their specific patterns of organization, and then sketching the probable lines of development. Rather than beginning with First Principles one should begin an analysis of Spencer’s social evolution with his Principles of Biology (1864, 1867). This was the starting point of social scientists such as Patrick Geddes (Renwick 2009: 47). While one can find anticipation of Spencer’s social evolution in the essays he wrote during the 1850s, it was not until he published his systematic works on biology that his theories assumed a sophisticated form. This does not mean that his biology is

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predictive of the exclusively sociological work that Spencer published between 1873 and 1891; it is just that The Principles of Biology contains Spencer’s most general statements on the operation of organic development. This is important because, by the 1860s, he no longer held that the social organism was closely analogous to a simple life form; instead, he had come to believe that environmental forces and the effect of the economy of action would, over time, modify social and biological equalities into increasingly complex organisms. If social evolution had been similar to developmental processes within a single human being then social explanation would have been a different, and simpler, matter. Turner was correct to emphasize Spencer’s remark in The Study of Sociology, “the morphology and physiology of society, instead of corresponding to the morphology and physiology of Man, correspond rather to morphology and physiology in general” (Spencer 1873: 59; Turner 1985: 21). Since the terms “ morphology” and “physiology” are no longer commonly used outside medical science, it might help if this passage were translated to read: the functions and structures of society are not analogous to those of single individuals, but to general organic systems. The radicalism of the statement is in stark contrast to the views of other nineteenth-century prophetic figures – such as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx – for whom social evolution belonged to a distinct human pathway with its own quasi-spiritual guidelines. Spencer was grimmer; by the time he came to write his systematic biology he saw Man as subject to general organic principles, and he did not foresee human evolution as leading to a special benign outcome in the future; it was only a process that must be in the nature of evolution in general (Spencer 1867: 494). The future of humanity was not a progressive one controlled by the Divine will or a historical Geist. There are significant implications to be drawn from Spencer’s insistence that human evolution was, and will be, a process controlled by the same kind of functional and structural advantages that determined the outcomes of animals and plants. First, it meant that Spencer could dispose of archaic anthropomorphic analyses of the kind used by Thomas Hobbes and J.-J. Rousseau to the effect that a society resembled, or should resemble, an individual human in having fear, reason, and prudence. That is, Spencer discarded the time-honored analogy between the social organism and an individual in which the former was imagined to function like a rational person who possessed a will and egotistical or altruistic desires. Second, while Spencer believed that human beings were motivated by ethics and by social forces, there was no necessary causal connection between the two. For example, he did not believe that morals, or a desire for increased morality, explained social change. Social development was not in response to ethical demands as it might have been if Spencer had accepted analogies between the demands of a political society and an individual’s desires and fears. Spencer saw such analogies as pre-scientific and opposed to the goal of sociology which he saw as delineating social and political processes in terms of their basic functions and structure. This was a difficult matter as there was no way of accurately predicting the success of some of the processes at the expense of others. For Spencer the scientific activity of social classification was not a matter of forecasting which functions and structures would be selected in the way that Darwinian sexual competition selected desirable traits among competing individuals.

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Curiously for a philosopher reputed to be an optimist and a prophet of progress, Spencer shunned the idea that evolution was an inevitable process that worked in response to an internal drive. “No more in the case of man than in the case of any other being, can we presume the evolution either has taken, or will hereafter take place, spontaneously” (Spencer 1867: 497). To him such a suggestion was reminiscent of the inner essences relied upon by Platonism or of a divinely-inspired impulse directing life. In opposition to such sanguine hopes, Spencer urged that, “In the past, at present, and in the future, all modifications, functional and organic, have been, are, and must be immediately or remotely consequent on surrounding conditions” (Spencer 1867: 497). The strictness of this environmentalism was somewhat mollified by Spencer’s belief that organic forms possessed a sort of equilibrium which acted directly or indirectly on the environment, but this would have been of little comfort to the religiously-minded. Such equilibrium was not a spiritual force, but was itself shaped by the environment. The effect of this equilibrium was equivalent to the culmination of successful adaptations which organisms had had to develop in the past in order to survive. While Spencer’s “reaching equilibrium” sounds as if he were relying upon a force which was dynamic in its own right, it was only shorthand for the presence of self-reflexive capabilities within individual organisms. This organic feature was not necessarily progressive as Spencer did not assume that the presence of an equilibrium meant that a biological organism or a society was advanced.

The structure and organization of society At its most basic level, Spencer’s sociology, like that of any classical sociologist, was a critique of historians who explained the present state of humanity as the consequence of particular and non-repetitive actions, and of the intentions of heroic individuals. To Spencer’s generation, Thomas Carlyle’s chronicling of “events” such as the French Revolution and the fascination with great men such as Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great represented a non-scientific approach to social explanation. Instead of this, Spencer imagined that social science would deal with the prediction (he called this “prevision”) of general trends in society (Spencer 1873: 56). However, since almost all of Spencer’s data were either ethnographic or historical, this meant that he could not concentrate on forecasting the future of developed societies, but, instead, looked to past examples. This meant that his predictions were a kind of retrodiction with the added difficulty that, while he believed that simple or “primitive” societies had the ability to replicate themselves, developed societies could not evolve so they could exactly copy the features of their originals. In Spencer’s inimitable words, this reads “higher social aggregates propagate their respective types in much less decided ways” than smaller aggregates (Spencer 1877: 569). The idea that modern social evolution behaved less repetitiously than primitive social evolution caused Spencer to argue that the analysis of social organisms produced difficulties not present in biological evolution; societies were not subject to such definite classification as plants and animals (Spencer 1877: 569). This problem was a serious one for Spencer because without a reliable classification, it was difficult for him to determine to what extent a particular organism had progressed or regressed from an earlier type. Social organisms also differed from others in that their subordinate

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units remained in disparate parts rather than forming “concrete wholes” in the way plants and animals did (Spencer 1877: 475). Despite his analytical difficulties with the social organism, Spencer grounded his sociology firmly in biology. The basis of knowledge was the same in both disciplines because the first step in the production of any organism is a process of differentiation during which a peripheral portion becomes distinct from a central portion (Spencer 1873: 61). Spencer imagined that, at the earliest stage of human evolution, people lived like the Esquimaux or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego in that they lacked specialized functions in labor or war, and they did not possess a centralized organization. As societies advanced, then individuals within these societies became specialized by adopting industrial and military functions, and even special judicial functions. On the basis of such specialization, societies began to display increasingly complex social structures grouped around centralized administrations. According to Spencer, these functional and structural features evolved because they acted upon each other in a reciprocal fashion: it was not a matter of simply treating one as a cause of the other. There was also the matter of demographic size; as Spencer phrased it, “mass is both a condition to, and a result of, organization in a society” (Spencer 1877: 12). He believed that as a society gained some permanence there were interactions between it and its individual members such that each affected the other, and they molded each other’s activities and ideas so they would be congruent (Spencer 1877: 12–13). In other words, human evolution involved a complex series of reflex actions; it was not simple as it would have been if caused by competition and survival of the fittest. The increasing complexity of developing societies in their differentiated functions and structures did not take on transcendent qualities; even when the causes of social change were human ones such as progressive modification of the physical environment, they stayed material causes. Spencer’s treatment of warfare is a typical example of how he dealt with complex evolutionary politics. Bravely for a pacifist writing in the era of Bismarck, Spencer argued that, “Warfare among men, like warfare among animals, has had a large share in raising their organizations to a higher stage” (Spencer 1873: 193). War was a social constant, and, with a few primitive exceptions, all societies “are occasionally or habitually in antagonism with other societies” (Spencer 1877: 576). Organized conflict would have eliminated feeble tribes and individuals who were lacking in endeavor, courage, sagacity, or cooperative ability (Spencer 1873: 193). Also, by increasing social consolidation, war indirectly favored industrial progress with all its civilizing consequences (Spencer 1873: 194, 197). Then too, Spencer believed that in the “super-organic” environment that existed between neighboring societies there was “a struggle for existence” which determined the kind of political organization that a society possessed. However, despite his admission that war had been a cause of human evolution, Spencer was far from arguing that evolution had always worked that way, or that it would continue to do so in the future. To begin with, war could not have been a factor – qua Hobbes – that had caused initial social formation because an existing organized society was necessary in order to pursue large-scale collective violence. Further, Spencer believed that the effect of war on industrialization might not be consistently progressive because it diverted men and material away from more general industrial growth, and it disrupted the complex independence of civilian agencies (Spencer 1873: 197). The psychological and social changes brought

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about by conflict were “profound metamorphoses” (Spencer 1877: 16), but they were only occasionally progressive. This implied that aggressive competition between groups could not be the cause of social evolution. Since Spencer’s analysis was based upon many thousands of examples it seems arbitrary at first sight to choose only one when illustrating. However, this procedure is appropriate because Spencer’s inductivism did not give priority to any particular examples of data. They all had weight, but the one mentioned here illustrates that Spencer included large-scale subjects that could not be easily tabulated. An example of such material is Spencer’s emphasis on Edward Gibbon’s remark that, “It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the causes of decay and corruption. The long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, had introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of empire” (Spencer 1873: 200). That is, the very stability which had brought about Rome’s greatness – its long and uniform government – caused its decay. In emphasizing this point Spencer was not subscribing to a Hegelian dialectical movement of reason through history, but to something much less spiritual. He perceived Gibbon’s remark as an example of the general scientific proposition that the same social features – mutual interdependence and cooperation – could cause the opposite results of social integration and disintegration. The second was a reflexive action of the first. Spencer was reluctant to accept monocausal explanations because he viewed social evolution as a dynamic set of changes producing factors that could be progressive or regressive depending on how they interacted with the environment. For a number of reasons even the environment could not be regarded as a constant. First, and most simply, the physical environment itself had been heavily modified by human activity. Second, human beings created “super-organic” environments which might alter their individual and collective behavior. These sorts of environments included theologies, codes of law, and even aesthetic contexts such as picture galleries (Spencer 1877: 14–15). For Spencer cultural traditions were not artificial legacies, but, over time, had become as natural as the material constraints that were imposed by population growth and food shortages. Spencer was able to jettison monocausal explanations because he was not focused exclusively on changes in either the individual or society. The individual and the social levels could interact. This meant Spencer could treat social action as a reflex of individual activity. For example, he claimed that excessive self-esteem within an individual’s mind had a reflex form at the social level as patriotism (Spencer 1873: 214). Also, he noted that some of the political demands by the working class and the middle class were reflex actions of individual egoism (Spencer 1873: 242). Spencer’s evolutionary theories work on distinct levels – the individual, the societal, and the super-organic – and adaptation might be limited to one of these levels, or, as in the example just cited, it might take place when one level interacted with another. The levels always stayed separate. Multi-level analysis put Spencer out-of-step with some other “classical” sociologists because he was usually content to discuss altruism in terms of psychological development rather than as a response to social forces. When Spencer wrote of the reciprocal influence of the society and its individual members, or of the influence of the whole on the parts and parts on the whole (Spencer 1877: 12), he was not only offering a theory that operated on different levels of analysis, he was also providing a dynamic multi-causal idea of social change

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that was integrated into his political theory. Since he perceived political and social development as a complex series of interlinked processes, any attempt to impose change arbitrarily as if one was outside these processes was doomed to fail (Spencer 1873: 21–2). Social changes had to take place “spontaneously” (Spencer 1873: 349), since if individuals did not voluntarily adapt to shifts they would revert to older patterns of behavior when they were no longer compelled to behave in a reformed manner. This was not a comment about the reversion of species to earlier forms. That is, Spencer was not re-enforcing the notion that societies might evolve backwards to an earlier stage, but claiming that only genuine adaptation could shape individual adaptation; if the latter were merely an effect of coercion then any apparent evolutionary advantage would vanish once harsh political sanctions were relaxed (Spencer 1873: 349). This is, of course, an empirical claim, not a philosophical one, and, in this quality, it resembled much of Spencer’s political theory. That is, he speculated, as a matter of fact, that moral behavior and increased freedom would, over time, tend to survive while immoral behavior and tyranny would tend to disappear.

Political institutions and social change Though he has sometimes been misinterpreted as a libertarian or an extreme individualist who opposed reform, it is more accurate to regard Spencer as a reformer who opposed politically-imposed changes because they were pre-scientific proposals that treated societies as if these responded to the same desires and appeals to reason as individuals did. Demands for political change which appealed only to the reason were regarded by Spencer as particularly repugnant. This was why he argued that legislation that ignored popular emotions would fail (Spencer 1872: 592–606; 1877: 71); his argument here was not a defense of democracy, but a rejection of utilitarian reform. Spencer believed that an attempt to direct reform by objectively calculating the interests and happiness of the diverse people who composed the citizenry would not account for the feelings or sentiments of large portions of it. Instead of this, Spencer wished to take into account the real interests of a community and this included respect for feelings. Spencer was rejecting not only the language of conservative politics, but that of reform as well. Both discourses relied upon the sovereign will to impose order or change upon a civil society, and this, Spencer believed, was despotic and cruel in both its psychological and social implications. To Spencer, the sovereign will was a perpetuation of the egoism that belonged in a primitive society. The evolution of the human psyche and social structures had transformed the expression of simple egoism to a more complex condition that incorporated some altruism or selflessness (Spencer 1877: 589). Industrial societies had evolved to the point that individual citizens could recognize that other citizens possessed correlative claims. Since, for Spencer, social forms included political institutions this suggested that the latter had adapted so as not to conflict with individual freedom. Instead of being commanded by a centralized regulatory agency, social activities were becoming voluntary or cooperative, and administration was becoming more decentralized. Spencer’s treatment of social change in advanced societies was in sharp contrast to his view of the origins of social change. At the beginning of social evolution, “simple societies” did not possess coercive hierarchies. Further, in the distant past

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simple or primitive societies had not yet begun to display cooperation and voluntary patterns, even though their members possessed the same virtues as those of modern societies. It was not increased morality that had caused evolution; evolution had proceeded through the gradual differentiation of societies by the erection of specialized administration. This was usually in the form of a headship, and it is notable that Spencer’s progressive tabulation of societies began with a categorization of simple societies, compound societies, and double compound societies – described in relation to some form of titular administration. Namely, they were “headless,” they had “occasional headship,” they possessed “unstable headship,” etc. The establishment of a permanent political hierarchy was near the beginning of the evolutionary process, though not its originating phase. Spencer’s insistence upon this point was not just a matter of ethnographic exactitude; it was an assault on social contract theory with its belief that the creation of a sovereign or Leviathan which would bring about peace was the origin of society. For Spencer, societies acquired administrative authority and the capacity to conduct war at an intermediate stage of evolution, not at the beginning. Spencer’s desire to avoid replicating the conditions which had been prevalent at the origin of society was part of his liberalism. While he agreed that tradition was necessary to political culture, this was a liberal use of tradition. That is, Spencer avoided the conservative strategy of assigning legitimacy to the initial elements of tradition. This is part of a perennial debate; even recent conservative thinkers such as Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss have assigned value to the initial establishment of tradition. Spencer, in contrast, takes the foundation of society as a necessary starting point which was too rudimentary to warrant respect. It was Spencer’s treatment of advanced societies – especially those which had undergone industrialization – that saw the biggest divergence between his evolutionary theory and those of other early sociologists. While his ideas supported social change based upon the development of a complex division of labor and occupationally-based stratification, they did not favor the general sociological proposition that there had been a contemporaneous emergence of rationalized proceedings for achieving social integration (Abrams 1982: 21). On the contrary, Spencer argued, faith in such procedures was part of a non-scientific political ethos. The distance between Spencer and other “classical” sociologists here did not arise from his political stance, but from his views on how modern individuals functioned. Sociologists such as Durkheim posited that the basis of social differentiation – the division of labor – sprang from the struggle between individuals as these learned to express their consciousness (Abrams 1982: 26), while Spencer saw social differentiation as evolving separately from the sense of individuality. Since Spencer could not discover that there was any effective coercive apparatus in early societies, he concluded that there was no reason to suppose that it could have caused a lack of individuality (Lizardo 2009: 541). While it is sometimes claimed that Durkheim’s social theory paralleled Spencer’s and that both were functionalist, it is important to reiterate that, for Durkheim, there was a political direction to his functionalism that always directed human beings towards the integration which he saw as the good of society (Turner 1985: 51). For Spencer, however, the effect of functionalism could be either integrative or disintegrative. Further, he could not imagine any way that one could satisfactorily elide the moral qualities of individuals into a notion of the overall good of society.

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It was Spencer’s attempt to be value-free and non-political that most distinguished him from other founders of sociology. Sociologists such as Max Weber and Émile Durkheim emphasized normative values in an attempt to shake up society which, they feared, was being undermined by excessively rational scientific analysis. Weber saw the presence of values as giving an obligatory quality to action and endowing it with compassion, responsibility, and brotherhood (Kalberg 2005: 245). While Durkheim was less concerned than Weber with ensuring that behavior would be binding or obligatory, his morals were restricted to supporting the social imperatives such as the common good (Lukes 1973: 417). For both Weber and Durkheim morals were subordinate to the political order, and social improvement was regarded as the consequence of citizens pursuing impersonal social goods. Spencer believed, on the contrary, that since morals evolve independently from political institutions they should not be subordinated to them. Rather than having the function of promoting political order, ethical values only had meaning when attached to private lives that needed protection from the state. In separating private lives from the state, Spencer was not so much offering a liberal version of sociology as avoiding an authoritarian one.

RECENT INTERPRETATIONS Much of Spencer’s sociology was based on reports of primitive (or, as he preferred, “pre-social”) societies which is why historians of anthropology (Hinsley 1981; Stocking 1987, 1995) have, in general, provided more sophisticated commentary on Spencer than historians of sociology. With the exception of Collini (1979) and den Otter (1996) accounts of Spencer often fail to display interest in detailed sociological disputes among Victorians. In addition, with the notable exception of Turner (1985), there was a disregard of empirically-based social theory of the kind that Spencer, Geddes, and Hobson practiced. Some sociologists (Abrams 1968, 1982; Peel 1971; Haines 1988) learned their social theory when studies of phenomenology were in fashion, and they applied to Spencer a Hegel-like progressive analysis in which social change was governed by teleological goals. In addition, sociological commentators often seemed unsettled by Spencer’s reliance upon methods of scientific analysis borrowed from biology – which explained social evolution as if it were no different than any other organic change. It was not just that Spencer’s explanation of social change seemed alien; his habit of relying extensively upon empirical data, and his rejection of subjective and phenomenological evidence, have puzzled many historians of sociology. There is a continuing scholarly tradition (see Gondermann 2007) which analyzes evolutionary theory on the basis of Spencer’s early essays written during the 1850s (Spencer, Essays, 1868, vols. I and II). Since Spencer did not systemize his social theories until after he had begun to publish his system of philosophy in 1862, this practice has led to a certain randomness of interpretation. The desire to analyze Spencer’s 1850s ideas is motivated by an attempt to emphasize their priority to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) so that a comparison between Spencer and Darwin will carry more weight. However, this enterprise has been unfruitful because Spencer’s early evolutionary theories were not based upon natural selection, but upon comparative neurophysiology, so were focused on the functioning

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of organic systems, not on their beginnings. Though the psychological underpinnings were a contributing source of Spencer’s evolutionary theories, there is no current and useful historical literature on this subject. Older histories of psychology (e.g., Hearnshaw 1964) paid some attention to Spencer’s emphasis on reflex action in his voluntary psychology. However, recent historians of psychology (Rylance 2000; Dixon 2003) are more interested in cultural history than in empirically based psychology, and largely ignore the role of reflex action in Spencer’s evolutionary psychology. Generally, recent Spencer scholarship shows signs of improvement. There is a recent study of Spencer’s philosophy which is very valuable (Taylor 2007), and some specialized work on Spencer’s scholarship is sophisticated. Lizardo (2009) has a very fine analysis of the Durkheim–Spencer relationship, and Renwick (2009) ably explores Spencer’s impact on Spencerians such as Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thompson. Beck (2004) has done good work on Spencerians in France and Italy. What is still needed is a detailed study of the relationship between Spencer’s biology and his use of ethnographic data. Curtis Hinsley Jr. (1981) did significant work on ethnography in nineteenth-century America but other areas of the world are only covered in passing by scholars, such as George Stocking Jr., whose main interest is to provide a general history of anthropology. While Robert J. Richards (1992, 2004) has opened up Spencer’s biology, it would be desirable to have a detailed study of how Spencerian biological theory impacted upon the collection and analysis of social data.

Reader’s Guide to Herbert Spencer The publishing history of the various components of Spencer’s system is complex. All volumes were initially issued in parts to subscribers. Subsequently, they were issued as volumes for general sale. First Principles (1862) stayed in a one-volume format, and The Principles of Biology (1864, 1867) and The Principles of Psychology (1870, 1872) were finished quite early, and were always two volumes each. The first parts of The Principles of Sociology and The Principles of Ethics first appeared in the 1870s, while some later parts of The Principles of Sociology such as Political Institutions (1882) were quite lengthy published books in their own right. Ultimately, The Principles of Sociology coalesced into three volumes and The Principles of Ethics into two volumes. It is a mistake to read Spencer’s 1850s essays, such as “Social Organism” (Essays, I, 1868), as if they contain early versions of the systematic theories of biological and social evolution that he developed in his system of synthetic philosophy during the 1860s and 1870s. The early essays are topical and reflect mid-Victorian popular concerns. Further, as indicated in their title they are speculative while Spencer’s system is scientific and heavily dependent upon data. The volumes of Spencer’s system are to be preferred as sources for Spencer’s sociology on grounds of both sophistication and originality. Spencer’s Principles of Biology (1864, 1867) contains useful demographic remarks on the ways in which the environment impacted upon human society, but more cultural aspects of social evolution were not discussed in detail until Spencer explicitly wrote on sociology. That is, the important aspects of Spencer’s social evolution are mostly contained in The Study of Sociology (1873) and volume I of The Principles of Sociology (1877). The second volume of The Principles of Sociology (1882) should not be neglected as it is interesting for its section on political evolution. The third

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volume of The Principles of Sociology (1896) was written too late in Spencer’s life to contain much of interest. This is a pity as it dealt with industrial institutions, and if it had been completed earlier there would be more value in a detailed comparison between Spencer’s ideas on industrial evolution and those of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. As it is, any viable comparison has to rest upon uninspired material in volume III together with sketchy remarks on industrial societies that Spencer made during the 1870s when dealing with other subjects.

Bibliography Writings of Herbert Spencer 1851. Social Statics, Or The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified and the First of Them Developed. London: John Chapman. 1864. The Principles of Biology. London: Williams and Norgate, vol. I. 1867. The Principles of Biology. London: Williams and Norgate, vol. II. 1868. Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative. London: Williams and Norgate, vols. I and II. (Volume I contains many of the essays Spencer wrote during the 1850s.) 1870. The Principles of Psychology. London: Williams and Norgate, vol. I. (This volume was first published in 1856.) 1872. The Principles of Psychology. London: Williams and Norgate, vol. II. 1873. The Study of Sociology. London: Henry S. King. 1874. Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative. London: Williams and Norgate, vol. III. 1875. First Principles. London: Williams and Norgate, 3rd edn. (First published in 1862.) 1877. The Principles of Sociology. London: Williams and Norgate, 2nd edn., vol. I. (This volume was first published in 1876.) 1882. The Principles of Sociology. London: Williams and Norgate, vol. II. 1884. The Man “versus” the State. London: Williams and Norgate. 1892. The Principles of Ethics. London: Williams and Norgate, vol. I. (Part I of this was published in 1879 under the title The Data of Ethics.) 1893. The Principles of Ethics. London: Williams and Norgate, vol. II. 1896. The Principles of Sociology. London: Williams and Norgate, vol. III. 1904. An Autobiography. London: Williams and Norgate, 2 vols.

Further Reading Abrams, Philip (1968) The Origins of British Sociology: 1834–1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Abrams, Philip (1982) Historical Sociology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Beck, Naomi (2004) “The Diffusion of Spencerism, and its Political Interpretations in France and Italy.” In Greta Jones and Robert A. Peel (eds.), Herbert Spencer: The Intellectual Legacy. London: Galton Institute, pp. 37–80. Collini, Stefan (1979) Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1886–1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. den Otter, Sandra M. (1996) British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dixon, Thomas (2003) From Passion to Emotion: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dixon, Thomas (2008) The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy.

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Francis, Mark (2007) Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life. Stocksfield: Acumen (UK)/Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gondermann, Thomas (2007) “Progression and Retrogression: Herbert Spencer’s Explanations of Social Inequality.” History of the Human Sciences 20(2): 21–40. Groenewegen, Peter (2001) “The Evolutionary Economics of Alfred Marshall: An Overview.” In John Laurent and John Nightingale (eds.), Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Haines, Valerie A. (1988) “Is Spencer’s Theory an Evolutionary Theory?” American Journal of Sociology 93(5): 1200–23. Hearnshaw, L. S. (1964) A Short History of British Psychology, 1840–1940. London: Methuen. Hinsley, Curtis M., Jr. (1981) Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2001) “Is Social Evolution Lamarckian or Darwinian?” In John Laurent and John Nightingale (eds.), Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Jones, Greta and Robert A. Peel (eds.) (2004) Herbert Spencer: The Intellectual Legacy. London: Galton Institute. Kalberg, Stephen (2005) “The Circumscription of Ethical Action Today and Weber’s Response, Introduction.” In Stephen Kalberg (ed.), Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Kuklick, Henrika (1991) The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laurent, John and John Nightingale (eds.) (2001) Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Leonard, Thomas C. (2009) ”Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism: The Ambiguous Legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s ‘Social Darwinism in American Thought’.” Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization 71: 37–51. Lizardo, Omar (2009) “Taking Cognitive Dualism Seriously: Revisiting the Durkheim–Spencer Debate on the Rise of Individualism.” Sociological Perspectives 52(4): 533–55. Lukes, Steven (1973) Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work. London: Penguin. Mackay, Ian (2008) Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada, 1890–1920. Toronto: Between the Lines. Mackay, Thomas (ed.) (1891) A Plea for Liberty. New York: D. Appleton. Miller, William L. (1972) “Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Welfare and Public Policy.” History of Political Economy 4(1): 207–31. Offer, John (ed.) (2000) Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments. London: Routledge, 4 vols. Peel, J. D. Y. (1971) Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist. London: Heinemann. Perrin, Robert G. (1993) Herbert Spencer: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. Perrin, Robert G. (2000) “Herbert Spencer’s Four Theories of Social Evolution.” In John Offer (ed.), Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments. London: Routledge, vol. II. (This article originally appeared in the American Journal of Sociology 81, 1976.) Renwick, Chris (2009) “The Practice of Spencerian Science: Patrick Geddes’s Biological Program, 1876–1889.” Isis 100: 36–57. Richards, Robert J. (1992) The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Richards, Robert J. (2004) “The Relation of Spencer’s Evolutionary Theory to Darwin’s.” In Greta Jones and Robert Peel (eds.), Herbert Spencer: The Intellectual Legacy. London: Galton Institute. Rylance, Rick (2000) Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stocking, George W., Jr. (1987) Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Stocking, George W., Jr. (1995) After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Taylor, Michael W. (2007) The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer. London: Continuum. Turner, Jonathan H. (1985) Herbert Spencer: A Renewed Appreciation. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.

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7 Thorstein Veblen KEN McCORMICK

THE PERSON Thorstein Veblen requested that no biography of him ever be published. Nevertheless, in 1934 Joseph Dorfman published Thorstein Veblen and His America. For more than half a century it reigned as the definitive biography of Veblen, and “citing it was de rigueur for generations of Veblen scholars” (Edgell 2001: 36). Yet when Dorfman’s papers became available to scholars in the 1990s, it became clear that he had written a “pathography” (Edgell 2001: 32) rather than a biography. Dorfman had a story that he wanted to tell, and he ignored or misinterpreted all evidence that contradicted that story. Veblen was an unconventional individual and a penetrating, original thinker. He was able to examine things that most people view as perfectly normal and point out how absurd they are. Dorfman wanted to explain this ability on the basis of Veblen’s personal history. He claimed that Veblen grew up in a poor, immigrant family that was isolated from the broader “Yankee” community. A weak command of English led to his continuing isolation, even in college. In short, Dorfman portrayed Veblen as the perpetual outsider, alienated and marginalized. His unique viewpoint allowed him to look at common institutions with an objective eye. Yet the facts do not support Dorfman’s portrait. Worse yet, Dorfman’s misinformation still clouds many people’s view of Veblen. Thorstein Bunde Veblen was born on a farm in 1857 in Manitowic County, Wisconsin. He was the sixth of what would eventually be 12 children born to Thomas and Kari Veblen, who had immigrated from Norway. Thorstein learned Norwegian at home, but also English from friends and in school. In 1865 the family moved to a farm in Rice County, Minnesota. The Veblens prospered on their farm. Thomas and Kari were able to send all of their children to Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. At the time it was quite unusual to send girls to college. But The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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the Veblen family placed great emphasis on education and on the equality of the sexes. Both of these ideas were important to Thorstein throughout his life. At Carleton, Thorstein met two people who would be influential in his life. One was Ellen Rolfe, the niece of the college president. Ellen would eventually become Thorstein’s first wife. The other was professor John Bates Clark. Clark is one of the founders of neoclassical economics, which, then as now, dominates the profession. Veblen’s respect for Clark would not prevent him from relentlessly criticizing neoclassical economics. After Carleton, Veblen taught mathematics for a year at Monona Academy in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1881 he went to Johns Hopkins University to do graduate work under Charles Sanders Peirce. In 1882 he moved to Yale to study under William Graham Sumner. In 1884 Veblen received his PhD in philosophy. His dissertation, “The Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of Retribution,” received the John Addison Porter prize, which is given at Yale to the best scholarly work in any field. Despite his stellar academic background and references, Veblen was unable to find suitable work. Part of the reason was the malaria that he had contracted, which sapped his health. But his unconventional religious beliefs also played a role. Veblen was no fan of organized religion, and, later in life, some of the best of Veblen’s legendary satire was directed at it. Even though he wrote favorably about some of Christianity’s core beliefs, Veblen consistently rejected any appeal to supernatural forces. Rick Tilman (2007) argues that the metaphysical foundation of Veblen’s work is the idea that nothing is outside of nature, and humans have no special place in it. In the circumstances of the times, a lack of religious orthodoxy was a severe handicap in finding academic employment. From 1884 to 1891 Veblen was unemployed. He returned home and read. He married Ellen Rolfe in 1888 and moved to a farm near Stacyville, Iowa. While in Iowa he translated the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga. In 1891 he went to Cornell University as a graduate student in economics under James Laurence Laughlin. In 1892 Veblen moved with Laughlin to the newly created University of Chicago. Veblen stayed at Chicago until 1906, rising through the university’s 10-step hierarchy to the rank of assistant professor of political economy. From 1896 to 1905 Veblen was the managing editor of the Journal of Political Economy. In 1899 he published his most famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. In 1904 he published The Theory of Business Enterprise. Neither book endeared him to his employers; the first is critical of the upper class in general and the second is critical of businessmen in particular. He was also working on a draft of The Higher Learning in America, which was critical of the university’s administration, especially its president. The attacks on powerful institutions jeopardized Veblen’s employment, but the last straw was his reputation as a womanizer. The extent to which he deserved the reputation is not entirely clear. Veblen was attractive to women partly because he treated them as intellectual equals. But it did not help that his wife was also unhappy with his relationships with other women. In any event, the combination of Veblen’s personal life and his assault on conventional views led to his departure from Chicago in 1906. Veblen found a job at Stanford University at higher pay and higher rank (associate professor). Unfortunately, the job did not last long. His estranged wife actively campaigned for his dismissal on the grounds of his alleged infidelities. He was forced to resign in 1909 and was divorced in 1911.

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In 1911 Veblen was hired by the University of Missouri, where a former student was head of the economics department. He stayed until 1918. In 1914 Veblen published The Instinct of Workmanship, which he considered his “only important book” (Edgell 2001: 25). Also in 1914, he married Ann Bradley, whom he had known since 1904. In 1915 he published Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. Some wrongly interpreted it as pro-German, and considered it unpatriotic. It was declared “unmailable” by the US Postal Service after the United States entered the war. Veblen worked at the Food Administration in Washington DC for a short time in 1918. He left voluntarily because it was clear that he was not welcome. People of questionable patriotism who write books critical of the powerful generally do not do well in Washington. After that, he became editor of the literary and political magazine The Dial. In 1919 Veblen became one of the founders of the New School for Social Research in New York City. The same year his wife Ann entered a mental institution; she died in 1920. In 1925 the American Economic Association offered to make him its president. Veblen declined. How could he accept after a lifetime of poor treatment by the academic establishment? His work had earned him an international reputation, but it was mostly in spite of the American economics profession. Veblen retired in 1926 and moved to Menlo Park, California. He had little money and his health was failing. A loving stepdaughter looked after him until he died of heart failure in 1929, three months before the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT Veblen came of age during the “Gilded Age,” when the United States became a great industrial power. In the process the country underwent great economic and social transformation. A national transportation network emerged that allowed for a national market. Economic power flowed to “Captains of Industry” such as J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, J. D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, all of whom amassed enormous fortunes. Adam Smith had argued that in a competitive market economy, to make money one would have to provide a good or service that someone else wanted. In this fashion, self-interest would lead to socially beneficial behavior. Yet the Captains of Industry (the “Robber Barons”) often made money by engaging in socially harmful behavior. For example, Standard Oil, founded by J. D. Rockefeller, monopolized the market for oil. With monopoly power, the firm could make more money by producing less. In other words, there was money to be made from what amounted to industrial “sabotage” (Veblen 1921: 1). The conflict between “industry” and “business” became obvious during the Gilded Age and it permeates Veblen’s work. The purpose of industry is to make useful goods and services. The goal of business is to make money. Sometimes the goals coincide. But often more money can be made by restricting industry. Monopoly power can do just that. The business cycle also illustrates the idea. In a recession, industry does not lose its ability to produce; it can still make the goods

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that people need or want. Businessmen do not allow production to continue because of the fear of losing money. Because business controls industry, making money trumps making goods. The incredible fortunes made during the period allowed for extravagant displays of wealth. Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to explain such displays. Humans are status-conscious. In our culture, wealth confers status. Yet “in order to gain and hold the esteem of men, it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence” (Veblen 1899: 36). The gild in the “Gilded Age” was a manifestation of the competition among the elite for status.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT In addition to Norwegian and English, Veblen was fluent in German and French. He read voraciously and did not respect disciplinary boundaries. He has been called one of “the best informed men of his generation” (Spengler 1972: 861). The huge variety of influences on him is astonishing. Yet there is no doubt that the most important influence was Charles Darwin. Social evolution exhibits the same continuous, cumulative change that Darwin ascribes to the biological world. Tilman argues convincingly that Veblen’s “epistemology, ontology, axiology and even his methodology are a variant fusion of American naturalism and Darwinian evolutionary theory” (2007: 4). Veblen read Darwin carefully. He also read Herbert Spencer’s ideas about “Social Darwinism.” Veblen studied under William Graham Sumner, who was a devotee of Spencer. A debate raged at the time between Darwinists and Lamarckians. Lamarckians argued that acquired characteristics could be passed on genetically. Darwinians objected, arguing that acquired characteristics do not affect one’s genes. Spencer embraced the Lamarckian view. It was virtually necessary for him to do so if he wanted to explain the relatively rapid evolution of civilization and still maintain a biologically deterministic view. Hodgson (1998) argues that an important influence on Veblen at this point was C. Lloyd Morgan’s book Habit and Instinct (1896). Morgan was a “vigorous Darwinian” (Hodgson 1998: 420). He recognized that, genetically, humans had not changed much over the last few millennia. The observed changes in human civilization had to stem from changes in the social environment. As Morgan wrote, “it is not perhaps so obvious that this transference of evolution from the individual to the environment may leave the faculty of the race at a standstill, while the achievements of the race are progressing by leaps and bounds” (1896: 340). In other words, society could change even if humans’ genetic make-up did not. Morgan did not, however, explain the mechanism of social evolution (Hodgson 1998: 422). Veblen’s lifelong research agenda was shaped by a desire to fill that gap in Morgan’s argument. Veblen saw that while biological evolution mattered, so did the social and physical environment. To put it differently, Veblen argued in favor of both nature and nurture. Biologically, humans inherit innate traits that motivate their behavior, traits that are themselves subject to biological evolution over long periods of time. How the traits are manifested depends on the social and physical

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environment. It is the evolution of that environment, and how it alters human behavior, that Veblen sought to explain. In his essay, “Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” (1919: 56–81), Veblen argued that economics was falling behind scientifically because of its failure to develop an evolutionary approach. Neoclassical economics was consciously modeled on Newtonian physics, which Adam Smith called “the greatest discovery that was ever made by man” (1795: 105). Vilfredo Pareto, a contemporary of Veblen’s, wrote that “the problem of pure economics bears a striking likeness to that of rational mechanics” (1897: 490). Newtonian physics led neoclassical economics to emphasize equilibrium analysis in which there is no room for evolution. Equilibrium analysis also requires a stable, unchanging unit of analysis. Neoclassical economics therefore posited that human nature is unchanging, and is motivated by pleasure and pain. Veblen famously satirized Homo economicus as “a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent nor consequent.… He is not the seat of a process of living” (1919: 73–4). Marx discussed social evolution, but not in Darwinian terms. In most interpretations, Marx’s system is teleological in that it has a predestined endpoint in communism. It is a variant of the natural law approach of neoclassical economics. Veblen wrote that “this natural law is felt to exercise some sort of coercive surveillance over the sequence of events and to give a spiritual stability” (1919: 61). But there is no room for teleology in Darwinian evolution; the direction of change cannot be known in advance. In addition, Marx emphasized nurture above all. Marx famously wrote that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness” (1859: 4). Veblen rejected this materialist view, arguing that it makes people merely “creatures of circumstances” (1897: 137). It was clear to Veblen that neoclassical economists were not even looking for an explanation of social evolution, and that Marx had taken the wrong approach. He therefore set himself the task of creating an evolutionary economics, which he said “must be a theory of a process of cultural growth as determined by the economic interest, a theory of a cumulative sequence of economic institutions stated in terms of the process itself” (1919: 77).

THE WORK The building blocks: instincts and institutions According to Veblen, human behavior is shaped by instincts and institutions. Instincts are “the innate and persistent propensities of human nature” (1914: 2). Institutions are “the habitual methods of carrying on the life process of the community” (1899: 193). The instincts provide the motives for behavior, and the institutions govern how those motives manifest. Instincts are the product of human biological evolution, and will continue to evolve. The slow pace of biological evolution implies that changes in instincts are

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not the cause of most observable social evolution. In practice, Veblen treated the instincts as more or less stable for the purpose of explaining social change. Commentators traditionally divide the instincts into group-regarding instincts and self-regarding instincts. Yet Veblen himself was no fan of taxonomies, and some instincts do not fit precisely into either category. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that both the self and the group are important to human survival. Without self-regarding instincts, individuals would not survive. But humans live in groups, and individual survival also depends on the group’s survival. One instinct is our “parental bent” (1914: 26). It is our instinctive desire to care for the young and it is much broader than the “quasi-tropismatic impulse” (1914: 26) to procreate. Groups who care for their young have their genes perpetuated. Care includes not just food and shelter, but also instruction so that the next generation can take care of itself when the time comes. We also possess an “instinct of workmanship,” which is “a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort” (1899: 15). We enjoy building and creating and dislike pointless activity. The survival of the species is enhanced by it, and so the trait survives. It does not mean that all work is always fun, but it does mean that work is not always as painful as economists assume. The instinct of workmanship complements our parental bent because it helps us provide for the young. Veblen saw the two instincts as so closely related that it is “a matter of extreme difficulty to draw a line between them” (1914: 31). A third instinct is “idle curiosity” (1914: 85). It is a desire “to know things, when greater interests do not engross their attentions” (1914: 85). People are simply curious and want to understand their world. The desire does not have a practical motive, but its cumulative effect is profound. Ultimately, it is the source of “the most substantial achievement of the race – its systematized knowledge and quasi-knowledge of things” (1914: 87). It is the root of science and technology. Another instinct is emulation. We observe what others do and copy them; it is how we learn. Veblen says that, “with the exception of the instinct for selfpreservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper” (1914: 110). Yet in choosing whom to emulate, we must rank people from better to worse. Such invidious comparisons create differences in status. As we shall see, the desire for status is central in Veblen’s analysis. It should also be stressed that, depending on the institutions, the objects of emulation differ. For example, in some circumstances people might emulate the most creative and productive workers. In others, they might emulate the most savage gangsters. The desire for status fuels two other instincts, self-aggrandizement and predation. We want to build ourselves up, sometimes even at the expense of others. To be at the top of the pecking-order improves the chances for our survival. The institutions determine how these instincts manifest themselves. Common outlets for predation include warfare, religion, crime, business, and law. Instincts often interact and blend. No particular instinct is always dominant; we are complex, sometimes contradictory beings. For example, our parental bent means that the old will look after the young. But our desire for self-aggrandizement means that the old may dominate the young far longer than they should. “Paternalism” has both good and bad connotations.

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Institutions arise because the world is a complicated place. The array of decisions an individual must make every day is huge. To cope with complexity, people develop routines and habits that allow them to live their lives without continually making conscious choices. We reserve “thinking” for novel circumstances for which we have no conventional response. Groups also face vast numbers of decisions that must be made, both within the group and in dealing with other groups. Group habits emerge. The habits govern the life of the group and acquire the force of custom and tradition. In some cases, the habits are formalized as laws or rules. Others remain as powerful habits of thought. Individuals are socialized to accept the group habits. Almost everything we do, from what to eat and wear to the proper views on religion, politics, race, gender, and lawn care, comes to be governed by the social habits called institutions. Through them we develop deeply ingrained ideas about right and wrong. Once ingrained, these ideas are rarely subject to reason. “Everyone” knows that the things they have learned define how “normal” people live. Institutions perform the essential function of organizing society. Without them there would be chaos. The symbols on this page allow us to communicate but are no more than social conventions. Traffic laws improve safety and traffic flows. Standardized measurements make a host of things easier. Yet not all institutions serve a positive function. Some entrench special privileges based on race, gender, age, or other characteristics. For Veblen, one of the most dangerous institutions of the modern world is nationalism. Nationalism creates a ranking of people from better to worse. In Veblen’s words, “born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress. In its material effects it is altogether the most sinister as well as the most imbecile of all those institutional incumbrances that have come down out of the old order” (1923: 38). Nationalism conflicted sharply with Veblen’s over-arching concern with the “generically human.” An important feature of institutions is that they are difficult to change. This is the case for a variety of reasons. One is because institutions are viewed as “normal,” so most people cannot conceive of doing things any other way. Those who advocate change are viewed as misguided or worse, and suffer social sanctions. Even today, to argue against nationalism is to open oneself to attack. And ultimately, as Veblen put it, “only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of their fellows” (1899: 30). Another reason institutions are hard to change is that some are supported by vested interests. Individuals and groups may want to preserve an institution because of the privileges it provides. Business, for example, can exploit nationalism to erect trade barriers to increase monopoly power. The combination of unquestioned traditions and cynical self-interest can make institutions quite powerful. In Veblen’s scheme, institutions are akin to society’s genes. The relative stability of institutions means that society tends to replicate itself over time, much like organisms replicate themselves. Generation after generation inherits the institutional (genetic) structure. Yet there are periodic mutations that occur. Institutions, like genes, tend to be stable, but they do change. Over time, small changes accumulate and become large changes. Society evolves. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the possibility of “revolutionary” change. The inherently conservative nature of institutions means that it is difficult to

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change them. If the change is too rapid or dramatic, there will be widespread resistance. As revolutionaries from Lenin to Pol Pot discovered, if one insists on revolutionary change, the price to be paid in blood can be quite high. Human beings are much more comfortable with small, gradual change. By analogy, revolutionary genetic changes are likely to create a genetic freak that cannot survive. Successful, lasting change is largely the product of many very small changes over time. The potential sources of institutional mutation are many. They include the actions of other societies (e.g., war), climate change, and even dedicated people with “aberrant temperament.” But for Veblen, the primary and most persistent cause of institutional change is technological change. New technologies create new problems and new opportunities that existing institutions cannot address. Adjustments become necessary.

Technological change and social evolution The amount of knowledge possessed by society is too large for any individual or family to possess. As a consequence, technology is a group possession. Individuals know only bits and pieces of the group’s technology, and what they know has value only because others know things that complement it. The book you hold in your hand is the product of countless individuals who each made a small but essential contribution. Loggers, tool makers, miners, truck drivers, chemists, binders, publishers, editors, and countless others contributed. None of them could have made the book by themselves. And a book is not considered advanced technology. Veblen stressed that the knowledge possessed by the community is ultimately its most important asset. Economists have often overlooked this point because technology cannot be seen and cannot be measured. Yet the community is helpless without it. As long as the community remains intact, material equipment can be replaced. If the community loses cohesion, nothing is possible, because as individuals our knowledge is fragmented into useless bits. Technological change ultimately arises from the instinct of idle curiosity. New ideas and understanding emerge, often without a clear purpose. The laser, for example, was for a long time derided as a solution in search of a problem. The instinct of workmanship leads people to apply the knowledge. Other instincts will guide technological change as long as “the growth of institutions has not seriously diverted the genius of the race from its natural bent” (1914: 110). Parental bent, for example, will channel new technology towards constructive ends; predation will direct it in socially harmful ways (viewed from the standpoint of the generically human). The laser is now used in both medicine and warfare. Veblen argued that technological development proceeds faster as people become more specialized. In so doing, he echoed Adam Smith, who had noted that one of the reasons that specialization enhances productivity is because people engaged in just a few tasks are more likely to find a better way to do them. Because the degree of specialization possible depends on the size of the technological community, Veblen argued that isolated groups would progress more slowly than those that interacted with other groups. He stressed that the technological community is not the same as the political community. A small country can participate in a large technological community, and a large country can cut itself off from the rest of the world. What is important is the free flow of ideas, unimpeded by national or other barriers. On the

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eve of World War I, Veblen wrote that the actions of “dynastic statesmen” (1914: 109n.) were likely to retard technological development. Instincts guide technological change to the extent that institutions do not interfere. Yet as the example of nationalism illustrates, institutions usually do interfere. In addition, the relationship between technology and institutions is bi-directional. Institutions guide both how technology is used and the direction of technological change. At the same time, technological change alters the institutional structure. The ultimate result cannot be known in advance; the process is not teleological. Institutions determine if or how technology is used. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot drive. In China, the ability to determine the sex of an unborn baby has led to so many selective abortions that the ratio of males to females is alarmingly high. The first book published by Gutenberg was a bible. Habits of thought, in other words, control technology. They also steer technological change by defining what good and bad are. Religious beliefs, for example, may stifle stem-cell research. Musical innovation is not likely to occur in areas under the control of the Taliban. The overall point is that institutions define what is acceptable, and therefore limit both the use of technology and the direction of technological change. In this fashion, technology is used to support institutions. But technological change can erode institutions. New technologies require existing institutions to react. The effect can be to create new institutions, sometimes by destroying old ones. For example, the development of industrial technology gradually led to a dramatic change in how people lived and worked. Large-scale enterprise meant that individuals could no longer work at home or at their own pace. The technology employed required the cooperation of large numbers of people, all of whom had to show up at the same place at the same time. The discipline of the clock reshaped the pattern of life. The process of technological change can also have a cumulative impact on how people view the world. Institutions are inherited from the past, and are generally accepted as normal without much thought. New technology, on the other hand, is the product of forward-looking reason. The technological view may gain importance in people’s minds. As that happens, people may acquire the habit of applying reason to institutions as well. When that occurs, institutions are weakened because they are no longer accepted without thought. Veblen emphasized that institutions usually change slowly. As he put it, the “rehabilitation of the people and the gradual readjustment of legal and moral convictions” (1915: 101) takes time. The result is a phenomenon that has come to be known as “cultural lag.” That means that the current set of institutions is always out of date in that it does not reflect the current state of technology. Intellectual property rights, for example, were written for a specific set of technologies. When technology changed, the laws did not automatically change too. Rules established for a preinternet age cannot adequately cope with the present situation. Veblen identified four broad stages of historical social evolution. The first, he argued, was relatively peaceful. During this period of “savagery,” technology was such that everyone was forced to spend their time making a living. During this time, a group “can not afford to be habitually occupied with annoying its neighbors, particularly so long as its neighbors have not accumulated a store of portable wealth which will make raiding worth while” (1914: 123). During this time, the instincts of workmanship and parental bent dominated. There simply wasn’t time for predation,

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which in any event had very little payoff. A dearth of idle time limited the amount of idle curiosity that could occur. Nevertheless, over a very long period of time, gradual improvements in technology occurred. Veblen, who read widely in anthropology, reported that these included advances in tool-making and in agriculture. Such technological advances would eventually have a profound impact on the institutional structure. They did so because productivity increased, which led to an economic surplus. A surplus means that not everyone has to spend all their time productively. As a result, there is scope for the predatory instincts. Veblen argued that during this time, predatory behavior manifested in two forms: warfare and religion. Warriors took what they wanted from others, or forced others to work for them. Shamans and priests did the same by threatening to bring down the wrath of the gods on the noncompliant. During this second, “barbarian” period, there emerges “a more or less habitual attitude of predatory exploit” (1914: 157). In the period of “savagery,” property rights were ill-defined because there wasn’t much worth owning. But in the “barbarian” period, the spoils of war and religion were claimed by the ones who acquired them. Property rights began to emerge. The combination of the economic surplus and predatory behavior meant that the leading warriors and priests accumulated wealth and wanted to preserve it. Thus warfare and religion, or what Veblen termed “force and fraud” (1914: 159), led to the institution of property. Ownership of property gave evidence of one’s predatory status. It also meant that one did not have to do productive work. Slaves taken in warfare were forced to toil for their captors. As a result, “work becomes a mark of inferiority and is therefore discreditable” (1914: 174). The instinct of workmanship goes into abeyance because the instinct of emulation leads people to mimic the high-status predatory elite. To this very day, productive work such as farming and plumbing has much lower status than absentee ownership or finance, even though farmers and plumbers are essential to our health and comfort. During the barbaric period, ownership became entrenched as evidence of high status. Gradually, the manner in which wealth was acquired became less important than the fact of ownership itself. Predatory activity remained the “best” way to obtain wealth, but any method was acceptable. Because steady application to trade or to a skilled profession could also lead to wealth, another channel to status emerged. Independent craftsmen and traders grew in numbers and in status, and became the hallmark of the third period, which Veblen called the handicraft era. Gradually there was a transition from a purely predatory culture to a commercial culture, which saw “the emergence of a middle class in such force as presently to recast the working arrangements of the cultural scheme and make peaceable business the ruling interest of the community” (1914: 184–5). During the handicraft era the instinct of workmanship found new expression as productive labor became another route to status. Idle curiosity was encouraged because it led to more technological improvements which further increased productivity. Yet the distinction between industry and business remained. The goal was status, and acquiring wealth was the method to achieve the goal. Hence making money was more important than making goods. Adam Smith emphasized that one could make money by making useful goods. Veblen did not dispute that that was sometimes the case, but he also pointed out that businessmen would not hesitate to

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make money in any way they could, even if it meant restricting productive activity. Smith himself had attacked the mercantilist system because it allowed businessmen to do just that. As technology developed, the scale of the production process grew. During the handicraft era, tools were relatively simple. Each worker could own and perhaps even make his own tools. In general, craftsmen could operate independently. As technology advanced, the requisite equipment needed to use it became increasingly elaborate and expensive, and often required many people to work together. Wealthier craftsmen hired others to work with, and ultimately for, them. Craftsmen who relied on the old technologies found that they could not compete with the new methods which had substantially reduced costs. A distinction thus arose between those who owned the equipment and those who depended on them for employment. “So capitalism emerged from the working of the handicraft system, through the increasing scale and efficiency of technology” (Veblen 1914: 282). The fourth period, the “era of machine industry,” brought with it profound social change. Large-scale enterprise requires the coordinated effort of many people who must show up at the same time. Individuals who at one time could decide where and when to work were forced to conform to the requirements of their employer. Life came to be scheduled and regimented by the clock. Veblen argued that the machine era made life in general more machine-like. Because human nature had evolved to fit a different environment, the result was an “increase in nervous disorders” (Veblen 1914: 316). The stress that plagues modern people is the result of the conflict between human nature “born, as it is, to fit the conditions of savage life” (Veblen 1914: 334) and the regimentation imposed by our technology and institutions.

The modern era: capital and business enterprise There are three institutions that dominate the modern period: ownership, business enterprise, and “an habitual and conventionally righteous disregard of other than pecuniary considerations” (Veblen 1914: 347). Ownership implies wealth, and wealth confers status. Business enterprise is the system that controls most of the wealth and the use of society’s technology. The object of both ownership and business is money, and so everything is considered in light of its pecuniary effects. The habits of thought of the dominant institutions pervade the society. In a modern economy, “ownership” generally means the ownership of capital. It is therefore worthwhile to consider what the word really means. In neoclassical economics, capital is a fund of value that represents ownership of what Veblen’s teacher John Bates Clark (1899) called capital goods. Capital goods are machines, tools, structures, and other tangible items used in production. The capital goods generate income that is used both to replace worn-out equipment and to pay a return to owners. The ability of capital goods to both pay for themselves and pay a return means that they are “productive.” A $1,000 machine may be able to generate, say, $1,100 worth of output. The surplus $100 is returned to the people who made it possible, i.e., the people who provided the capital. It is worth emphasizing that, in this formulation, the return to capital does not come from the exploitation of labor (as in Marx); it comes from capital’s own ability to produce a surplus.

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In both neoclassical and Marxist economics, there is an obsession with explaining the distribution of income among workers, capitalists, and landlords. Veblen argued that this was evidence that economics was taxonomic and therefore pre-Darwinian. By attempting to explain the returns to labor, capital, and land, economists missed the obvious point that production is a social process. Capital, labor, and land are not productive by themselves; they are productive only to the extent that we know how to use them. In other words, the productivity of anything depends on technology, which is possessed by the society as a whole. As Veblen put it: All tangible assets owe their productivity and their value to the immaterial industrial expedients which they embody.… Those immaterial industrial expedients are necessarily a product of the community, the immaterial residue of the community’s experience, past and present; which has no existence apart from the community’s life, and can be transmitted only in the keeping of the community at large.… What there is involved in the material equipment, which is not of this immaterial, spiritual nature, and so what is not an immaterial residue of the community’s experience, is the raw material out of which the industrial appliances are constructed, with the stress falling wholly on the “raw.” (1919: 347–8)

Economists have generally missed this point because typically there is no payment for the use of technology, the vast majority of which is freely available. Businesses must pay wages, profit, and rent because labor, capital, and land have owners. But for the most part no one owns technology. The exception proves the rule: when a particular piece of knowledge is owned because of a patent, payment must be made for its use. Payments follow property rights and do not correspond neatly with “productivity.” Capital, land, and labor are not productive outside the technological community. If you doubt this, consider how useful advanced industrial equipment and highly trained modern specialists would be in a stone-age community. If capital is not inherently productive, how is it that owners of capital can claim a payment for its use? In Veblen’s view, for most of human history, there was no return to capital. When technology is simple, capital goods are simple and are easily made. Anyone who wants a digging stick or stone mortar can just go find one. But as technology advanced, the equipment needed to make use of it became both more sophisticated and more expensive. The small number of people who could afford it discovered that they could extract a payment for its use. Society as a whole possesses technology, but only a few own the equipment needed to make use of that technology. Capital and land are useless without society’s technology, but the scarcity of capital and land allows their owners to extract a payment. Veblen likens owners of capital to owners of land: It is only within the given technological situation, the current scheme of ways and means, that any parcel of land has such productive powers as it has. It is, in other words, useful only because, and in so far, and in such manner, as men have learned to make use of it. This is what brings it into the category of “land” economically speaking. And the preferential position of the landlord as a claimant of the “net product” consists in his legal right to decide whether, how far, and on what terms men shall put this technological scheme into effect in those features of it which involve the use of his parcel of land.

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All this argument concerning the unearned increment [land rent] may be carried over, with scarcely a change of phrase, to the case of “capital goods.” (1919: 337–8)

Owners of capital can demand a payment because without their capital goods, the society cannot use its technology. The same is true for owners of land. Capital goods and land are not themselves productive, but without them production is not possible. Their scarcity allows them to command a payment. Note also that there is an element of predation here. Ownership grants a right to “get something for nothing.” The value of any particular block of capital depends on expectations about the pecuniary return it will generate. As Veblen put it, “ ‘capital’ means ‘capitalized putative earning capacity’ ” (1904: 131). That capacity, in turn, depends on both the technological and the institutional. Capital represents ownership of tangible assets which “capitalize such fraction of the technological proficiency of the community as the ownership of the capital goods involved enables the owner to engross” (Veblen 1919: 365). But capital also represents ownership of intangible assets that “capitalize such habits of life, of a non-technological character, – settled by usage, convention, arrogation, legislative action, or what not, – as will effect a differential advantage to the concern to which the assets in question appertain” (1919: 365). Because the value of capital can be enhanced by intangible assets, real resources are devoted to creating them through advertising, marketing, and lobbying. Lobbyists, for example, often want restrictions on competition so as to increase monopoly power. Nationalism means that it is popular to restrict foreign competitors, so trade barriers are created. The barriers are often promoted by demonizing “unfair” foreign competition. Yet the motive is to give domestic business more power over domestic buyers. The effect is also to harm the long-run technological development of the species as it creates barriers to the flow of goods and ideas. Ownership of capital implies control over business. Business, in turn, controls industry. Veblen stressed that the welfare of the community as a whole is served by allowing industry to operate at its capacity so as to produce useful goods and services. Yet the objective of business is not to produce useful goods and services but to make money. A conflict therefore arises between the desires of the community and the desires of business. Veblen argues that industry is never allowed to operate at full capacity because to do so would depress the price of output and cause business to make less money. The habits of thought of the dominant institutions pervade the society. As mentioned above, pecuniary considerations trump all else. So deeply entrenched is this attitude that no “sane” person would expect a business to operate if it would lose money. And even if it did, it would soon cease operation because it would be unable to pay its suppliers; one cannot, after all, expect other businesses to operate at a loss too. Because the value of capital depends on expected earnings in an unknowable future, capital values are subject to uncertainty. Unexpected changes can alter the outlook significantly. A boom in the economy can raise profits. Technological change can make the tangible assets obsolete and destroy profits. Moreover, the use of credit can amplify the effects. As Veblen discussed a century ago, and as illustrated by the financial crisis of 2008, the combination of uncertainty about the value of capital and the use of credit can destabilize the economy. Veblen discussed the effect of the increase in demand for war materiel occasioned by the Spanish–American War. The initial effect was to raise the prices of goods in

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the industries immediately affected. The industries in question moved to expand production and so raised demand for supplies and equipment. Their suppliers did the same in response, and so in that fashion the boom spread throughout the economy. Higher prices led to higher earnings, and the general boom led to a “lively anticipation” (Veblen 1904: 195) of even higher future earnings. Hence, “extensive contracts for future performance are entered into in all directions” and a “habit of buoyancy, or speculative recklessness” (1904: 196) emerges. The expectation of higher future earnings raises the value of capital. Higher capital values mean that firms are more credit-worthy, and lenders are more willing to lend to them. The credit is used to buy more capital, which further raises the value of capital. The cycle feeds on itself. Credit expands, capital values rise, and optimism reigns. Lurking in the background is upward pressure on costs of production. The boom raises the demand for resources in general, including labor. As the prices of these resources rise, the profitability of firms begins to fall. At some point it becomes obvious that earnings will not meet expectations. Capital values fall, but the values of the loans taken out do not. New credit cannot be found, and with lower profits firms may be unable to repay their debts. Bankruptcies occur, investment ceases, and orders dry up. The financial calamity is translated into industrial depression. Veblen emphasized that “depression is primarily a malady of the affections of the business men” (1904: 241). Industry’s ability to produce is unaffected by the ups and downs of capital values. The underlying technological reality is unaffected by the financial machinations. But business controls industry, so the business downturn means that industry will slow too. The conflict, however, is not just between business and the community as a whole. There is also conflict between the people who own business and the people who manage business. Modern corporations are owned by their shareholders. But the shareholders are for the most part what Veblen called “absentee owners” (1923); they do not run the companies. Corporations are run by professional managers. The absentee owners desire the maximum possible long-run profits. The managers often have other objectives. Managers seek to maximize their pay and to profit from short-run stock-price manipulation. Because the owners often have no detailed knowledge about the company, it is difficult for them to know what is taking place. How would the typical GM stockholder know if the corporate executives were making the right decisions? Managers, therefore, have considerable freedom to run companies as they please. In recent years, reports of the excesses of corporate management have become commonplace. A question that sometimes arises is why anyone would ask for the truly staggering compensation received by some executives. After all, once one has everything, what more does one need? Veblen’s answer was status. He wrote that “it is necessary, in order to ensure his own peace of mind, that an individual should possess as large a portion of goods as others to whom he is accustomed to class himself; and it is extremely gratifying to possess something more than others” (1899: 31). Corporate executives class themselves with other corporate executives; the absolute amount of income received is not as important as the relative amount of income. No matter how high executive incomes are, only one can be the highest. Veblen examined the competition for status in his most famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class.

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Consumption and status As technology has advanced, labor productivity has increased dramatically. Even in Veblen’s time, the productive capacity of modern industry was enormous. If the purpose of consumption was simply to satisfy biological needs and provide creaturecomforts, then one might imagine that it would be possible at some point to produce enough to satisfy all human wants. Yet Veblen guessed that more than half of all consumption was motivated by status, not necessity or comfort. The proportion is certainly higher today. As he put it, In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be satiated in any individual instance, and evidently satiation of the average or general desire for wealth is out of the question. However widely, or equally, or “fairly,” it may be distributed, no general increase of the community’s wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every one else in the accumulation of goods. If, as is sometimes assumed, the incentive to accumulation were the want of subsistence or physical comfort, then the aggregate economic wants of a community might conceivably be satisfied at some point in the advance of industrial efficiency; but since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible. (1899: 32)

As noted earlier, emulation is a powerful and deeply embedded human trait. Emulation requires an invidious ranking of people from better to worse; without such a ranking one does not know who to emulate. During the barbarian era, highstatus warriors and priests acquired significant amounts of wealth from their predation. Over time, status came to be associated with wealth itself, independent of how it was acquired. Eventually, wealth “becomes necessary to have any reputable standing in the community” (1899: 29). And as the general wealth of the community rises, the amount of wealth one must have to maintain one’s status rises with it. The point is to have more than everyone else. In an anonymous urban environment, one must provide evidence of one’s wealth in order to claim one’s status. This can be accomplished by means of what Veblen called “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous consumption.” Conspicuous leisure provides evidence that one is wealthy enough to not have to work. It does not, however, imply simply that one is idle; sitting at home doing nothing does nothing to display one’s wealth. Instead, one must give evidence of “nonproductive consumption of time” (1899: 43). Examples include knowledge of the finer points of etiquette, fine wine, spelling and grammar, and other things that prove that time has been spent unproductively. In an agrarian economy where most people work outside, most people of European descent will have a tan; not having one is evidence that one does not have to work. In a modern economy where most people work inside, having a tan becomes fashionable because it provides evidence that one has the leisure to get one. Wearing delicate or cumbersome clothing is also a way to exhibit conspicuous leisure because it shows that one cannot possibly engage in physical labor. Conspicuous consumption provides another avenue to display one’s wealth. Flashy jewelry, expensive clothes, big houses, and fast cars all provide evidence that

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one has wealth. Discrimination in what one chooses to buy can also give evidence of conspicuous leisure. Instead of just buying large quantities of goods, one must spend the time learning about what the “best” goods are. Veblen notes that conspicuous consumption has become more important than conspicuous leisure as improvements in transportation and communication “now expose the individual to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging his reputability than the display of goods” (1899: 86). As consumption becomes a vehicle for claiming status, “pecuniary canons of taste” arise. Goods are valued not for their ability to satisfy human needs, but for their ability to display wealth. A silver spoon and an aluminum spoon function equally well, but the silver spoon is more desirable simply because it is more expensive. “Without reflection or analysis, we feel that what is inexpensive is unworthy” (1899: 169). It must be stressed that most people do not consciously engage in conspicuous consumption. In other words, the motive behind most consumption is not the conscious thought that one will buy something expensive to impress the neighbors (although that does happen). Instead, the leisure class establishes the consumption standards that the rest of us try to emulate to the best of our ability. “The observance of these standards, in some degree of approximation, becomes incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale.… On pain of forfeiting their good name and their selfrespect in case of failure, they must conform to the accepted code, at least in appearance” (Veblen 1899: 84). The leisure class sets the standards of how to live. The rest of us strive to live up to these standards as best we can, primarily to avoid unfavorable notice. Office workers wear suits and ties because they are expected to, not because doing so demonstrates that they are exempt from “drudgery.” Yet the habit of wearing suits and ties originates from the desire of the elite to demonstrate just that. Fashion cycles emerge as the elite attempt to separate themselves from everyone else, and then the masses seek to emulate the new fashions. Once the fashion becomes popular, it no longer serves its original function as a means for the elite to separate themselves from the rest of us, and so a new fashion emerges. Enormous resources are spent on clothes, not for the purpose of warmth, but for the purpose of status.

IMPACT AND ASSESSMENT E. K. Hunt called Veblen “the most significant, original and profound social theorist in American history” (1979: 300). Rick Tilman wrote that Veblen “was arguably the most original and penetrating economist and social critic that the United States has produced” (1992: ix). C. Wright Mills said Veblen was “the best critic of America that America has produced” (1953: vi). Clearly, some regard Veblen as one of the most important social theorists. Yet Veblen’s impact has not been as extensive as such comments might lead one to expect. This is particularly true in economics, which is the discipline he most tried to change. One can graduate from the very “best” economics graduate and undergraduate programs without ever hearing his name. If his name is mentioned at all, it is as a curiosity; his pecuniary canons of taste provide a rare exception to the

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law of demand. His fundamental criticism of the pre-Darwinian approach of neoclassical economics has simply been ignored. He wrote that, “the question now before the body of economists is not how things stabilise themselves in a ‘static state,’ but how they endlessly grow and change” (1934: 8). The question remains unanswered. One consequence has been that economists have no useful answer to what is arguably the most important question in economics: how can poor countries become rich countries? As Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas wrote, once one tries to answer the question, “it is hard to think about anything else” (1988: 5). Economic development has nothing at all to do with static, equilibrium analysis. It is an evolutionary process that transforms the entire society. It is not just about acquiring more capital and labor; it is about profound institutional change, often driven by technological change. Without an evolutionary approach, the mystery of economic development cannot be fully understood. There have been some who have taken Veblen’s challenge seriously. The Association for Evolutionary Economics, for example, is an organization of social scientists working in the tradition of Veblen. They practice what is known as “Original Institutional Economics”; the word “original” is necessary to distinguish them from variants of neoclassical economics that have adopted the name “institutional,” but have no trace of evolutionary analysis. Yet the organization, and others like it, encompasses only a small fraction of economists and social scientists. Veblen’s influence has been felt in other areas. John Kenneth Galbraith (1987: 176–7) contends that Veblen’s withering satire of excessive displays of wealth in The Theory of the Leisure Class had the effect of restraining such displays. The phrase “conspicuous consumption” has entered the language and has raised awareness of the practice. That has not made it go away, but it has, perhaps, tempered it. Veblen’s student, Wesley Claire Mitchell, founded the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Mitchell’s primary objective was to understand business cycles. To that end, he sought to conceptualize and create quantitative economic measures. Commonly reported economic statistics such as GDP and the inflation rate are direct descendants of his work. The NBER remains the leading nonprofit economic research institution in the United States. For those who have bothered to read him, Veblen has affected how they see the world. As C. Wright Mills wrote, Veblen’s “real and lasting value” is that “he opens up our minds, he gets us ‘outside the whale,’ he makes us see through the official sham. Above all, he teaches us to be aware of the crackpot basis of the realism of those practical Men of Affairs who would lead us to honorific destruction” (1953: xix). Once one has read Veblen, one will never see the world the same way again. If that is the mark of a great social theorist, then Veblen is definitely one. Unfortunately, few people bother to actually read Veblen, and his style is in part to blame. For most people, he is just too much work. As one sympathetic writer put it, “the chief reason why Veblen has not been more widely read is his style, which is so marked with tortuous clauses and involuted phrases that one sometimes wonders whether Veblen did not do all in his power to hide his ideas from those who might utilize them” (Herskovits 1936: 352). Yet once one gets used to it, Veblen’s style can be a source of joy. His wit and satire are legendary, and the precision of his language is astonishing. Another reason Veblen has not had more influence is that his work did not, and could not, inspire a political movement. There are clear political messages in

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writers like Smith, Marx, and even Keynes. Veblen makes clear that much of the present system is irrational, but at most he only hints at what should be done. He is also acutely aware of the power of “imbecile institutions” and vested interests. As Edgell wrote, for Veblen, “the most recent era is more susceptible to ‘natural decay’ than social engineering of an ameliorative or radical kind” (2001: 98). It would be difficult to build a political movement on that basis. Veblen’s research agenda is unfinished and the questions he asked are unanswered. What he wrote a century ago is still true: “There is the economic life process still in great measure waiting theoretical formulation” (1919: 70). The most obvious trait of modern economies is their continuous evolution. A truly evolutionary economics would be immensely valuable. No social scientist who wants to understand the world can afford to ignore Veblen. His penetrating insights are both useful and inspiring. It is time to revive his vision.

Reader’s Guide to Thorstein Veblen Veblen’s first and best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), is both a satire on the extravagant lifestyle of the rich during the Gilded Age and a theory of consumer behavior. Arguably, Veblen’s most important book is The Instinct of Workmanship (1914). It presents his theory of instincts, institutions, and technology. He also describes how they interact in the process of social evolution. The Place of Science in Modern Civilization (1919) is a collection of some of Veblen’s most important articles and essays. He critiques the preconceptions of modern science in general and economics in particular. He also lays out his theory of capital, which stands in sharp contrast to both neoclassical and Marxist theories. The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) emphasizes the conflict between business and industry. Its discussion of how credit can exacerbate the business cycle makes it seem like it was written yesterday. The secondary literature on Veblen is vast. Veblen in Plain English (2006) by Ken McCormick provides an accessible introduction to Veblen’s thought. Stephen Edgell’s Veblen in Perspective (2001) sets the record straight on Veblen’s biography and discusses the intellectual influences on Veblen. We are fortunate to have two excellent collections of academic papers about Veblen. The more recent is the three-volume The Legacy of Thorstein Veblen (2003), edited by Rick Tilman. The other, also in three volumes, is Thorstein Veblen: Critical Assessments (1993), edited by John Cunningham Wood. Between the two collections, one can find almost all of the most important journal articles written about Veblen. John Patrick Diggins’s book Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class (1999) emphasizes the role of status and emulation in supporting existing institutions. Rick Tilman’s book Thorstein Veblen and the Enrichment of Evolutionary Naturalism (2007) compares Veblen’s ideas to those of prominent social scientists of the past century. He argues that evolutionary naturalism is the foundation for Veblen’s work.

Bibliography Writings of Thorstein Veblen 1897. Review of Max Lorenz, Die Marxistische Socialdemokratie. Journal of Political Economy 6: 136–7. 1899/1965. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. 1904/1975. The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York: Augustus M. Kelley.

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1914/1964. The Instinct of Workmanship. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. 1915/1964. Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. 1917/1964. An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. 1918/1965. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. 1919/1990. The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. 1921/1965. The Engineers and the Price System. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. 1923/1964. Absentee Ownership. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. 1924. The Vested Interest and the Common Man. London: George Allen and Unwin. 1925. The Laxdaela Saga. New York: B.W. Huebsch. 1934/1964. Essays in Our Changing Order. New York: Augustus M. Kelley.

Further Reading Clark, J. B. (1899/1965) The Distribution of Wealth. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. Diggins, J. P. (1978) The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory. New York: Seabury Press. Diggins, J. P. (1999) Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dorfman, J. (1934/1972) Thorstein Veblen and His America. Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley. Dowd, D. (1958) Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Edgell, S. (1996) “Rescuing Veblen from Valhalla: Deconstruction and Reconstruction of a Sociological Legend.” British Journal of Sociology 47(4): 627–42. Edgell, S. (2001) Veblen in Perspective: His Life and Thought. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Galbraith, J. K. (1987) Economics in Perspective: A Critical History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Herskovits, M. J. (1936) “The Significance of Thorstein Veblen for Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 38: 351–3. Hodgson, G. (1992) “Thorstein Veblen and Post-Darwinian Economics.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 16: 285–301. Hodgson, G. (1998) “On the Evolution of Thorstein Veblen’s Evolutionary Economics.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 22: 415–31. Hodgson, G. (1999) Evolution and Institutions: On Evolutionary Economics and the Evolution of Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Hunt, E. K. (1979) History of Economic Thought. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Lucas, R. (1988) “On the Mechanics of Economic Development.” Journal of Monetary Economics 22: 3–42. Marx, K. (1859/1978) Preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” In R. C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. McCormick, K. (2006) Veblen in Plain English. Youngstown: NY: Cambria Press. Mills, C. W. (1953) “Introduction.” In Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Mentor Books. Mitchell, W. C. (1964) What Veblen Taught. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. Morgan, C. L. (1896) Habit and Instinct. London: Edward Arnold. Pareto, V. (1897) “The New Theories of Economics.” Journal of Political Economy 5: 485–502.

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Smith, A. (1795/1982) “The History of Astronomy.” In Essays on Philosophical Subjects. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. Spengler, J. J. (1972) “Veblen on Population and Resources.” Social Science Quarterly 52(4): 861–78. Tilman, R. (1992) Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891–1963. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tilman, R. (ed.) (2003) The Legacy of Thorstein Veblen. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Tilman, R. (2007) Thorstein Veblen and the Enrichment of Evolutionary Naturalism. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Wood, J. C. (ed.) (1993) Thorstein Veblen: Critical Assessments. London: Routledge.

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8 Georg Simmel LAWRENCE A. SCAFF

LIFE, WORK, AND ORIENTATION As one of the most important modern social theorists, Georg Simmel has always presented an impressive and yet ambiguous face to the world. He was in some ways the founder of sociology as a discipline with transnational appeal; his essays were read and translated almost immediately by Albion Small and published in the American Journal of Sociology (see Simmel 2008). Like Émile Durkheim or Sigmund Freud (and unlike Max Weber), he enjoyed international recognition during his own lifetime. Moreover, as an intellectual and teacher he gained a reputation in Germany as a prescient and brilliant diagnostician of our times, a standing that Jürgen Habermas has acknowledged (1991: 158). Yet Simmel has also been seen as more interested in the suggestive aperçu than in systematic science. His work as a whole has thus been treated as an ambivalent “experiment” with “impressionist” leanings (Lukács [1918] in Gassen & Landmann 1993: 175; Frisby 1992), or as a loosely connected series of suggestive and insightful inquiries without “an explicit methodological foundation” or any “systematic development of theory,” quoting Talcott Parsons’ unpublished assessment (Parsons 1936: 5). This critical view led Talcott Parsons to exclude Simmel’s work from The Structure of Social Action (1937), an omission that would otherwise seem incomprehensible. This record of neglect and misunderstanding has taken a toll, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that it has taken a hundred years for Simmel’s major sociological treatise, the Sociology of 1908, to be translated in its entirety into English (Simmel 2009). Critical and conflicting judgments about Simmel should not be surprising, however, considering the task that he set for himself to write as both a philosopher and sociologist, ignoring the usual disciplinary fetters, while probing the dynamics of modern social and individual experience in all of its aspects, from economics to art, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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with an uncompromising earnestness and originality. Much of what remains engaging and instructive in Simmel’s work has to do with the reach, depth, and risks of his unusual intellectual journey. He understood the importance in the modern age of grasping the whole of social life through the fragmentary, the particular, and the concrete; and he had little patience with efforts to claim systematic coherence and consistency where there was none. In an ironic twist that Simmel would have appreciated, the daring of his explorations at the margins of social relations and the boundaries of the established disciplines seems to vouchsafe his centrality in our own times. Simmel was an intellectual of the fin de siècle. Born in the very heart of old Berlin in 1858, he lived in the city nearly all his life, experiencing its rise from a modest and sleepy provincial capital to a teeming, industrialized metropolis and center of world power. Only in 1914 did he move to a chair in philosophy at Strasbourg, Alsace, dying of liver cancer in that disputed city four years later as the Great War ground to a halt outside its gates. The intellectual, cultural and political life of Berlin was essential for Simmel. He was a man of the metropolis, a close observer of the dynamics of urban social life, and a devotee of its varied socio-cultural milieu. In one of his rare autobiographical statements, he commented that “Berlin’s development from a city to a metropolis in the years around and after the turn of the century coincides with my own strongest and extensive development” (quoted in Frisby 1992: 19). His mind was joined irrevocably to the sights and sounds of the emergent metropolis. Simmel’s personal development took place most importantly within the Philosophical Faculty of the Humboldt University, where he was a student and lecturer for nearly 40 years, though never gaining a regular professorial appointment – a source of bitter disappointment. The problems, topics, and themes of his many writings over these decades breathe the spirit of this most urban of universities and its powerful intellectual traditions and profoundly unsettled environment of sublime spectacle and dynamic pace. Contemporaries understood this fact. As the philosopher Karl Joël observed in reviewing The Philosophy of Money, the work some regard as Simmel’s major achievement, it could only have been “written in these times and in Berlin” (Frisby 1992: 11, 19). It was in this urban center also that Simmel moved from philosophy to sociology, delivering the first lectures on sociological subjects in a German university in 1893–4. His sociological commitments were underscored later when, with Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies, he founded the German Sociological Society, inaugurating its first meeting in 1910 with his important paper on “sociability.” Georg Simmel was the youngest of seven children in a family of Jewish heritage from Silesia, now in southern Poland. Both parents had converted to Christianity, his mother to Protestantism as a teenager, and his father to Catholicism during a business trip to Paris. The son followed his mother’s example, though he never entirely lost his Jewish identity and thus felt the sting of anti-semitism in his professional life. Simmel’s father, Edward, a successful businessman and founder of the firm “Felix and Sarotti” (later the well-known chocolate company), died when young Georg was 16, leaving him in the care of a family friend, Julius Friedländer. This tragic event proved fortuitous, however, as Friedländer had successfully established the “Edition Peters” music publishing firm, and the generous inheritance he left Simmel allowed the promising young scholar to pursue an academic career, despite years

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spent without a regular salaried position. Simmel’s life path thus paralleled those of others in his generation, such as Weber, Sombart, or slightly later Robert Michels, in which the sons fled the comfortable confines of the Besitzbürgertum, the wealthy upper middle class, for the speculative fields of science – an enduring commitment to intellectual life and the academy made possible in part by inherited wealth or the condition Weber ironically labeled his “miserable rentier existence.” One of the most significant aspects of Simmel’s upbringing and university years was his introduction not simply to philosophy and social theory, but also to artistic circles in Berlin. Supported by Friedländer, Simmel continued a musical education begun in his youth, studying both piano and violin. But even more importantly he became acquainted with the Graef family, home of the famous painter, Gustav Graef, and through the members of the family came into contact with artistic circles, the figures of the Berlin Secession, and eventually the symbolist poet Stefan George and his circle. It was also through the daughter, Sabine Graef, that he met his future wife, Gertrud Kinel, who with Sabine had studied painting at the celebrated Académie Julien in Paris. By the 1880s and 1890s the interest in these circles in the inner life, emotions, the psyche, and artistic expression had congealed in a new aesthetic “culture of feeling” in urban centers like Berlin, Vienna, and Paris – a cultural movement, as historians have pointed out, that was sharply set apart from the dominant liberal, politically oriented, moralizing and philosophical culture of the era. Simmel was deeply immersed in both of these cultures – the aesthetic, and the liberal-philosophical – associating with the poets and aesthetes attracted to Stefan George, and composing experimental verse and prose for the art nouveau journal Jugend. Yet he was also dedicated to the rigors of Kantian philosophy, while publishing in Karl Kautsky’s socialist publication, Die neue Zeit, and also becoming active in the politically engaged Social Science Students Association, the Sozialwissenschaftliche Studentenvereinigung. As a young man Simmel thus bridged the great cultural divisions of his times, showing an inclination to multiple perspectives and group affiliations. His mature work can be seen as an effort to understand the different and opposed sides of these divisions, to rethink the problems of each through the new science of sociology and the modes of inquiry characteristic of “philosophical culture,” as he titled one of his most important collections of essays. Critical synthesis of contradictory viewpoints, system building in the style of the grand narratives of philosophy, or reconciliation between opposing forces in the world was not Simmel’s ambition, however. For again and again he presents himself to us as a man of ideas having an uncommon will to originality, adopting a provisional and questioning stance, a mode of writing, and a discursive style that reveal the unique grammar of his thinking. That grammar emphasizes a dialectical questioning and investigation of contrasting points of view. Simmel evinces an interest in maintaining the dyadic tensions and discovering the meaning of the contradictions in social life, rather than imposing a new synthesis or schematic master narrative in the manner of Hegel, Marx, Comte or Spencer, or in our own time Parsons or Habermas. Today some would call such a view “postmodern,” though for Simmel himself it was merely “modern” or consistent with the modern world. If as a modernist he singled out a particular moral-political problem, then it had to do with individuality: today how can our individuality be preserved in the face of the

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dominating forces external and opposed to the individual? Or as he frames the issue in the idiom of The Philosophy of Money, it is “the discrepant relationship between objective and subjective culture, which forms our specific problem” (2004: 450). Simmel’s social theory and sociology can be understood as a sustained effort to address this larger and most consequential perplexity.

YOUNG SIMMEL: THE EARLY WRITINGS “I began with epistemological and Kantian studies, which went hand in hand with historical and social scientific studies,” wrote Simmel about his own starting points (Gassen & Landmann 1993: 9). This self-appraisal referred quite obviously to the neo-Kantian movements of the time, represented in Berlin by Wilhelm Dilthey, and also to Simmel’s participation in lectures and seminars offered by famous historians like Theodor Mommsen and Heinrich von Treitschke. But the “social scientific” reference is more obscure. In part because of the detailed recent work of Klaus Köhnke (1996), we now know considerably more about this aspect of the intellectual point of departure and its significance for Simmel’s mature work. As a budding social scientist in his early twenties, Simmel’s earliest written work actually dealt with a field of social psychology known as Völkerpsychologie or ethnopsychology, founded by one of his most important teachers, Moritz Lazarus. His first effort at a dissertation, subsequently rejected by his committee, bore the striking title, “Psychological and Ethnographic Studies on the Origins of Music,” and incorporated an evolutionary perspective informed generally by Spencer and Darwin. Indeed, Dilthey himself later commented appropriately on the early Simmel that his “standpoint is Spencer’s evolutionary theory” (Köhnke 1996: 65, 77; Gassen & Landmann 1993: 22). The reason for this assessment had to do with an effort to postulate mechanisms and stages of evolutionary change with regard to the production of human culture – in this case, musicality. But Simmel was also fascinated by problems in the less controversial field of Kantian philosophy, where much of his early work was centered. Kant was the subject of his successfully defended dissertation of 1881, and problems in Kantian ethics and logic formed the subject matter for his habilitation four years later. When he began lecturing at the University of Berlin in 1885 the subjects revolved around philosophical and ethnopsychological problems: ethics, Kant, and the significance of Darwinism. It took Simmel a decade to shift “from ethnopsychology to sociology,” as he noted himself – a transition that went hand-in-hand with the gradual substitution of evolutionary theory by a more “formal” approach. When the transition was completed he began offering the first sociology lectures in a German university. So whereas his good friend, Max Weber, came to sociology by way of political economy, Simmel developed his perspective through engagement with ethnography, psychology, and philosophy. This particular intellectual path had important implications for the form and content of the Simmelian sociological field, in contrast to both Durkheimian and Weberian perspectives. We see something of Simmel’s developing intellectual perspective in the highly varied work leading up to The Philosophy of Money (1900). Many of Simmel’s lifelong themes are evident in essays and lectures on epistemological problems; the

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philosophy of history; pessimism and culture; the nature of sociology; the psychology and social position of women; the problem of style and fashion; the sociology of the family; and the contributions and significance of major figures like Goethe, Nietzsche, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt. But the major dimensions of his social theory are announced in two studies: On Social Differentiation: Sociological and Psychological Investigations (1890), and the weighty two-volume opus, Introduction to the Moral Sciences: A Critique of Basic Ethical Concepts. Notwithstanding Simmel’s mature criticism of the latter as a “youthful sin,” these studies are important for showing the formulation of his central questions and the emergence of his sociology from evolutionary and developmental problematics. The text on social differentiation establishes a fundamental truth that Simmel carries with him the rest of his life, namely, what he calls “the unity of society as reciprocal interaction of its parts.” The key concept of “interaction” or Wechselwirkung, with its connotations of reciprocal (macro) causes and effects brought about by exchanges among individual (micro) units, is already well-defined in this work and later becomes a highly nuanced element in Simmel’s methodology. It is used in this early context to articulate a theory of social differentiation reminiscent of Durkheim’s in The Division of Labor in Society, though the Durkheimian evolutionary framework is replaced by autonomous processes of differentiation within and among social groups, operating analogously to the principle of the “conservation of energy.” Moreover, Simmel’s most urgent problem is not the Durkheimian treatment of social facts as “things,” sui generis, but rather the protection of individuality, a core value he establishes in this text that is itself a product of social interaction. The eclecticism and experimentalism of the Introduction to the Moral Sciences have tended to diminish its importance. It is fair to say that it has “no recognizable thesis” and offers an “undisciplined reflection on the social,” as Köhnke maintains (1996: 167–8). But it is nevertheless the key early work, for it focuses Simmel’s life work and theme around a “double relationship” expressed in the following way: “On the one hand the individual belongs to a whole and is a part of it, while on the other hand s/he is independent and stands opposed to it” (Simmel 1989, vol. 3: 178). The overriding concern of the Introduction involves answering the questions, how is this double relationship possible, and what are the categories for its analysis? As for J. S. Mill, Simmel’s version of the moral sciences encompasses that branch of practical philosophy dealing with ethics and customs or mores; thus, much of his effort leads the reader on a tour through the standard categories: the ought, egoism, altruism, duty, happiness, freedom. But along the way Simmel begins to introduce sociological considerations bearing on the traditional problems of practical philosophy. “With Simmel the formation of sociological concepts begins within the framework and thus with the medium of ethics,” as Köhnke suggests (1996: 397). The basic concepts of social life then start to take shape – individual and group; family, estate or status order (Stand); and the ordering of time and space – as do, most importantly, all of the various forms of interaction and sociation – competition, opposition, conflict, super- and subordination, emulation, secrecy, and the like. It is with the insertion of this new conceptual language that the venerable “moral sciences” of the nineteenth century give way to the new sociology of the twentieth. In Germany Simmel was the key figure in leading this transformation, as was Durkheim in France. And across the Atlantic it was this Simmelian “interactionist”

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social perspective that so strongly influenced his American student, Robert Park, and through him the formation of the “Chicago School” of American sociology.

SIMMEL’S SOCIAL THEORY: THE PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY At the time Simmel was working through issues in ethics and the epistemology of the human sciences, he also began to engage with topics in political economy and with models of Homo economicus. A paper on the “psychology of money,” first delivered in Gustav Schmoller’s economics seminar in Berlin, appeared in 1889, and it was followed by brief studies on the role of money in modern culture and in the relationship between the sexes. This work culminated in the seminal volume published in 1900, The Philosophy of Money. Simmel’s striking fin-de-siècle title concealed a number of important lines of thought. As “philosophy” his inquiry raised a question about the meaning of “money” as commodity, value, and symbol for the quality of human life. Simmel remarked that he was interested not only in the conditions that produce a money economy, but also in the effects of money and its exchange and use values “upon the inner world – upon the vitality of individuals, upon the linking of their fates, upon culture in general” (2004: 54). Such a question cannot be given an exact answer, to be sure, but instead presupposes a method that Simmel referred to as “hypothetical interpretation and artistic reconstruction.” In this sense philosophy remains a special form of questioning, whose subject matter is always the “totality of being.” Interestingly, however, Simmel’s version of philosophical inquiry does not proclaim such a totality. Instead, it proceeds at the level of phenomena that are particular, specific, concrete, limited, and finite. Its investigations are justified by the possibility “of finding in each of life’s details the totality of its meaning” (2004: 55) – a quintessential Simmelian statement of purpose. Methodologically, then, for Simmel the “philosophy” of money is distinct from the political economy of the modern capitalist economy, as understood either by Marx and his followers, or by contemporary political economists like Weber or Sombart. In Simmel’s wording, The attempt is made to construct a new storey beneath historical materialism such that the explanatory value of the incorporation of economic life into the causes of intellectual culture is preserved, while these economic forms themselves are recognized as the result of more profound valuations and currents of psychological or even metaphysical pre-conditions. (2004: 56)

In other words, Simmel hopes to uncover the psychological premises upon which modern economic forms must rest. These premises are worked out in terms of the inner valuation of money and the reaction to it as an abstract, impersonal power. The preconditions for the modern economy are found in the depersonalizing norms of calculation and efficiency that encourage us to view the world simply as an “arithmetical problem” having definite solutions. Employing architectonic imagery, Simmel has thus chosen to reinterpret Marx’s materialist foundationalism through the medium of a psychologically attuned critique of the modern age. Alternatively, we

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might say that those aspects of the individual’s orientation toward life that Max Weber spoke of as a “spirit” or an “ethos,” Simmel tends to treat at the ground level of “psychological preconditions.” For Simmel, however, the outcome of such an ordering of relations must be not so much a clearer view of history, but rather a nuanced understanding of the clash between subjective and objective moments in the total life of our evolving civilization. To reach this understanding and accomplish its purpose The Philosophy of Money uses a distinctive perspective informed by juxtaposing “objective” and “subjective” realms of experience, a distinction that becomes central for Simmel’s entire theory of society and culture. In this text the objective forms of the money economy are considered not in order to lay bare the economic substructure of society, but in order to probe what might be called their subjective consequences for the make-up of individuals and the content of social life. The problem is this: there is a contradiction that becomes increasingly evident in the modern age between the simultaneous “increase” in objective (or material) culture and the “decrease” in subjective (or individual) culture. Whereas the former becomes more and more refined, complex, sophisticated, expansive, comprehensive, and domineering, the latter in relation to it becomes cruder, simpler, more trivial, limiting, fragmentary, and anarchic: Just as our everyday life is surrounded more and more by objects of which we cannot conceive how much intellectual effort is expended in their production, so our mental and social communication is filled with symbolic terms, in which a comprehensive intellectuality is accumulated, but of which the individual mind need make only minimal use.… Every day and from all sides, the wealth of objective culture increases, but the individual mind can enrich the forms and contents of its own development only by distancing itself still further from that culture and developing its own at a much slower pace. (2004: 449)

In the face of such a dynamic tendency Simmel then speaks of “the fragmentary lifecontents of individuals” and “the insignificance or irrationality of the individual’s share” of objective culture. Stated somewhat differently, the material artifacts and technologies we have created are set against ourselves and against human purposes; we lose control of our objective culture, are assaulted and overwhelmed by it, and begin to respond to it in different and opposed ways: with passivity or aggression, fascination or repulsion, immersion or escape. This initial insight into the duality of our experience presents Simmel with his philosophical and sociological problem: How is an opposition possible between ourselves and the contents of the world we have created? And what can it mean for the forms of sociation, of individual action in society? Turning to the first question, the sociology of cultural contradictions is not difficult to conceive: objectification has its root causes in such solid facts as the division of labor, that is, the differentiation of functions and specialization of tasks in the economic order. Indeed, Simmel has already established differentiation as an irreducible general phenomenon and category of social life, whose true home is found in the increasingly complex money economy. But differentiation soon spreads everywhere and “brings about a growing estrangement between the subject and its products,” which then “invades even the more intimate aspects of our daily life” (2004: 459). While gaining a hold over the life-world through differentiation, the money economy

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also prepares the way for the subversion of this world, just as it creates the conditions for our self-estrangement. In addition, the fetishism of objects is aligned with the fixation of a psychological dependence upon a quality Simmel refers to as die Mode – namely, style or fashion. That which is newly “fashionable” and au courant reveals itself in the commanding power of style. The problematic features of economic life are defined not merely by a separation between purportedly “natural” subjects and the material means of production or products of labor, but rather by the psychological transformation of external forms into a reified content. What Simmel thought of as “technological progress” is thus accompanied at the level of individual consciousness by a new interiority or subjectivism that renders the ephemeral continuous and the marginal central. Now the primacy of style, characterized by Simmel at a key juncture in his reasoning as “one of the most significant instances of distancing” (2004: 473), is most importantly an indication of the increasingly uneasy awareness of a growing tension within the economy of the ego, or an increasing gulf between the self and objects, the self and others, all of which results from the individual’s absorption into the entirely fluid realm of psychological experience. But distancing is also a precondition for sociation and group life. It gives us a starting point for addressing Simmel’s second question about the forms of sociation. One of the great achievements of The Philosophy of Money is the way it sets forth a phenomenology of our efforts to cope with the “social-technological mechanism” of the “objective” world, a line of thinking on a par with Freud’s later attempt in Civilization and Its Discontents. What Simmel is able to do is demonstrate both the opportunities for freedom of the personality on the one hand, and the alternatives for mastery of the world on the other. In the third chapter the types of alternatives become quite explicit, and they are subsequently elaborated in some of Simmel’s finest essays, such as those on “fashion” and the “metropolis,” as well as in his last chapters on sociological topics in the Fundamental Problems of Sociology (see Simmel 1999: ch. 3; 1950: 40–57; 1971: 294–339): greed or avarice, a life of extravagance, ascetic poverty, cynicism, the blasé attitude or position of complete indifference, reserve or aversion, the appropriation of “style” in the name of “being different,” even sociability or conviviality as the “play form” of social interaction – all represent the choice of an ethos, a way of life, occasioned by the intensification and heightening of experience in our material world. In Milan Kundera’s language, they are ways of making this “lightness” bearable, of staking out a ground for freedom and personal choice. For Simmel these psychological alternatives are manifested in two interesting and contrasting ways. First, they are self-referential and reflexive, and they provide a powerful commentary on Simmel’s own unique cast of mind and stylistic peculiarities as a “theorist.” Second, they recombine in the social types of his sociological analysis and occasional essays: the stranger, adventurer, miser, spendthrift, dandy, coquette, lover, aesthete, activist, conspirator, and so forth. These figures and the social roles they play signify possible responses to the dynamic forces unleashed in the money economy. But there are other responses as well, potentially an even infinite variation. (Parenthetically, Simmel once complained that what counts as sexuality is too limited, a situation modern society may seem determined to remedy!) In one of his last statements on the subject, Simmel gave the idea the following form:

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I should like to think that the efforts of mankind will produce ever more numerous and varied forms for the human personality to affirm itself and to demonstrate the value of its existence. In fortunate periods, these varied forms may order themselves into harmonious wholes. In doing so, their contradictions and conflicts will cease to be mere obstacles to mankind’s efforts: they will also stimulate new demonstrations of the strength of these efforts and lead them to new creations. (Simmel 1950: 84; 1999: 149)

Moreover, Simmel tends to view the ideological manifestations of political activity and social movements, such as socialism and feminism, in a similar light. That is, they too arise as a response to the impersonal, disintegrating effects of “money” on associational life. When precisely a social movement arises, or why one type or direction is chosen over another are the historical causal questions that Simmel sets off to one side. That is the weakness of his brilliant, process-oriented intellectual tour de force. But the strength of his unconventional analysis is that a “new storey beneath historical materialism” has been constructed and prepared for its new occupant: a general and a formal sociology.

SOCIOLOGY: INTERACTION AND EXPERIENCE Simmel’s main contributions to systematic sociology are found in two texts, the so-called “major” and the “minor” sociologies: that is, the essays begun in the 1890s and supplemented with later material in the thousand-page opus of 1908, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms [Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung], or more literally an investigation of the forms of “sociation” or association; and the four brief essays penned toward the end of his life and published in 1917 as Fundamental Problems of Sociology: Individual and Society [Grundfragen der Soziologie (Individuum und Gesellschaft)] (Simmel 1950: 1–84; 1992; 1999: 59–149; 2009). The latter provides a kind of overview of the path Simmel had followed, and in it he distinguishes among three kinds of sociology: philosophical, general, and pure or formal. The distinction can be described in terms of three kinds of problem areas: inquiry into the modes and presuppositions of knowledge suggested by the sociological point of view; inquiry into the relationship between individual and society, viewed from the standpoint of the individual or the social; and inquiry into the forms of interaction among individuals, the reciprocal relations that make up what we call society and the social. In Simmel’s vision of sociological inquiry these problem areas presuppose three important epistemological positions, which in themselves delineate the character of a philosophical sociology. First, in the foundational first chapter of the Sociology on “The Problem of Sociology” (with its excursus on “How is Society Possible?”) Simmel announces a conception of society that emphasizes its dynamic and processoriented qualities: “Society exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction [Wechselwirkung],” he writes, noting that “interaction always arises on the basis of certain drives [Triebe] or for the sake of certain purposes” (1971: 23; 1992: 17–18). Indeed, he argues, “one should properly speak, not of society, but of sociation [Vergesellschaftung]. Society merely is the name for a number of individuals,

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connected by interaction” (1950: 10; 1999: 70). Society is thus not a reified whole or an observable object that exists sui generis, as Durkheim claimed, but a fluid reality composed of willing, acting, conscious individuals who impose a scheme of interpretation on their actions, intentions, and engagements. It can be viewed by the sociological observer as a kind of a priori, but only because humans are social animals given to sociation and sociability, not because society exists independent of its human agents. In brief, such claims provide the answer to Simmel’s Kantian question of how society is possible. A second underlying presupposition is a conception of sociology that “asks what happens to people and by what rules they act, not insofar as they develop comprehensible individual existences in their totality, but insofar as they form groups through interaction and are determined by this group existence” (1950: 11; 1999: 71; translation modified), a formulation taken up by Albion Small, Louis Wirth, and others in the “Chicago School.” As the specialized science of society, this sociology therefore “must exclusively investigate these interactions, these kinds and forms of sociation” (1971: 25; 1992: 19). That is sociology’s central task, and it is one Simmel pursued for three decades with perspicacity and seemingly inexhaustible energy in a stream of essays, chapters, and occasional writings. His statement of the task also helps demarcate the contested boundary between sociology and psychology, an important distinction because of the charges of “psychologism” that have burdened these Simmelian formulations. Whereas sociology’s domain is sociation or the process of forming social relationships and the resultant “forms” of social interaction, psychology’s is the structure and development of the personality and individual consciousness, or the quality Simmel called the irreducible “core of individuality” that makes each human self unique (see Watier 2009). Third, Simmel’s vision of sociologically articulated knowledge insists on a basic methodological precept, namely, the view that sociological investigation proceeds according to its own canons of inquiry, not according to the nomothetic intentions of the physical sciences. Sociology is essentially a reflexive science, aware of the way knowledge is conditioned by the knowledge-seeker, emphasizing in all domains of life what Simmel calls the “universality of sociation,” and using an inductive method. To study sociation is to adopt “a methodology which is wholly different from that for the question of how nature is possible” (1971: 8; 1992: 45), according to Simmel’s view. Thus, in contrast to Durkheim’s conceptual realism, Simmel observes social life from the position of a thorough-going philosophical nominalism that underscores the constructed and purposeful aspects to knowledge in the human sciences. In this respect his views resemble those of Max Weber, although Simmel’s reflections on a “philosophical” sociology lack Weber’s explicit formulation of the “ideal type” and its implications for sociological inquiry and social theory. The main chapters, two through ten, of Simmel’s major or “grosse” Sociology, as it has been called, are often regarded as the locus classicus of his substantive contributions. They bring together the main outlines of both a general and a pure or formal sociology that proceeds with Euclidean precision from the most elemental of units (the hypothesis of the autonomous individual); to complex interactive units (dyads, triads, groups, organizations, bureaucracy, state); to complex social relationships (subordination, conflict, secrecy, trust), abstract ordering principles (“spatial” and “temporal” relationships), and particular social types (e.g., the stranger). Simmel

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struggled with this text and was never satisfied with the published results. Yet some of his most insightful and provocative studies are found in these investigations of the formal, abstract properties of, say, the “eternal triad” in human relationships, the unusual dynamics of the conspiratorial clique, or the positive functions of intense conflict for group solidarity. Every one of these studies is directed toward advancing our understanding of sociation processes and their typical forms, and all are rich with suggestions for investigating specific actual instances of social life. Throughout these multifaceted studies it is clear that the most obvious underpinning of Simmel’s scientific questioning in the Sociology and the Fundamental Problems of Sociology is the concept of “interaction,” or as the German word Wechselwirkung implies, action that has “reciprocal effects.” It is a relational concept that is designed to probe the “objective” aspects of social life which exist outside of any particular individual and are then located in the space between individuals. To speak of an interaction is to characterize a relation between a subject and an object (both of which may be human individuals). The appropriate images for this characterization are spatial, directional, and three-dimensional: movement to and fro, repetitious circular motion, the sweep of a curve, or (one of Simmel’s favorites) the spiral movement from one “level” to another. The dynamics of rhythm, pace, and tempo are a part of this Simmelian language, as are the possibilities for either progression or regression, development or implosion, sympathy or antagonism, forming connections or breaking apart, certainty or ambivalence. Ironically, the very range and undecidability of these opposed categories has led critics, starting with Georg Lukács, to place this analysis itself in the “ambivalent” category – a charge that a Simmelian sociologist would say misses the point of Simmel’s scientific intentions and ignores the ambivalence inherent in social life. Summing up, we can say that interaction involves processes like objectification, differentiation, and distanciation. Interaction also creates social “forms” – roles, institutions, social structures – and produces social effects, such as integration or marginalization. But this is not the entire story, for it is equally important to recognize, as Nedelmann (1990) has suggested, that Simmel’s sociology actually proceeds from a double perspective: on the one side interaction is the focus of attention, and on the other, “lived experience” or Erleben. The potential for this second perspective is already present in The Philosophy of Money, where Simmel expresses his interest in understanding the “inner world” and “vitality” of individuals. Then in his mature sociology, such as the remarkable 1903 essay on the metropolis (1971: 324–39; 1995: 116–31), this interest is translated into an effort to grasp the effect of institutional forms produced by interaction on the Geistesleben – that is, on the mental, spiritual and intellectual life of the individual. It is not the structure or development of the personality, which is the province of psychology, after all, that is at stake in this perspective, but rather the effort of individuals to integrate the “forms” of the social world, of which they are a part, into their own mental life. The concept of “lived experience” becomes a matter of developing or choosing one’s self, an act that is not merely personal, but social. Along with objectification, therefore, comes the reverse process of internalization of roles, norms, social attitudes and behaviors – in a word, the process of socialization. Simmel’s sociology thus leaves us with a unique perspective on the fully “socialized” individual as both a cause and an effect: as the agent of interaction, as well as the

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resultant of the social structure and institutions produced by interaction. The circularity of this account would not have bothered Simmel, for it gave his analysis a secure way to understand sociology’s perennial conundrum: the relationship between the subject’s internal perceptions of action and the realities of the external social world, or between what is typically referred to as agency and structure.

THE FORMS OF INTERACTION Many of Simmel’s sociological writings were concerned with explorations of forms of interaction, the third major division in his characterization of sociology’s subject matter. To call this aspect of his work “pure” or “formal” sociology, as he suggested himself, is in some ways misleading. For the actual content of the discussion of social forms produced not simply an elaboration of abstract categories and types, but a wealth of illustrative materials for extending the reach of sociological analysis into uncharted domains. In using the concept of “form,” Simmel had in mind the patterned ways in which people relate to each other and structure their relationships over time and in space. To explore a particular form required not only generalization, but also a linking of the general to the particular, the abstract to the concrete. The capacity to order our experience and provide illustrative specificity has given Simmel’s approach its continuing appeal. We recognize ourselves and our social world in the ways of acting and relating to others that emerge in Simmel’s inventive narratives. Consider two of many possible examples from the Sociology: Simmel’s excursus on the “stranger,” and his chapter on the “secret and the secret society.” In both instances he starts from a general paradox: qualities that are valued socially in a person in one setting – familiarity/closeness or trustworthiness/openness, respectively – are at the same time counterbalanced and negated by equally compelling qualities that are valued in other contexts, times, and places – distance/remoteness and concealment/discretion. This paradox is apparent at the micro-level of individual action and social types, such as the stranger who “is near and far at the same time” (1971: 148; 1992: 770), or the conspirator who must remain invisible while still leading a social existence. At the macro-level Simmel wants to show that such dynamic tensions can permeate social relationships and come to characterize collective social life as a whole. There have been instances in the modern world, for example, in which concealment, deception, obfuscation, and denial of the true state of affairs have become a way of life for entire societies. Simmel is alert to the historical or developmental dimension of the social forms and their articulation. For obvious reasons some of the most challenging problems are posed by modernity: on the one hand in the modern world the increasing differentiation and specialization of social life place a premium on having confidence in the operation of processes and the production of results that no individual alone can conceivably comprehend. In Simmel’s formulation the individual comes to rely on a generalized trust or “faith in the honesty of the other” (1950: 313; 1992: 389). Yet on the other hand increasing social differentiation and complexity create the conditions for anonymity, concealment, asocial behavior, and suspicion. Paradoxically, in this unstable and perplexing world the relative mobility of the stranger can represent

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both a threat from the “other,” as well as an opportunity to reveal confidences “at times reminiscent of a confessional,” citing Simmel’s formulation (1971: 145; 1992: 767). This peculiar combination of subjectivity with “objective” relationships is woven into the texture of all modern experience. Characteristically some of Simmel’s primary examples of the practical synthesis of tensions between closeness and remoteness, or openness and concealment are drawn from the modern economy and modern science. In his view these spheres of interaction show especially well that the organization of modern life “is a ‘credit economy’ in a much broader than a strictly economic sense” (1950: 313; 1992: 389). He means to suggest that ongoing economic activity and the growth of science would be impossible without the extension of “credit” understood as social trust. Even in the civic discourse of modern democracies proponents tend to prize the creation of social capital and the public nature of knowledge as intrinsic and unquestioned public goods. From this perspective Simmel would have appreciated the contemporary effort to mediate between openness and concealment by appealing to “transparency” as an antidote to the excesses of secrecy under conditions of crisis in the socioeconomic system. But such an appeal is not absolute: it too is conditioned by the dialectics of the conflicting forms of interaction. The texts about the stranger and secrecy and secret societies illustrate one of the strengths of Simmel’s investigation of different social forms: they open onto the most timely and consequential subjects, inviting further investigation. The “stranger” is in essence a text about displacement and the uprooted, displaced person. It can apply to the immigrant, the newcomer, the undocumented migrant, the homeless, the outsider who becomes an insider – anyone who “comes today and stays tomorrow” while still remaining a “potential wanderer,” in Simmel’s phrasing (1971: 143; 1992: 764), a ubiquitous representative of the modern world. Similarly, the lengthy inquiry into secrecy is actually a formative contribution to the sociology of information, as sociologists have suggested recently (Marx & Muschert 2009), while at the same time, in its sections on the “secret society,” providing a sociological window onto the modern phenomenon of conspiratorial groups and revolutionary cells. The key issues are everywhere the same: the social construction of secrecy with respect to patterns of effective recruitment, proof of loyalty in members, testing of their resolve, and the formation and maintenance of group solidarity. Simmel’s legacy in the Sociology is thus to delve into social forms in detail, giving them currency and visibility as important social phenomena worthy of attention. Each of his chapters and sections, including the well-known commentary on the social effects of conflict and the less familiar, though highly original sociology of the “senses” and emotions, serves such a purpose. The open-ended character of the work contributes to the aim, offering the reader an exercise in thinking sociologically and an invitation to sociology.

THE THEORY OF CULTURE While in his Sociology Simmel tends to think of interaction in terms of the “forms” it produces, elsewhere he begins also to introduce a vitalistic concept into his thinking, following the lead of contemporaries like Henri Bergson. Simmel’s initial

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statement of the idea is to say that “life” expresses itself through interaction, and out of life certain forms emerge that make life itself possible – predictable, secure, bearable, pleasurable, and creative. But the difficulty, as he begins to see, is that these forms tend to congeal and rigidify, a concern also voiced later by Charles Cooley. The forms become a constraining “culture” opposed to life, and then set off the eternal struggle between “life” and “form.” This insight leads Simmel in the direction of a theory of culture as powerful as that developed by Freud. The logical dualisms that serve as building blocks for Simmel’s cultural theory become implicit by the time he writes his last chapter to The Philosophy of Money, for in that text two of his most important notions are present: the “objectification of mind,” and the growing tension in modernity between “material” and “individual” culture. But it is not until completing some of his last essays, especially “The Concept and Tragedy of Culture” (1911) and “The Conflict in Modern Culture” (1918), that Simmel successfully elaborates the assumptions, arguments, and details of this aspect of his work. Simmel actually selects a twofold dualism for his point of departure: the familiar Kantian opposition between subject and object, but also the opposition between self-consciousness and the “natural” world without consciousness of itself. “Humans, unlike the animals,” he writes in “The Concept and Tragedy of Culture,” do not allow themselves simply to be absorbed by the naturally given order of the world. Instead, they tear themselves loose from it, place themselves in opposition to it, making demands of it, overpowering it, then overpowered by it. From this first great dualism springs the never-ending contest between subject and object, which finds its second tribunal within the realm of spirit [Geist] itself. (1968: 27)

Or as he says later in “The Conflict in Modern Culture”: “Whenever life progresses beyond the animal level to that of the spirit, and spirit progresses to the level of culture, an internal contradiction appears. The whole history of culture is the working out of this contradiction” (1971: 375). The contradiction between the vital forces of “life” and the timeless forms of “culture” presupposes a process of objectification, which Simmel describes in terms of human mind or spirit projected outside itself, creating “structures” that exist independently of the creative subject, and becoming an autonomous force opposed to that subject. The subject thus becomes “objectified” in this process, which results in a radical and permanent tension – a Formgegensatz in Simmel’s terminology – between vital, finite life and the fixed, timeless forms it is destined to create as a precondition for its own expression and survival. While the former seems transient, finite, fluctuating, relative to subjects, inward, and immediately experienced, the latter appear to be permanent, timeless, static, objectively valid, external, and mediated by distance. Simmel then announces his major insight: “The idea of culture dwells in the middle of this dualism.” Essentially two senses of the concept of culture seem to follow from this theoretical perspective. The first elaborates the metaphor of culture “as the path of the soul to itself,” a formulation that could be read as a comment on an ascetic stance toward life that one also finds discussed in Nietzsche and Freud. Yet against the one-sided criticism of asceticism as repressive, Simmel’s idea of culture suggests expression, development, and fulfillment of that which is essentially human. In a 1916 speech, “The Crisis of Culture,” he suggested that culture can be considered

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the completion of the soul … in which it takes the detour through the formations of the intellectual-historical work of the species: the cultural path of the subjective spirit traverses science and the forms of life, art and state, vocation and knowledge of the world – the path on which it now returns to itself as higher and perfected spirit. (1999: 37)

From this perspective “life” must also be something formed, and the activity of culture can offer it what Simmel calls a “unity of the soul,” that is, the enticing prospect of a “solution to the subject–object dualism” through the promise of setting the preconditions for the pursuit of what could be designated self-development and the cultivation of personality. In Simmel’s view we appear to consist of a bundle of directions for selfdevelopment, all having varied potentialities. However, it is also the case that as cultural beings our choices are not arbitrary, but are instead governed by our culturally derived sense of “personal unity.” Using Simmel’s own peculiar language, we see that “Culture is the way that leads from closed unity through unfolding multiplicity to unfolding unity” (1968: 29). Or in more direct phrasing, culture exists only if man draws into his development something that is external to him … the perfection of the individual is routed through real and ideal spheres outside of the self. The perfection does not remain a purely immanent process, but is consummated in a unique adjustment and teleological interweaving of subject and object. (1971: 230)

Thus, we can say that culture is necessarily dualistic, necessarily objective and subjective, and it makes possible the process of forming the self, an “unfolding unity,” through reciprocal action between the objective and the subjective. Simmel’s mature conception of culture is rich with paradox, for on the one hand culture requires the perpetuation of an unresolved dualism, while on the other it is thought of as mediating or synthesizing the dialectically separated poles of our existence. Stated somewhat differently, whereas on one level it assumes unresolved difference, on another it urges development through mediative inclusion of the “other.” Subjective life, driven toward perfection of its identity, “cannot by itself reach the perfection of culture,” yet culture “is always a synthesis” of subjective life and the contents of life that “presupposes the divisibility of elements as an antecedent.” Today it is especially modernity that accounts for such otherwise incomprehensible tension and potential confusion, for as Simmel maintains: “Only in an analytically inclined age like the modern could one find in synthesis the deepest, the one and only relationship of form between spirit and world” (1968: 30, 35). We should accurately speak of a longing for synthesis and wholeness as most characteristic of the modern. The clearest depiction of a second sense to the concept of culture comes at the end of Simmel’s thinking on the subject in “The Conflict of Modern Culture,” where he decides to speak of culture not so much whenever it functions through mediation, but rather whenever life produces certain forms in which it expresses and realizes itself: works of art, religions, sciences, technologies, laws, and innumerable others. These forms encompass the flow of life and provide it with content and form, room for play and for order.

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But although these forms arise out of the life process, because of their unique constellation they do not share the restless rhythm of life, its ascent and descent, its constant renewal, its incessant divisions and reunifications. These forms are cages for the creative life which, however, soon transcends them. They should also house the imitative life, for which, in the final analysis, there is no space left. They acquire fixed identities, a logic and lawfulness of their own [eigene Logik und Gesetzlichkeit]; this new rigidity inevitably places them at a distance from the spiritual dynamic which created them and which makes them independent. (1971: 375; translation modified)

For Simmel, not capitalism, vocational specialization, or instrumental rationality, but rather rational culture itself becomes the new “iron cage,” employing Weber’s well-known metaphor from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Moreover, this culture also possesses an “internal and lawful autonomy” of the kind Weber assigned to the different life-orders and value-spheres of the world. As a distinctive supra-life form, culture is in this way of thinking set squarely against the forces of (creative) life. Culture is not merely the path to self-recognition, but also the dwelling place of repressive order. In one sense culture suggests movement and possibility, in another rigidity and limitation. Simmel’s theory raises this quality of culture that he refers to variously in his later essays as a paradox, crisis, conflict, or tragedy to the conscious level, not in order to abolish or transcend it, as some have supposed, for that would destroy culture and its sources in life, but in order to view cultural paradox as a moment in its own development. Like all of human life, culture has a history too, which shows that in the modern present “we are experiencing a new phase of the old struggle,” in Simmel’s words; it is “no longer a struggle of a contemporary form, filled with life, against an old, lifeless one, but a struggle of life against form as such, against the principle of form” (1968: 12). The peculiar and increasing “formlessness” of modern life is the hallmark of the present, and in agreement with Weber, Simmel believes it has been accompanied by numerous exaggerated expressions of life: endless searches in the avant-garde for originality and heightened experience, strivings for a “new ethic” or a “new religiosity,” attempts to sanctify the soul in blasé and cynical personal styles. “Thus arises the typical problematic situation of modern man,” Simmel maintains: his feeling of being surrounded by an innumerable number of cultural elements which are neither meaningless to him nor, in the final analysis, meaningful. In their mass they depress him, since he is incapable of assimilating them all, nor can he simply reject them, since after all, they do belong potentially within the sphere of his cultural development. (1968: 44)

However, in Simmel’s view it was not always so, for in a rare historical detour he suggests that at the very center of culture, from antiquity to modernity, has been a movement from an assumed “unity of being” (Greek philosophy), to “god” (Christianity), “nature” (the Renaissance), the “self” (the Enlightenment), “society” (the nineteenth century), and finally “life” (modernity), a schematic developmental process that has parallels in Weber’s well-known and concise critique of the illusory meanings Western culture has assigned to science and the search for knowledge. Just

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as Weber’s modern science has now become disenchanted, or disabused of its innocent pretense, so Simmel’s modern culture has surrendered the delusion of unitary meaning. For Western thought the move from Kant’s critique of pure reason to Simmel’s critique of culture seems to entail replacement of the universal individuality of a transcendental ego, situated in a single and generalizable world of mechanistic properties, with the unique individuality of a determinate subject, dispersed into multiple and particularizing worlds of qualitative variation. Furthermore, Simmel’s historic diagnosis of modern culture’s paradoxes and tragedies is given an immediacy it would otherwise lack because now our experience has driven the tension between “life” and its “forms” (most importantly including science and knowledge among them) to the greatest extreme yet attained. In his scientific work Simmel responds in three important ways to the contemporary state of affairs outlined in his theory of culture. In the first place he is intrigued by the many socio-political forces, organized groups, interactions or processes of sociation, sociability, and conviviality that aim, as he remarks in his first essay on Rodin, “to subordinate the whole of life to a meaningful order” which will serve “that deepest longing of the soul to mould everything that is given in its own image” (1995: 96; quoted in Böhringer & Gründer 1976: 234–5). This perspective and attendant subject matter can be understood as focused on the attempts in the modern age to recover a lost unity to culture, to find a way of overcoming the paradoxical juxtaposition of life and form. Even the unique concept of “conviviality,” as Tönnies noted, was for Simmel precisely the “play form” of reciprocal action or interaction that created a space for “the sense of liberation and relief” indispensable for coping with the conditions of culture (quoted in Coser 1965: 52). But in evaluating the modern search for meaningful order, a healthy metaphysical skepticism often prevents Simmel from doing more than honoring such attempts as humanly understandable and significant efforts from within culture to “solve” the crisis the tension between objective and subjective culture has produced. Genuine solutions lie in the unforeseen future, at the “end” of our history, so to speak. According to Simmel’s theory of culture attempts aimed in this direction will lead to further fragmentation and differentiation, to a continuing proliferation of cultural forms, to further tensions between objective and subjective culture. A second response becomes apparent in the realm of aesthetics, through the quest for “salvation through art” and the experience of conducting one’s life as a “work of art.” Certainly Simmel’s writing on art and artists, such as Rembrandt, Goethe, Rodin, and George, and his own authorial experimentation with poetry and the essay form sub specie aeternitatis in the modernist journal of art nouveau, Jugend, are inclined in this direction. In addition, so is the aesthetic dimension implicit in the concept of “lived experience” or Erleben in his sociology. Indeed, some of Simmel’s most provocative formulations appear in connection with the aesthetic dimension of individual experience, as distinct from social interaction: The problem that afflicts us in all areas, namely, how purely individual existence can be unified, how one can reject consideration of general norms … without descending into anarchy and rootless caprice – this problem has been solved by Rodin’s art as art always solves spiritual problems: not in principle, but in individual perceptions [Anschauungen]. (1995: 94; Böhringer & Gründer 1976: 233)

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Similarly, the closest Simmel ever came to a personal answer to the problem of culture was in his own “individual perceptions,” not in a definitive, principled “solution” to the conflict and “tragedy” of culture his analysis disclosed. No such solution existed, for to say that the widespread cultural problem can only be resolved aesthetically is to say that it can and must remain unresolved. But if Simmel was attracted to the light of aesthetic judgment as a source of illumination, then he was also pulled in the direction of the clear air of reflection – caught, as it were, between the imperatives of Kant’s first and third critiques. Like Weber and Freud, Simmel also chose to bind himself to the vocation of science, to choose intellect over latent possibility. This was his third response to the ultimate conflicts and tragedy of culture. In one of his very last comments, for instance, he reasoned, It is a philistine prejudice that all conflicts and problems are dreamt up merely for the sake of their solution. Both in fact have additional tasks in the economy and history of life, tasks which they fulfill independently of their own solutions. Thus they exist in their own right, even if the future does not replace conflicts with their resolutions, but only replaces their forms and contents with others. In short, the present is too full of contradictions to stand still. This itself is a more fundamental change than the reformations of times past. The bridge between the past and the future of cultural forms seems to be demolished; we gaze into an abyss of unformed life beneath our feet. But perhaps this formlessness is itself the appropriate form for contemporary life. Thus the blueprint of life is obliquely fulfilled. Life is a struggle in the absolute sense of the term which encompasses the relative contrast between war and peace: the absolute peace which might encompass this contrast remains an eternal secret to us. (Simmel 1971: 393)

To speak of the breakdown of cultural tradition and continuity is to return to the paradoxical idea of form’s absence as itself a form. This striking version of our acceptance of a formless present and our muted curiosity in the face of mystery may vouchsafe the interpretation of Simmel as a “tragic” and “ambivalent” thinker, trapped by the modern cultural dynamic and unable to penetrate those “eternal secrets” that might lead us into another world. Perhaps in this respect Simmel remained a cultural being, his imagination attuned solely to the rhythms of his own time. However, in Simmel’s defense one should say that the barrier to affirming definitive solutions and a new world, when it arose, was not inability but unwillingness: the other worlds, the alternatives made available in culture, were still for Simmel a part of that unprecedented modern culture he had so carefully dissected in all of its complexity and contradiction. In his critical judgment of those alternatives Simmel surely shed that alleged “ambivalence” that has haunted his reputation as sociologist and philosopher. With good reason he reserved the right, recalling Wittgenstein’s well-known epigram, to pass over the evaluation of any number of proposed solutions in silence. The essential achievement of Simmel’s theory is to emphasize the dialectical interplay that gives substance, direction, and shape to culture – especially now a modern culture delineated, so to speak, by the struggle between life and form. Simmel is convincing in maintaining that this struggle, considered in the abstract, is inevitable

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and necessary as a presupposition for culture – a position that separates his analysis from any dialectical syntheses, or the variations on Marx’s historical materialism. Yet it is the very search for resolution and transformation of the dialectical aporia, for reconciliation of life with form, that is most characteristic of the sociology of associative activity in specifically modern culture. Simmel understands this insight, and therefore defends an “empirical” cultural sociology that rests upon his claims about culture’s paradoxes. The subject matter for this sociology, in other words, is established by the great refusals to accept the essential opposition between external, material forms and humanity’s subjective strivings. We can achieve some measure of judgment, Simmel tells us, by viewing such refusals from a distance, honoring their necessity, but also declining to enlist under the banner of their hopes for reconciling the dualisms of the culture we call our own.

WOMAN AND FEMALE CULTURE One of the most remarkable and prescient of Simmel’s contributions to cultural sociology was his work on woman, gender, and difference. In Germany in the 1890s the women’s movement began to gain a following in socialist and liberal circles, with growing numbers of women taking on public roles, participating in organizational activity, entering the universities, and preparing for the professions. As a close observer of social change, Simmel responded with a series of essays that staked out a theoretical position based on his overarching views about society and culture. Discussion of the “woman question” in the philosophical traditions before Simmel had generally followed one of two possible patterns of thought: either woman was treated as “similar” to man because of a shared basic nature, as argued by Plato, or woman was considered “different” by virtue of differences in biology, psyche, being, or some other factor, as claimed by both Kant and Hegel. Occasionally a writer would articulate a position that combined elements of both views, as did J. S. Mill in “The Subjection of Women.” Regardless of the particular orientation, in all these discussions the major questions were always twofold: Similar or different with respect to what goods or values in social life? What is the relevance of any claimed similarities or differences for social conduct and the structure of society? Simmel’s approach is a striking instance of the argument from “difference,” similar to that of the developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan today. That is, he essentially adopts the view that woman is different in socially important ways, such as having a special relationship to the contents of culture, or having a different “sense of justice.” Consider his most comprehensive statement on the issue in “Female Culture” (1911), for instance: Frequently the “legal antipathy” of women is stressed: their opposition to legal norms and judgments. However there is no sense in which this necessarily implies an animus against the law itself; instead, it is only against male law, which is the only law we have, and for this reason seems to us to be the law as such. In the same way, our historically defined morality, individualized by considerations of both time and place, seems to us to fulfill the conditions of the concept of morality in general. The female “sense of justice,” which differs from the male in many respects, would create a different law as well. (1984: 68)

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However, this “difference” is not understood as a basis for subordination. It is seen instead as an opportunity for developing multiplicity and cultural variation, as a possibility for promoting the emergence of new cultural forms. The reason for this radical perspective is grounded in the logic of Simmel’s theory of culture. Starting from his fundamental distinction between “objective” and “subjective” culture, Simmel links the difference between male and female experience to the process of objectification. The aspects of life that he calls the “cultural capital” of an era are found in its objective culture, and this culture “with the exception of a very few areas … is thoroughly male” (1984: 65, 67). The dichotomy between objective and subjective is then restated in numerous ways in Simmel’s writing, but its basic alignment is with a view of woman’s difference having to do with notions of differentiation and totality. As Simmel records the idea in one summation, “If there is any sense in which the distinctive psychic quality of woman’s nature can be expressed symbolically, it is this: Its periphery is more closely connected with its center and its aspects are more completely integrated into the whole than holds true for the male nature” (1984: 73). Now it is not always clear what Simmel wants to infer or conclude from this kind of assertion, or even if he is fully committed to it. There is an experimental quality to such thoughts that may defy our normal expectations for clear and distinct reasoning. But such an experimental claim poses the obvious questions: What social changes occur when women move into the domains of objective culture? If women also create objective culture, is it then a qualitatively different kind of culture? Is there, or can there be, such a thing as female culture, and if so, what would it be like? Bearing these qualifications in mind, Simmel nevertheless forges ahead and proposes a number of hypothetical answers to his questions, perhaps surprising to us for their contemporaneity. For instance, he suggests that woman accomplishes something in objective culture men cannot achieve, because of her capacity for empathy, using the example of diagnosis and care in medicine. Or he suggests that woman’s unique character and ability can lead to newer forms of knowledge, alluding to the importance of “understanding” in writing history. However, for a contemporary feminist like Marianne Weber, writing a reply to Simmel in the journal Logos (“Woman and Objective Culture,” 1913), these hypotheses sounded far-fetched, perhaps merely a projection of male needs and a romanticization of woman’s difference. Moreover, they still failed to distinguish unambiguously between nature and nurture, between all that is naturally endowed and everything that is socioculturally determined. Despite these difficulties, Simmel’s last word poses an interesting challenge. For in his formulation culture itself is two-sided: it assumes a difference that is genderspecific; its subject is “man” and his choices. But culture also develops through mediative inclusion of the other, of “woman” and her being. This formulation, however, is set forth from within the perspective of objective (male) culture. Is there any other (female) perspective that can be stated in a different language? Consider Simmel’s speculative conclusion to “Female Culture,” a rare paragraph in which he seems to anticipate the course of the most radical directions of thought originating in the late twentieth century, especially those challenges to so-called “phallogocentrism” associated with postmodern critics:

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From the standpoint of cultural history, consider the extreme point that the ideal of the independence and equality of women seems to be capable of reaching: an objective female culture parallel to the male and thereby annulling its brutal historical idealization.… Under these circumstances, the male monopolization of objective culture would persist, but with justification. This is because objective culture as a formal principle would qualify as a one-sided male principle. Juxtaposed to it, the female form of existence would present itself as a different form, autonomous on the basis of its ultimate essence, incommensurable on the basis of the standard of the male principle, and with contents that are not formed in the same way. Thus its meaning would no longer turn on an equivalence within the general form of objective culture but rather on an equivalence between two modes of existence that have a completely different rhythm. One [male culture] is dualistic, oriented to becoming, knowledge, and volition. As a result, it objectifies the contents of its life out of the process of life in the form of a cultural world. The other [female culture] lies beyond this subjectively constituted and objectively developed dichotomy. For this reason, the contents of its life are not experienced in a form that is external to them. On the contrary, it must search out a perfection that is immanent to them. (1984: 100–1)

Simmel, like modern feminism, does not know what this “immanent perfection” might look like, or what kind of “world” it might create. But the insight of his commentary is to foresee the trajectory of the line of thinking that the argument from difference must follow. The world, as he says, is “a form of the contents of consciousness.” In this view the argument from difference is all about forming and raising consciousness; once that has taken place, the transformation of the social world will not be far behind.

SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION AND ART Simmel’s writings in the sociology and psychology of religion spanned two decades, from “A Contribution to the Sociology of Religion” of 1898, to the concluding section in “The Conflict of Modern Culture” of 1918. Among this work it was the lengthy essay, Religion (1906; 2nd edn., 1912), published in Martin Buber’s popular multi-volume series on different aspects of modern society, Die Gesellschaft, that provided the most sustained discussion of his views. The subject matter in these writings is not simply the sociology of religion as a field for observing interaction, but more particularly the “lived experience” of the religious person. In contrast to Max Weber’s well-known essays in the sociology of religion, Simmel’s work thus tends to play down comparative historical or institutional questions, while instead investigating the inward and personal aspects of religiosity or “religiousness” – the side of his sociology concerned with “experience.” As Phillip Hammond has suggested, in contrast to Weber’s “religiously unmusical” selfdescription we seem in this body of work to be confronted with the “religiously musical” side of Simmel’s perceptions (Simmel 1997: vii). Following the tradition of thought that is also exemplified in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, Simmel distinguishes between religion as a doctrine or “set of claims,” and religion as a “form of life” or a “state of being,”

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agreeing with James that the latter is his primary concern. Both might be said to explore the meaning of Kant’s notion that religion is “an attitude of the soul.” But unlike James, Simmel explicitly repudiates the mechanistic psychology that views religiosity as a mental entity, instead proposing to see it sociologically as “a form according to which the human soul experiences life and comprehends its existence” (Simmel 1997: 5, 50). “All religiosity,” he asserts, contains a peculiar admixture of unselfish surrender and fervent desire, of humility and exaltation, of sensual concreteness and spiritual abstraction; this occasions a certain degree of emotional tension, a specific ardor and certainty of the subjective conditions, an inclusion of the subject in a higher order – an order which, at the same time, is felt to be something inward and personal. (1997: 104)

Religiosity is thus a type of affective relationship, an aspect of the dialectical struggle between “life” and “form” that Simmel places at the center of his theory of culture. Religion in this sense is not life itself, but rather a form that emerges out of life and makes an important aspect of our experience possible. For Simmel life’s rebellion against form guarantees the renewal of religious experience and the emergence of new forms of the religious life. Religiosity thus provides the essential dynamic of religion as a set of claims. In his important summation, “Just as cognition does not create causality, but instead causality creates cognition, so religion does not create religiosity, but religiosity creates religion” (1997: 150). Or as Simmel expresses the idea in another passage, the logical sequence the observer must follow is from religiosity to “social phenomena” to “objective religion” (1997: 211). As in other parts of his thought, one important problem Simmel confronts is framed by the advance of the scientific outlook and the powers of technological civilization: What can be the meaning and experience of religiosity in the modern age, he wants to ask, when we are faced with a withdrawal of the “content” of religion, while the “religious need” – that is, the form called religiousness – remains with us? How are we to understand the reality of a religiosity that exists independent of any content, that can be transformed, so to speak, from “a transitive to an intransitive activity” (1997: 23)? Simmel’s answer requires that he propose a conjecture: The real gravity of the current situation is that not this or that particular dogma but the object of transcendent faith per se is characterized as illusory. What survives is no longer the form of transcendence seeking new fulfillment but something more profound and more desperate: it is a yearning, once fulfilled by the idea of transcendence, and now – although it is a concrete reality within the soul – paralyzed by the withdrawal of the content of faith and as if cut off from the path to its own life. (1997: 9)

This observation is congruent with Freud’s later theme in The Future of an Illusion (1927), and it allows us to understand the modern penchant for expression of religiosity and experimentation with its results. In “The Conflict in Modern Culture,” Simmel argues that the modern turn to mysticism and its various forms (such as Zen Buddhism or “New Age” spirituality today) represents an attempt to find a way out of the dilemma. No doubt there are others, though they all may in the last analysis “become equally entangled in contradictions,” as Simmel notes (1997: 23).

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But there is a second problem for Simmel in this part of his work, for he wants to assess the connection between religiosity and social phenomena. Can there be instructive parallels or analogies between religious conduct and social interaction? Simmel’s complex responses take different forms themselves. But in general his reflections on art, subjectivity, inwardness, or reconciliation trace the engagement of the self – especially the contested modern self – with religiosity. Moreover, particularly in the longest text, Religion, his point is that religiosity is itself a social form, observable within other non-religious relationships, serving as a template for appropriate interactions, triggering the search for social unity in a “higher order,” or modeling the relationship of the individual to the group. Such passages show Simmel at his best, revealing for him the problems that the sociology of religion should pursue: We can see, for example, that many human relationships harbor a religious element. The relationship of a devoted child to his parent, of an enthusiastic patriot to his country, of the fervent cosmopolite to humanity; the relationship of the worker to his insurgent class or of the proud feudal lord to his fellow nobles; the relationship of the subject to his ruler or of the true soldier to his army – all these relationships, with their infinite variety of content, can be seen to share a psychological form. This form has a common tone that can be described only as religious. (1997: 104) The interaction between the human being and his God thus encompasses the whole range of possible relationships, both sequentially and simultaneously. In doing so it unmistakably reiterates the behavioral patterns that exist between the individual and his social group. Here we see the same phenomenon of an individual subjected to a supreme power yet permitted a degree of freedom; passive reception that still allows room for a responsive reaction; the self-surrender that does not exclude rebellion; the mixture of reward and punishment; the relationship of a single member to the whole, even though that single member still desires to be a whole himself. One feature of religion in particular can be transposed to the relationship of the individual to the group: that is the humility with which the pious person attributes everything he is and has to God’s generosity and sees in divine power the source of his being and strength. For man is not absolutely nothing in relation to God: though only a grain of dust, he is not an utterly insignificant force but is at least a receptacle ready to receive its contents. Thus there are strong similarities between the religious and the sociological forms of existence. (1997: 157)

In this view not only are there parallels between religious activity and social activity, but the element of religiosity is contained within other, non-religious relationships. By understanding religiosity, in other words, we can also better grasp the nature of other kinds of social interactions. Moreover, for Simmel there is a strong affinity between religion and art, or between the religious life and the artistic life, which then accounts for their historic attraction and repulsion in the great world religions. On the one hand, then, he can envisage an “essential similarity between the form of the religious life and that of art” and postulate “the ultimate similarity of form through which religion always anticipates art and art always stimulates religious sentiment” (1997: 67). The most important reason for this similarity has to do with the process of distanciation at work in both the artistic and religious realms. For both art and religion project their

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objects into a world “beyond” the empirical here-and-now, Simmel argues, but only in order to draw these objects into the close and immediate orbit of our consciousness. Paradoxically, the distance created between the self and its objects of perception makes possible the subjective possession of these objects and the complete and apparently unmediated identification with them. Of course, in actuality there is a source of mediation in social interaction and group life. Thus, when Rembrandt is understood as the “painter of the soul” offering a vision of reconciliation for the inner life, as Simmel holds in his monograph on the great artist, then it is because these notions of soul, reconciliation, and inner life have meaning and value for us as social beings. On the other hand art proclaims its autonomy and competition with the religious life: l’art pour l’art is the rallying cry of the fin de siècle. The significance of this challenge for Simmel becomes marked in the essays on art forms and major artists, where in historical and comparative perspective he explores the great dualisms of nature and spirit, content and form, our existence in the life-world and the contrasting reality of the work of art. The attraction of modern art especially lies in its ability to work through and heighten these age-old dualisms in such a way as to present art as “salvation” from the everyday. Toward the end of one of his essays on Rodin, for example, Simmel comments, Ancient sculpture sought the logic of the body, so to speak, whereas Rodin seeks its psychology. For the essence of modernity as such is psychologism, the lived experience and interpretation of the world in terms of the reactions of our inner life and actually as an inner world, the dissolution of the fixed contents in the fluid elements of the soul, from which all substance has been removed, and whose forms are only forms of movements. Thus music, the most moving of the arts, is actually the most modern art. Thus landscape painting is the specifically modern achievement of painting, for it is an état d’âme, and its use of color and composition dispenses with logical structure more than the body and figural composition. And in the human figure the modern gives precedence to the countenance, antiquity to the body, because the former reveals the person in the flow of the inner life, the latter more the human in its fixed substance. (2001: 34–5)

So whereas art in antiquity achieved its goal by freeing us from discontent through a perfection of style that negated the flux of life, Simmel contends, modern art rescues us by grasping the truth of the fluidity, motion and dissolution of form that we experience. Art is capable of validating our lived experience, a powerful argument for substituting the aesthetic for the religious life, and for Simmel one of the important tendencies at work in modernity.

PROBLEMS IN SIMMEL’S THOUGHT The identification and elaboration of important dynamic, dualistic tensions in our experience is one of the most striking aspects of Simmel’s thought. His treatment of the category of “life” held in creative tension with “form” is only the most abstract of these dualisms. Surely among the most striking is his exploration of the ways in

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which individual autonomy and freedom are both opposed to social formations and constraints, but then also authorized and made possible by such formations and constraints. One of the most consequential tensions for modern life is the dynamic interplay between our subjective historical identities and the objectified socialtechnological forces that challenge those identities, both canceling and reinforcing or reshaping them. The complexity in this dynamic mode of thinking is one source of the fascination with Simmel. But it is also a contributing source for the questioning of his general approach, method of inquiry, and overall contribution to social theory. This questioning can be reduced to five problem domains: subjectivism, psychologism, aestheticism, formalism, and ambivalence.

Subjectivism One of the earliest criticisms of Simmel focused attention on the speculative quality of his thinking. To be sure, Simmel was not an “empiricist” in the usual sense of the word, nor did he want to follow the normal paths of empirical inquiry. However, neither was he a system-builder whose edifice of thought rested on metaphysical foundations. Avoiding either of these polarities, did he nevertheless have a method of inquiry that could give “systematic coherence” to his approach? Did he provide any guidance at the level of, say, Durkheim in The Rules of Sociological Method? For Simmel the answer to such challenges is difficult to formulate, and that difficulty has fed the suspicion among critics that methodological rigor is not among the scientific values promoted in Simmel’s work.

Psychologism Simmel did, however, contribute to the longstanding discussions of explanation through understanding, or Verstehen, as did his colleague Max Weber. The difficulty, however, is that in his early writings Simmel tended to think of understanding in terms of an inner mental state of the observer, such as empathy or a unique capacity to re-experience the observable, rather than emphasizing the intersubjectivity of external standards for verification and falsification. He corrected this weakness in his later work, but never added the level of logical clarity that Weber achieved with “ideal type” constructions. Too often, therefore, it seemed to some critics that Simmel’s insights, as brilliant as they might be, rested on an appeal to the primacy of human psychology, the mental apparatus and individual consciousness.

Aestheticism Closely related to the charges of subjectivism and psychologism is the concern that Simmel’s distinctive style or manner of thinking – his Denkart – is driven and characterized by aesthetic considerations. From this point of view, for example, his version of “political economy” in The Philosophy of Money is highly individualized, and notwithstanding an array of brilliant constructions, it lacks the clear conceptual underpinnings and critical edge of Marx’s Capital, or the explicit analytic categories and systematic intentions of Weber’s Economy and Society. Instead of merely writing

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a text, it is as if Simmel wants to compose a dense texture of images that will convey, like a canvas or a score, the essential experience of a phenomenon – in this case “money” as both an overbearing material power and a metaphysical reality. According to this critical view such results are like a work of art in the hands of a master: admirable for their perfection, originality, and singularity, but not in principle “falsifiable” according to the canons of science.

Formalism Of course, Simmel was also an acknowledged master of “formal” analyses of social interaction. But the problem is that such analysis can appear unhistorical and untested by systematic, rigorous, substantive comparative applications. There is a tendency in this kind of analysis to stress only formal properties, instead of investigating actual cases, historical patterns, or developmental logics. Thus, unlike Marx and Weber, Simmel cannot be said to have a comparative historical sociology, or a structural analysis of stratification systems, or a developmental sociology of the modern state. His formal sociology might be viewed as a suggestive heuristic for understanding historical and structural dimensions of a given society, but it is not in itself an analysis, for example, of actually realized social structures or historical patterns of domination.

Ambivalence While often viewed as an astute diagnostician of the Zeitgeist, Simmel has also been accused of reveling in that diagnosis at the expense of developing an unambiguous critical position, or making a clear choice about the most desirable path toward a rational future. Simmel’s thought is never short on critical perspectives, but in this view those perspectives remain as equally valued possibilities, rather than temporary and questionable positions that must be challenged and overcome. In this view his mature thinking thus never points without question to transformative action projects, but it leaves us instead merely reflecting on the “tragedy,” “fate,” contradictions, or possibilities of our times. Now these five problem areas speak to the challenging and unique character of Simmel’s voluminous writings. But in partial defense of Simmel it must be said that many of the charges against him misunderstand or misdirect the tasks he set for himself. Better brilliant errors than dull correctness and pedantry, as Weber once remarked, just as he warned against succumbing to a “methodological pestilence.” Simmel avoided both of these traps, though at a price. Unwilling to pose as a utopian or futurologist, he was content to dissect social life to expose the sinews that made sociability, individuation and differentiation possible. Content to leave historical and structural problematics to others, he concentrated his efforts on a general level of analysis about history, society, culture, economy, art or religion as such. Particular histories or a specific religion were not Simmel’s concern, but rather the writing of what we call “history” as an idea and creative act, or the formation of what we call “religion” out of the quality of experience identified as religiosity. For Simmel, then, in these instances any loss in the particularity of a subject matter could be compensated by an unexpected turn, a novel line of inquiry, an especially suggestive

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example, or a unique depth of understanding. It is also the case, however, that when it came to the specifically sociological problem of investigating the ways in which we form social relationships, Simmel subjected his topics and interests to the most microscopic scrutiny. Generalization about the forms of interaction was then at most an orienting framework for unearthing and making sense of the manifold particularities of social life. It is this unusual combination of “form” and “content” that gives Simmel’s thought an enduring fascination. In the last analysis he wanted surprise, originality, and enthusiasm: when achieved, it is these qualities that challenge the most earnest criticisms of his work and its legacy.

SIMMEL’S POSITION IN MODERN SOCIAL THEORY Returning to Simmel’s intellectual and social world of the fin de siècle, there was a legendary quality to his public presence in the pre-war Berlin of his time. Not many sociologists or philosophers receive the garland of poetic declamation from their students. Simmel was one of the few who did: The differences are illusionary; Is the flamingo nobler than the stork? I sink into my seat painfully For the great analyst Geork. There I sit in my brown vest, And the army of objects envelop me. Oh, will the problems never rest, The walled-in smoke of indifference encircles me. What is the meaning of life? This question Is foolish, but it exists nevertheless, It needles me for seven thousand days of vexation: I sit there in agony, ill-fated, helpless.

So wrote Kurt Hiller in 1911 in the avant-garde expressionist journal, Die Aktion, commemorating in doggerel the spell Simmel cast over audiences that included Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Robert Park. The long shadow of this influence can then be seen in their quite varied later work, even in the famous insights about “alienation” and “reification” in Lukács’s essays in History and Class Consciousness (1922), or the “cultural criticism” advanced by Siegfried Kracauer and members of the early Frankfurt School, as well as the “interactionist” perspectives of the Chicago School of American sociology and the subsequent symbolic interactionists. But Simmel never intended to be a founder of a school or movement, in contrast to Durkheim or Marx, and many of those who explicitly borrowed his name, such as Hiller, were marginal figures and outsiders to the academy and the major social and political movements of the time. For the main orthodoxies in social theory and philosophy Simmel seemed to remain a brilliant essayist and wide-ranging intellect, a master of the insightful aperçu and the ambiguities and conflicts of modern life, but a thinker without a philosophical system or a unified, marketable sociological doctrine. It is an interesting comment on the peculiarities of our times to note that it

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is precisely these alleged deficiencies that have once again made Simmel an engaging presence, even for some an insightful “postmodernist” avant la lettre. Simmel, of course, thought he was merely “modern,” if not ahead of his times. With neo-Kantian theory in eclipse during the twentieth century, Simmel’s profile in philosophy has retreated into the shadows. But the legacy of his thought has remained strong in several major fields of sociology, where it first attracted attention, especially in the United States, perhaps because the traditions stemming from George Herbert Mead or Robert E. Park bear a certain family resemblance to Simmel’s work. Most obviously, symbolic interactionism, formal sociology, and conflict sociology all owe a major debt to the Simmelian analysis of interaction processes and patterns of sociation. Indeed, these subject matters and areas of inquiry, represented, for example, by the work of Lewis Coser in conflict theory, are at the core of what was seen for decades as Simmel’s unique contribution. Today, however, a new Simmel has taken the stage. The renaissance of interest in Simmel and his work, nearly a century after his death, is explained by several considerations: renewed interest in cultural theory and analysis, a spate of writings on modernity and its discontents, concern with substantive topics (such as the sociology of emotions, secrecy and secret societies, feminism and gender, or the sociology of fashion and art) that Simmel cultivated almost alone, dissatisfaction with orthodox sociological empiricism, and the energizing disarray in social theory generally. In addition, Simmel’s writings have finally become more widely available, both through the nearly complete (and affordable) collected works, the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, and for the vast international English-language readership through the translation of the Sociology (2009) along with the earlier Philosophy of Money. Students of social thought are now in a position, for the first time, to read Simmel as he always should have been read, though rarely was – in intellectual context, sequentially from beginning to end. Among the “classics” Simmel can seem to offer the most sustained, varied and intriguing discussions of a full range of problems and topics, some of them quite exemplary, that touch on the thematic interests of the present. Apart from the selfsustaining project of institutionalizing a sociological practice or pursuing “science for science’s sake,” as a good Simmelian might put it, what we can hope to find in Simmel’s work is an orientation, a series of insights, even a kind of deep programmatic understanding about what is significant in social life that will satisfy our need for clarity about our own situation in the modern world and in sociology and social theory. Using the work as a starting point and extending it in new directions and to unanticipated and novel applications always offers an attractive prospect (see Sofsky 1997; Rol & Papilloud 2009). Some have gone even further to find in his work a “research program” for comprehending the “historical anthropology of the modern” (Nolte 1998). Whether in their weaker or stronger form, ultimately these orientations are the grounds on which the interest in Simmel’s work will be sustained for the foreseeable future. Simmel was a great raconteur, often lacing lectures and essays with illustrative fables and anecdotes. One of his favorites told the story of the farmer who on his death bed advised his children to search for a treasure he had buried in the fields. They diligently followed his directions, plowing hard and deep, but found no buried treasure. However, the following year the land yielded a threefold harvest. Like these

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heirs, we won’t find the treasure, Simmel announced, but the world we have cultivated in looking for it will prove many times more fruitful, because such cultivation is the necessary condition for our imagination, intellect, and spirit. And so it is with the promise of Simmel’s work. The fable aptly captures the last important legacy of his sociological and philosophical investigations, and suggests the importance of our relation to his science and to him as a cultivator of the intellect, observer of the individual and social life, and enthusiast for the life of the mind.

Reader’s Guide to Georg Simmel The best collection of Simmel’s own writings is Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, edited by Donald Levine (1971). The Philosophy of Money (translated for Routledge by David Frisby and Tom Bottomore [2004]) is important, especially the last chapter, though Simmel’s perspective is highly unusual and a challenge to understand. Kurt Wolff’s classic The Sociology of Georg Simmel (1950) contains important chapters and essays by Simmel. Guy Oakes has published timely essays in Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love (1984) and written a useful introduction to Simmel’s thought. Recently Simmel’s entire Sociology has been translated as Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms (2009), although it still awaits an affordable paperback edition. A good starting point for commentary on the range of Simmel’s thought is David Frisby (2002), Georg Simmel, or the reissued older study by Nicholas Spykman (1966), The Social Theory of Georg Simmel, with an introduction by Frisby. The reader Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology, edited by Michael Kaern and others (1990), focuses primarily on Simmel’s connection to the modern discipline of sociology. In an engaging recent study, Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology: The Birth of Modernity, 1880–1920, Ralph Leck (2000) places Simmel’s ideas in the cultural and intellectual context of his times. The collection of recent articles in Georg Simmel in Translation: Interdisciplinary Border Crossings in Culture and Modernity, edited by David Kim (2009), also considers Simmel’s work in relation to the modern movement and aspects of cultural criticism. Though it bears a German title, Soziologie als Möglichkeit: 100 Jahre Georg Simmels Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, this new collection edited by Cécile Rol and Christian Papilloud (2009) contains numerous useful articles in English on the lasting significance of Simmel’s Sociology published in 1908.

Bibliography Writings of Georg Simmel 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. and ed. K. Wolff. New York: Free Press. 1955. Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations. Trans. K. Wolff and R. Bendix. New York: Free Press. 1959. Georg Simmel 1858–1918. Ed. K. Wolff. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1959. Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics by Georg Simmel. Ed. K. Wolff. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1968. The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays. Trans. P. Etzkorn. New York: Columbia Teachers College Press. 1971. Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Ed. D. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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1977. The Problems of the Philosophy of History. Trans. G. Oakes. New York: Free Press. 1984. Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love. Trans. G. Oakes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1986. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Trans. H. Loiskandl et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1989. Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft: Eine Kritik der ethischen Grundbegriffe. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vols. 3 and 4. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1992. Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 11. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1995. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, Band I. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1997. Essays on Religion. Ed. and trans. H. J. Helle and L. Nieder. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1997. Simmel on Culture. Ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone. London: Sage Publications. 1999. Grundfragen der Soziologie (Individuum und Gesellschaft). Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 59–149. 2001. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909–1918, Band I. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 2004. The Philosophy of Money, 3rd edn. Ed. and trans. D. Frisby and T. Bottomore. London: Routledge. 2005. Georg Simmel: Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art. Ed. and trans. A. Scott et al. New York: Routledge. 2008. Englischsprachige Veröffentlichungen 1893–1910. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 18. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 2009. Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms. Trans. A. Blasi et al. Leiden: Brill.

Further Reading Böhringer, H. and K. Gründer (1976) Ästhetik und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Georg Simmel. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Coser, L. (ed.) (1965) Georg Simmel. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Frisby, D. (1992) Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg Simmel’s Social Theory, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Frisby, D. (2002) Georg Simmel, rev. edn. London: Routledge. Gassen, K. and M. Landmann (eds.) (1993) Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel, 2nd edn. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Goodstein, E. (2005) Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Habermas, J. (1991) Texte und Kontexte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kaern, M., B. Phillips, and R. Cohen (eds.) (1990) Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kim, D. (ed.) (2009) Georg Simmel in Translation: Interdisciplinary Border Crossings in Culture and Modernity. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Köhnke, K. C. (1996) Der Junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen Bewegungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Leck, R. (2000) Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology: The Birth of Modernity, 1880– 1920. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.

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Marx, G. and G. Muschert (2009) “A Legacy and Inheritance for the Sociology of Information.” In C. Rol and C. Papilloud (eds.), Soziologie als Möglichkeit: 100 Jahre Georg Simmels Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, pp. 217–33. Nedelmann, B. (1990) “On the Concept of ‘Erleben’ in Georg Simmel’s Sociology.” In M. Kaern et al. (eds.), Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 225–41. Nolte, P. (1998) “Georg Simmels Historische Anthropologie der Moderne: Rekonstruktion eines Forschungsprogramms.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 24: 225–47. Parsons, T. (1936) “Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Toennies: Social Relationships and the Elements of Action,” Talcott Parsons Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUGFP 42.41, Box 2, 28 pp. Rol, C. and C. Papilloud (eds.) (2009) Soziologie als Möglichkeit: 100 Jahre Georg Simmels Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Sofsky, W. (1997) The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp. Trans. W. Templer. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spykman, N. (1966) The Social Theory of Georg Simmel. New York: Atherton Press. Watier, P. (2009) “Psychosocial Feelings within Simmel’s Sociology.” In C. Rol and C. Papilloud (eds.), Soziologie als Möglichkeit: 100 Jahre Georg Simmels Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, pp. 199–216.

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9 Émile Durkheim TARA MILBRANDT AND FRANK PEARCE1

THE PERSON General legacy Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) played a central role in the development of a theoretically robust empirical sociology in France. Engaged by some of the major social, political and intellectual concerns of his times, Durkheim explored topics as diverse as industrialization, socialism, crime, suicide, religion, morality, the family, education, professional ethics, and sociological method. Building on the work of his theoretical predecessors (e.g., Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer), a significant challenge Durkheim took up was the development of appropriate methodological protocols for the systematic study of society. His erudite writings were animated by his enduring passion to uncover and explore the deeply social foundations of our human existence. Durkheim’s tireless intellectual labors were pivotal to sociology’s establishment as an institutionally legitimized and productive academic discipline. This was evident by the central role he played in the successful establishment of the discipline’s first major academic journal in France, L’Année Sociologique in 1898, and by his earning of the first post in France to bear the name “sociology.” As Edward Tiryakian aptly remarks, “before Durkheim sociology was a provocative idea; by his professional endeavors it became an established social fact” (Tiryakian 2009: 11). Durkheim was adamant that there was a responsibility to develop sociology in ways that could illuminate the complex nature of social reality on its own terms. He dissented from the reigning position that sociology be corralled into a domain of study limited by the psychologistic assumption, shared by many European thinkers since the seventeenth century, that society is merely the sum total of individuals. Durkheim hints that sociology was, in fact, the master discipline within the social sciences:

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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[I]ndividual consciousnesses, by associating themselves in a stable way, reveal, through their interrelationships, a new life very different from that which would have developed had they remained uncombined; this is social life. Religious institutions and beliefs, political, legal, moral, and economic institutions – in a word, all of what constitutes civilization – would not exist if there were no society. (Durkheim 1909/1977: 76)

Durkheim’s efforts to extend a scientific gaze to the realm of the social were not initially welcomed. This is not surprising given the magnitude of the challenge his ideas would pose to existing schools of social thought and ways of thinking about the nature of human existence that prevailed in his time. While Durkheim’s significance within sociology cannot be overstated, it is important to be aware that he developed and communicated his ideas within a remarkably “long-lived and intense” collaborative milieu, leading to the formation of what came to be known as the Durkheimian School of sociology (Strenski 2006: 27). This group included Durkheim’s own nephew, Marcel Mauss. That the Durkheimians were reputed to have been an exceptionally cohesive intellectual circle of “loyal and brilliant workers” (Lemert 2006: 118) is somewhat fitting given the centrality of the social tie in Durkheim’s writings.

SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT Formative years – family life, student days, and education David Émile Durkheim was born into a close-knit orthodox Jewish family of relatively modest means on April 15, 1858 in the town of Épinal in Alsace Lorraine, France. His mother, Mélanie Isidor Durkheim, was an embroiderer, his father, Moïse Durkheim, was a rabbi, and he had three siblings: one brother, Félix, and two sisters, Rosine and Céline. He seemed destined for the rabbinate like his father, and his father’s father before him, and so on, for a total of eight generations. While the young Émile spent part of his early schooling in rabbinical school, when he was still a schoolboy he decided that this was not to be his life path. Though with their support, he broke this family tradition and lived his life as a secular person. Durkheim completed primary and secondary schooling in Épinal. He was regarded as an exemplary student, skipping two years along the way to the completion of his baccalaureates in Letters (in 1874) and Sciences (in 1875). He moved to Paris and, after two failed attempts, gained admittance on his third try to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1879. His first two failures were undoubtedly influenced by his need to make frequent trips to his hometown from Paris due to a serious illness suffered by his father. Throughout his university years, Durkheim was located in the center of an exceptionally stimulating cultural, political, and intellectual milieu in Paris. He was, however, disappointed by L’École Normale. In particular, he was dismayed by what he considered to be its unrigorous curriculum. Durkheim had strong reservations about what he took to be an excessively literary, humanistic, and even dilettantish style of education at L’École Normale, desiring a more scientific orientation. Additionally, he was somewhat lonely and isolated in what has been described as its total institutional character. In spite of these challenges, Durkheim did connect with a handful

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of teachers who came to have a formative influence on his intellectual development. These included the historian Fustel de Coulanges and the neo-Kantian philosopher Émile Boutroux. He became strongly influenced by the writings of Charles Renouvier, another neo-Kantian philosopher, whose writings he was introduced to during his university studies in Paris. It is an understatement to say that Durkheim belonged to an extremely influential generation of students. Many of his classmates at L’École Normale, including Henri Bergson and Jean Jaurès (who became a close friend), would go on to become influential and leading intellectual figures. Within this exceptional context, it is notable that Durkheim was considered almost excessive in his studiousness and seriousness, even earning the nickname “the metaphysician” (Coser 1977) amongst his peers. Though at the end of his third year he scored abysmally (second from the bottom) on a national test, Durkheim came to be well respected by those professors with whom he became well acquainted. In a letter of reference dated October 14, 1882, Fustel de Coulanges described Durkheim as an “excellent student” possessing “a very forceful mind both sound and original, with a remarkable maturity.” Coulanges went on to say that, “His teachers think highly of him,” noting that Durkheim had been awarded “the Adophe Gamier prize as the hardest worker and most deserving member of his class” by L’École Normale (cited in Tiryakian 2009: 20). Like most of the early sociologists, Durkheim’s degree was in philosophy. In 1882 he successfully passed his aggregation and for three years he taught philosophy in various provincial Lycées. Notes of his philosophy lectures from that time have recently been translated and published (Durkheim 1884/2004). Meanwhile his interest in sociology was deepening and by 1885, when he won a prestigious scholarship to spend a semester in Germany, Durkheim was already a proselytizing sociologist. While studying in Germany, he began to focus his attentions upon philosophy and, more particularly, on morality and its relation to law, political economy, history, and collective psychology. While he read some of the works of Karl Marx (Lukes 1973: 246), his major focus was an appreciative and critical engagement with the works of the sociologist and “authoritarian socialist” Albert Schäffle, the economists Gustav von Schmoller and Adolph Wagner (the “Socialists of the Chair”), the jurist Rudolf von Ihering, and the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. These engagements helped clarify and develop many of what are now recognized to be his abiding concerns, including: the benefits of scientific study, society as a reality sui generis, social order as a moral order, the importance of the collective consciousness, the social significance of the unintended and unrecognized consequences of human actions, and the general utility of the organic analogy. The fruits of this visit to Germany, moreover, included a more clearly sociological rethinking of his major thesis topic; it also led to the publication of two perceptive articles, “La Philosophie dans les universités allemandes” (1887a) and “La Science positive de la morale en Allemagne” (1887b/1993).

Productive years – Bordeaux Upon returning to Paris, Durkheim again taught philosophy, this time in the Lycée de Troyes. In 1887, he was appointed to a post (as chargé de cours of social science and pedagogy) at the Faculty of Letters at Bordeaux. In the same year, he married

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Louise Julie Dreyfus, with whom he had two children, Marie and André. By all accounts, theirs was a traditional bourgeois marriage whose division of labor enabled Émile to devote the majority of his energies to intellectual pursuits, while benefiting from the care Louise took in domestic affairs, proofreading, and performing various “secretarial” tasks. Like other male academics of his time, the husbandscholar was able to move seamlessly from the world of domesticity to the world of theory without having to concern himself with such things as the feeding of children or the cleaning of the home; this undoubtedly influenced the kinds of concerns and relevances that guided his general social theory (see Smith 1987). Rather remarkably, Durkheim introduced social science into the curriculum while he was at Bordeaux. In an undated letter from the Archives Départementales de la Gironde, it is noted that during his job interview he had indicated that in addition to teaching pedagogy and basic educational principles to schoolteachers, he intended to teach social science. This intention was realized in his popular “public course on Social Science,” organized around one of the central themes of his writings: social solidarity (see Tiryakian 2009: 21). Such a course was unprecedented not only at Bordeaux but in France more generally. Durkheim remained at Bordeaux for 15 productive years. In 1892 he successfully defended a minor thesis on Montesquieu. Dedicated to his former teacher, Fustel de Coulanges, and written in Latin, it was only translated into French in 1937 and into English, along with some other texts, in 1960 (Durkheim 1892/1960). In 1893 he defended his major thesis, this time dedicated to Émile Boutroux, which was published in the same year as The Division of Labour in Society (which was translated into English in 1933). In 1894/1895 he published The Rules of Sociological Method, and in 1897 Suicide; the first was translated into English in 1938, the latter in 1951. In 1898 he was a leading figure in the establishment of the new sociology journal, L’Année Sociologique. Its publication clearly revealed the gains that had been made in the development of sociology as a distinctive discipline. In his optimistic preface to Le Suicide, whose publication coincided fairly closely with the journal’s emergence, Durkheim confidently proclaims that sociology is now “in fashion.”

Later years: a sociologist in Paris Durkheim returned to Paris in 1902, a return that was “facilitated in very large part by his nephew, Marcel Mauss, and Mauss’s close collaborator, Henri Hubert” (Strenski 2006: 27). He was appointed as chargé de cours in the Science of Education at the Sorbonne, obtaining the prestigious title of Professor of Education in 1906. Marking the emergence of a newly institutionalized discipline in France, in 1913 his chair was quite remarkably renamed as a Professorship of Sociology and Education. The first of its kind, its naming signified a formal recognition of sociology in France. Shortly before this symbolically monumental event, Durkheim’s final and (now) much celebrated major work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), was published, and it was (quite speedily) translated into English in 1915. Much had changed over the course of a decade. Durkheim’s efforts were clearly instrumental in setting the stage for sociology’s institutional legitimacy in France. It is notable that when he had completed his dissertation in 1893, sociology had

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had remarkably little status in his home country. At that time, “Professional philosophers knew in general and quite vaguely that Comte had proposed this word to designate social science: they were unanimous in finding it bizarre and unwarranted” (Lukes 1973: 66). This was powerfully exhibited in the 1870s when furious examiners at the Faculty of Letters of Paris had forced Alfred Espinas, a future colleague of Durkheim’s at Bordeaux, to suppress the introduction to his thesis because he refused to delete the name of Auguste Comte from its pages (Coser 1977: 145). Indeed, during the defense of Durkheim’s own thesis, a member of his examining committee, Paul Janet, allegedly “lost his temper, rapped on the table, invoked God, and warned Durkheim that sociology led to madness” (Bouglé, cited in La Capra 1972: 81). Clearly, sociology was becoming an intellectual force to be contended with.

POLITICAL CONTEXT War, suffering, and death As a person of his time, Durkheim’s life was touched, and sometime torn, by war. To provide some sense of the times within which he lived and worked, some political contextualization is needed (see Cobban 1965; Furet 1988/1992; Gildea 2008). In the 90 or so years prior to Durkheim’s entrance to L’École Normale in 1879, much had occurred politically in France, including: a successful revolution (1789–93), the First Republic (1793–9), a dictatorship and empire (1799–1820), royalist restorations (1820–30), a constitutional monarchy (1830–47), the Second Republic (1847–51), another dictatorship and a Second Empire (1851–70), and a Third Republic (1870) which would survive until 1914. Throughout this often-bloody period there was a significant continuity of protagonists in the political sphere: republicans and socialists, royalists and Bonapartists. There were also important internal developments in the ideologies of each, as well as shifting rivalries and alliances, often as much grounded in social class as in ideology. Durkheim bore witness to the occupation by the Germans of his hometown of Épinal during the Franco-Prussian war. He was 12 years of age in July 1870 when Emperor Napoleon III declared war on Germany. Napoleon’s war was brief and on September 2 he surrendered the Rhine army, which he had until then commanded, to the Prussian king. As he was escorted to the Belgian border, he left 100,000 of his soldiers behind as prisoners of war. In response to demands from the Parisian crowds, Léon Gambetta declared a Republic and set up the Government of National Defense. This quickly came under the control of conservatives, who dominated the National Assembly. Then in January 1871, this government surrendered to the Germans, signing a humiliating Convention that included the German annexation of Alsace and half of Lorraine. Thus during Durkheim’s early teens, “the façade which constituted the imperial system had collapsed” (Durkheim 1900/1973: 12); the German army occupied Épinal and he was exposed to anti-semitism since “Jews were blamed for defeats” (Durkheim 1899, cited in Lukes 1973: 41). While France was still under German domination, new elections returned a conservative government led by a former Orléanist, Adolphe Thiers. A month later the insurrectionary and largely

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working-class Paris Commune was founded, successfully sustaining itself for more than two months until, on Thiers’s orders and with the tacit support of German occupying forces, the regular army broke through the Commune’s defenses and, in a single week, brutally slaughtered between 20,000 and 30,000 communards. Subsequently a group of 23 surviving communards were executed, perhaps 40,000 imprisoned and eventually released without trial, and 10,000 were tried and condemned to prison and/or exile (Edwards 1977: 347–8). In 1873 monarchists opposed and defeated Thiers’s administration for failing to pursue a “resolutely conservative strategy.” They were in a good position to restore the monarchy but disagreements about who should be the king meant that no restoration took place. A threat by Bonapartists led Orléanists and Republicans to negotiate and craft the 1875 constitution. Elections in 1875 produced conservative majorities in the Senate but then in 1876 a strong Republican representation in the House of Deputies. Right-wing politicians prorogued Parliament in 1877 and new elections were called. The result was a resounding victory for Republicans – from the center left to the extreme left – under the leadership of Gambetta. The year 1877 was also when Durkheim moved to Paris to prepare for the entrance examination to the L’École Normale and when he met Jean Jaurès. Both were admirers of Gambetta’s radical democratic republicanism and of his shrewd leadership of what came to be known as the “Opportunist Republicans” and both were aware of how narrowly the Republicans had just avoided defeat (Stedman Jones 2001: 44–51). The widespread awareness on the political left of the fragility of the Third Republic led the more radical Republicans and many socialists to be its strong supporters against the authoritarian conservative forces. A fear that right-wing forces might stage another massacre like that of the Paris Commune was on the minds of many; this led some to oppose any challenges to the state that might lead to violent confrontations and it led to reservations about the rhetoric and practice of class warfare. Supporters of the Republic were not merely defending it against reactionary forces; its very existence had facilitated the emergence of a “future oriented … dynamic and optimistic vision of social becoming” (Charle, cited in Stedman Jones 2001: 45). Meanwhile, Durkheim was a staunch bourgeois democratic republican who was particularly negative about socialism. In 1882 he had intended to write a rather critical thesis on “Individualism and Socialism” (although this never came to pass), and in 1883 and 1884 he informed his students at the Lycée de Sens that, “socialism … denies the rights of individuals, insisting that all citizens are the property of the state”; he went on to say that socialism “undermines the personality of the individual” and “is therefore clearly immoral” (Durkheim 1884/2004: 260). Before, during, and after his 1885 trip to Germany, however, Durkheim was influenced by socialist writings, notably those of Wagner, Schmoller, and above all Schäffle. Durkheim’s first published piece was a long review of Schäffle’s work. Durkheim was particularly impressed by the argument that the malaise of modern society was due to the suppression of “corporations” (Körperschaften) which resulted in “a struggle among unrestrained egoisms,” leading in turn to either the “crushing of the weak” or an (over-)expansion of the state and, if the “organ of will” (the state) was “not protected from the masses,” ultimately to a “despotic socialism” (Durkheim 1885/1978: 108). Three years later, in a shorter piece, Durkheim reprinted some of the correspondence between him and Schäffle and in general endorsed his positions,

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particularly his repudiation of Marx’s “leveling democracy.” Society’s “organic complexity,” he argued, made hierarchy inevitable and this was best achieved through an “authoritarian socialism” which reordered economic production in guild-like organizations that could act as authoritative centers of activity. The state would have a role too, but a limited one; it would interact with these centers of activity and even help coordinate them. Thus socialism’s main objective was not to improve the situation of the worker but “to combat … the dispersive tendencies which engender the practice of individualism” (Durkheim 1888: 3–7; Gane 1992: 135–6). Durkheim was clearly becoming sympathetic to at least some versions of socialism. A formative event in Durkheim’s politics was the arrest, trial, and sentencing of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894. This event revealed a particularly ugly face of conservative Catholic reaction. Durkheim, like Jaurès, was a committed Dreyfusard and publicly opposed the great injustice perpetrated on an innocent man. This event stimulated one of his most subtle works, “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (1898a/1973). In this text he challenged the utilitarian egoism favored by Spencer and the economists, advocating instead the moral individualism of Kant and Rousseau. Kant and Rousseau repudiated the view that self-interest was an adequate basis for conduct, arguing instead that since all human beings are in principle capable of moral action, action should be guided by such abstract principles as the categorical imperative. And so, wrote Durkheim, an implication of this is that: The human person … is considered sacred. … It has something of that transcendental majesty which churches of all times have given their Gods. It is … invested with that mysterious property which keeps an empty space around holy objects, which keeps them away from profane contacts, and which draws them away from ordinary life.… It is a religion of which man is, at the same time, both believer and god. (Durkheim 1898a/1975: 62)

Durkheim’s argument was that the rights, capacities, and civic engagement of the individual depended upon the creation of a complex and egalitarian form of social organization. In such societies both the collectivity and the individual human person are equally sacred. For Durkheim this implied more than just a negative conception of rights. There was a need “to alleviate the functioning of the social machine, still so harsh to individuals, in order, finally, to work towards making a reality of the famous precept: to each according to his works” (Durkheim 1898a/1975: 710). Moral individualism required a collectivity whose members were aware of their powers and responsibilities to all individual members, and individual members, in turn, who honored their responsibilities to both the collectivity and each other. The campaign for Dreyfus ended in a victory for the forces of reason while also providing grounds to sustain a faith in the Republic. This broader context undoubtedly influenced Durkheim’s patriotism and later support for France in the First World War. Durkheim was a liberal internationalist, committed to a lawful world order based upon negotiations, non-aggression pacts, and treaties between nation states, which ideally would be democratic, republican, and egalitarian. In 1915 he wrote two pamphlets highly critical of Germany. The first was titled, Who Wanted War? The Origin of War according to Diplomatic Documents (1915). In the body of the text he provided his own unequivocal answer

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to the question posed by its title: Germany wanted war (Durkheim 1915a: 61). In the second, L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout: la mentalité allemande et la guerre (1915b), he explained Germany’s belligerence as being due to German exceptionalism. This derived from its culture, exemplified in the writings of Baron Heinrich von Treitschke. Treitschke viewed the German people, and particularly the German state’s “will to power,” as an absolute good. The German state had no need to seek or value a mutually conditioning system of interdependent relations with other states; instead, it was committed to world domination. Similarly, within Germany, the general staff saw themselves as above civil society; ruling with an iron hand they used the legal system as a means to an end. Law may have been imposed consistently but, Durkheim argued, since the legal system had no organic relation to the collective culture, in practice it was arbitrary and unjust. “The duty of the citizens is to obey” (Durkheim 1915b: 36). Why had the war been so barbaric? “The German staff has conducted the war with an inhumanity without parallel in history.… [T]hese atrocities merely put into practice ideas and sentiments long inculcated in the minds of German youth” (Durkheim 1915b: 38, authors’ translation). This assignation of blame was plausible in so far as the explanation was restricted to the immediate events leading to the outbreak of war, but it is far too simple once a wider history and geography are taken into account (see Koch 1984). Similarly Durkheim’s culturalist analysis, by downplaying the complexity of social structure, exaggerates the differences and effaces many similarities between Germany and France and the latter’s allies (Rueschermeyer, Stephens, and Stevens 1992; Jessop 2007). Nevertheless, the tone of neither pamphlet is xenophobic and generally Durkheim resisted the excessive fervor of the propaganda and sloganeering that surrounded him. Years later, many former students with whom Durkheim shared deep and lasting bonds were drafted and later perished in the trenches of war (e.g., Robert Hertz, Maxim David, and Jean Raymond). The death of his own son, André, from wounds inflicted on a battlefield in the Balkans, in December 1916, was a source of immense devastation from which Durkheim never recovered. The closeness between father and son, and the tenderness and respect the former had for André, is clear in the moving biographical note Émile wrote for him in 1917. Three years after André’s death, at the age of 59, an overworked and heartbroken Durkheim collapsed and shortly thereafter died. While the general consensus has been that his death was due to a stroke, a recent study that draws upon correspondence between Durkheim and his nephew, Marcel Mauss, toward the end of Durkheim’s life suggests that he may, in fact, have died of cancer (Pickering 2000). Illness and heartbreak aside, it is somewhat fitting that overwork should have been at least a contributing factor in the death of Émile Durkheim. Prior to his death he was writing a book on morality. Although it remained unfinished, with the assistance of Mauss, an introductory part was published in 1920 and for a number of years other works, some already in press, and some based upon his lectures, continued to be published. In addition to the texts which continue to be published bearing his name, the personal notes, faculty cards, and carefully placed shards of colored glass that can be found on Durkheim’s modest gravestone in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris today are a poignant testimony to his enduring influence.

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THE WORK – THE DIVISION OF LABOUR IN SOCIETY Durkheim’s intervention First sketched out in his 1887 essay “The Positive Science of Morality in Germany,” Durkheim’s conception of the nature of social order was quite fully developed by the time he published his first major theoretical work, The Division of Labour in Society (1893/2004). This latter text – which was also his doctoral dissertation – put forth a powerful new way of thinking about modern society that challenged understandings of social order and morality that prevailed in late nineteenth-century European industrial society. Indeed, Durkheim’s thesis examiners raised the objection that the text “treated the evolution of morality as inexorably determined by social causes” (Giddens 1978: 34). Durkheim explores a curious paradox in The Division of Labour in Society, namely, “How does it come about that the individual, whilst becoming more autonomous, depends ever more closely on society?” (Durkheim 1893/2004: xxx). With great complexity, the text explores the dialectic of integration and differentiation under conditions of modern, Western, industrial, secular, urban(-izing) society. Set against the backdrop of a period marked by immense social change and corresponding uncertainties surrounding the basis for social order and cohesion, the text is framed around three central and intersecting concerns: (1) the social need to which the division of labor corresponds, (2) the causes and conditions upon which it depends, and (3) the principal abnormal forms that it assumes (Durkheim 1893/2004: 6–7). Durkheim powerfully shifted the terms of discussion concerning the modern division of labor away from purely economic matters and modes of analysis (e.g., centered on questions of productive gain or loss) and towards the broader social implications of an increasingly differentiated division of labor. Placing questions of social cohesion, regulation, and integration at the center of his inquiry, the text marked a significant departure from the influence of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, written over a century before. It also diverged from more Marxian approaches to industrial capitalism by positing forms of solidarity, not class relations, at the center of analysis. Durkheim was also challenging the foundation of utilitarian accounts of contractualism that presupposed a pre-existing and complex social order. He criticized Herbert Spencer, in particular, for failing to relate individual contracts to shared meanings socially guaranteed through regulation (Durkheim 1893/2004: 158–63). He developed the important argument that the types of cooperation and interdependency necessary in a modern, industrial society could not be the outcome of self-interest alone but, rather, depended upon a complex morality qualitatively unlike the type found in, and required by, a less differentiated (more traditional) society. In so doing, Durkheim also challenged some of the assumptions underlying the arguments of German theorists of community, notably Ferdinand Tönnies. In his 1887 text, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887/1955), Tönnies had identified traditional society as an active community based on familial ties, and modern, urban, industrial society, by contrast, as characterized by declining social bonds and excessive individualism. Durkheim (1889) reviewed this text two years after its publication and, while he had some sympathy with its categories, was critical of the implicit romanticism of village life that animated Tönnies’ negative

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reading of the modern, urbanizing world. Anonymous urban centers, after all, were no more or no less social than the most kinship-oriented of rural settlements. Durkheim wished to establish that existing accounts of the division of labor failed to grasp that it is, in fact, a constituent feature of modern society and in no sense unique to economic life. Throughout his writings, Durkheim was fascinated by the question of social order and the nature of the social bonds characteristic of different types of societies. Underlying the narrative in The Division of Labour in Society is the deep presumption that order is a basic imperative of collective life and that different social structural conditions engender different (and analyzable) forms of social solidarity. Durkheim argued that there have been, and are, two major and distinctive types of society and that these are grounded in two different types of solidarity. The first he named “mechanical solidarity” and the second “organic solidarity”; this distinction was central to his concern to understand modernity’s distinctive strengths and address its particular malaise.

Mechanical solidarity Mechanical solidarity refers to a form of unity based upon the likenesses of individuals who share a uniform way of life and system of beliefs. Generally, while there will be some differences between individuals, linked with age, gender, social status, etc., it is assumed that all share an understanding of the world, participate in a common morality, and similarly identify with the collectivity. Members of such a society are united through their shared participation in a collective consciousness, a notion Durkheim began to use in the 1880s and which had the dual meaning of the collective consciousness and the collective conscience or collective morality (Lukes 1973: 4). The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average members of the same society forms a particular system with a life of its own. One might call it the collective or common consciousness. … [I]t does not change with each generation, but on the contrary, it links generations one to the other. … It is therefore something completely different from individual consciousnesses, even though it is materialized only through individuals. (Durkheim 1893/2004:29)

Moral rules are an essential component of the conscience collective; they may be expressed through custom and public opinion; they may also be formalized as laws, and, in the case of traditional societies, repressive law. What is understood to be a crime, as Durkheim develops, varies widely between different societies, but in any particular society, activities that disturb and offend “strong, well-defined states of the collective consciousness” can be identified as criminal. Putting forth a thoroughly sociological understanding of crime, he writes: “we must not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends the consciousness” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 30). In the face of crimes deemed particularly serious, members share an immediate and spontaneous sense of outrage, which can include a powerful desire to harm the “criminal.” The act of punishment is still, “at least in part, an act of vengeance” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 33) since it is an expiation. The collectivity, symbolically wounded by the offence, reveals (and in

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so doing reanimates) its own vitality through its response to crime. What is crucial for Durkheim is the collective response to crime, and one of its fascinating and unintended consequences is that it intensifies solidarity. While this may be more pronounced in traditional societies, Durkheim is careful to note, “punishment remains for us [moderns] what it was for our predecessors” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 33). Collective responses to persons believed to have committed crimes considered heinous in contemporary society clearly reveal this relationship.

Organic solidarity The second form of solidarity that Durkheim identified, organic solidarity, is present when there exists extensive and complementary social differentiation. Through this broad social division of labor “the individual is … made aware of his dependent state vis-à-vis society” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 333); what accompanies this is at the foundation of social (and so, moral) order in modern society. Social order now both depends upon and produces individuals with a plurality of socially useful capacities; this makes the fulfillment of a wide range of societal needs possible through (for example) the ongoing exchange of goods and services. Individuals come to recognize their mutual interdependence and shared interests. “[T]he members are united by ties, which extend deeper and further than the brief periods of exchanges. Each of these functions is performed in a fixed way, dependent upon others, and forms a solidary system with them” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 40). These types of society, then, normally develop different social organs or institutions, “each of which has a special role, and which are themselves formed of differentiated parts” (often organized hierarchically internally). These social organs are not all of the same nature and are relatively autonomous yet ideally are all connected and coordinated through a “central organ.” This organ is not some sovereign external to or intrinsically different from other organs but it is more of a primus inter pares – for it depends as much on the others as they depend upon it. The “central organ” is the modern administrative state and its major role is to regulate the relations between organs and, at the same time, of these other organs with itself. If relations are disrupted, all will suffer, just as all will equally benefit by a restoration. Thus the state’s major role is not to command and control but, rather, to integrate and facilitate; this is accomplished primarily through restitutive law, the dominant legal form in such societies, rather than punitive law (see also Durkheim 1888). In complex societies, then, there is a relative marginalization of the expiative element of law. For example, in economic life contractual relations between different kinds of purchasers and sellers of goods and services are assumed to be entered into freely by all parties and hence to be mutually beneficial. Civil law, which regulates these contracts, is thus seen as neutral (using formal criteria of due process), and primarily facilitative. However, as Durkheim stressed, the general anticipation that people will abide by such contractual relations depends upon more general expectations concerning the (moral) obligation to self and others to honor promises. This presumes, further, that legal regulations should conform in letter and spirit with principles of justice (such that both parties are freely, and not out of necessity, engaging in shared undertakings). Hence, the validity of a contract or even the significance

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of its breach – for example in the case of debtors – must be assessed by substantive criteria of justice (Durkheim 1893/2004: 47). While Durkheim suggests that in societies based on organic solidarity there is a diminution in the importance of the conscience collective (Durkheim 1893/2004: 44), restitutive law, “by forcibly redressing the action impugned … or by annulling it” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 280), nevertheless retains a coercive aspect. This is somewhat confusing but not surprising given that Durkheim implicitly bases some of his writings concerning law, regulation, and crime on a command theory of law which, in essence, presumes some kind of “sovereign,” representing, expressing, and guaranteeing by force the interests and values of society as a whole (Pearce 2001: 105–11). Societies characterized by organic solidarity retain aspects of those characterized by mechanical solidarity. Morality, religion, and law are clearly, for Durkheim, overlapping phenomena. Law in its broadest meaning is concerned with actions that are prescribed or proscribed, in a relatively codified manner, and according to criteria which are not only legal but also often moral and religious, that have effects on others, which are observable and can be recognized, judged, and subject to an organized social response. Legal activities can be used as a concrete and external index of morality while also themselves acting as a source of solidarity. Different kinds of society, based upon different kinds of solidarity, clearly involve different forms of morality for which there exist equivalent differences in the nature of law.

The genesis of the social division of labor As intimated previously, Durkheim begins his account of the genesis of the division of labor (in part) by repudiating the image of the self-interested calculating social actor often deployed in the writings of political economists. According to such writings, individuals desire not merely to be happy but to continually enhance their happiness; this is best achieved, so it is thought, by a general increase in resources. From observing that the more work is divided up, the more production increases, the actor envisioned by political economy deduces that the division of labor is a source of the ability to produce more and better quality goods (Durkheim 1893/2004: 179–80). This engenders a strong incentive for people to find ever-new ways of increasing the division of labor. Challenging this conception, Durkheim argues that the cause of the division of labor could not consist in anticipation of the effects of the division of labor since no knowledge of these effects would be possible prior to its coming into existence. Moreover, it is not self-evident that in “primitive” society people were less happy than their “civilized” and more materially well-off counterparts, nor that the production and consumption of more goods by “civilized” humanity increases its happiness. Civilization is not a goal that motivates people but the necessary effect of a cause (Durkheim 1893/2004: 287). Durkheim emphatically rejected explanations based upon the goals of individual human beings; by contrast, he sought explanations based on analyses of forms of organization at the societal level. Drawing upon descriptions of “rudimentary” societies in Australia and North America, Durkheim takes his reader back in time to develop a model of “simple” clan-based tribal societies. In a thought experiment, he extrapolated from these materials to construct an ideal type of an earlier and even simpler societal form, the

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“horde.” This, he argued, was the “real social protoplasm, the germ from which all social types would have emerged” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 126). Durkheim described the horde as a small and completely homogeneous society whose parts could be easily distinguished. Members experienced identical life conditions, their world was full of intrinsically sacred beings, and their lives were ordered through religious rituals. Since it extended to and included every aspect of their lives, religion regulated “even the minutiae of private life” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 90), and so was identical with the all-encompassing collective consciousness. Typically, a horde allied itself with other horde(s) to form a clan, thereby developing a new and mixed collective consciousness. In the clan, all members of the same age cohort are related by the same degree of kinship, the “[a]dults of both sexes are equal to one other,” and all are equally responsible for the care of all children and, if required, collective revenge. And leaders who emerge are merely temporarily fulfilling a leadership function in the group and enjoy no superior status; hence their existence does not represent a real social differentiation (Durkheim 1893/2004: 126–7). Clans may join with other clans to form segmentary societies. The bonds between members of such societies are often fragile, with a high rate of attrition. “Lacking any internal organization” they will “only hold together under the action of external circumstances, and through the habit of living their life in common” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 126–7). At other times, clans are embedded in a higher form of organization, a tribe, and the latter, in turn, may be grouped together to form a confederation. There are two important parallel developments: the group-as-such often comes to be thought of as a collective personality and sacralized (Durkheim 1893/2004: 129–30); and the position of leadership becomes increasingly institutionalized. Leaders draw their strength from the group as a whole and typically come to be seen as the embodiment of the group. However these new relations allow them to become autonomous as “capable of personal action” thus engendering the possibility of their being able to act independently and to provide innovative leadership (Durkheim 1893/2004: 143). But the power they exercise in the group is virtually absolute, rendering the bond between group members and leaders “identical to that, which joins things to persons” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 130). A rudimentary division of labor has now emerged within the group. While such societies can grow quite large, dynamism remains concentrated in the “superior personality” of the leader and conformity remains the fundamental source of solidarity. The division of labor within is thus stalled. In later works, Durkheim makes it clear that such relations have survived into the nineteenth century and beyond (cf. “Socialism” [1928/1962]; “Two Laws of Penal Evolution” [1901/1973]). Other forms of social organization are more likely to engender a dynamic and selfsustaining division of labor. A greater concentration of clans means more intermingling of members of different clans throughout the tribe as a whole. Where hitherto there was mere co-presence of members of different clans, there would now be participation in more extensive social relations. The multiplication of interactions would facilitate an increasing density of population, movement of members between clans, and increases in the dynamic and moral density of the tribe (Durkheim 1893/2004: 201–2). This would result in a stronger identification with the tribe as a whole. A new collective consciousness would emerge from the adoption throughout the tribe of

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some of the different customs, beliefs, and practices that previously were found exclusively in particular clans but now were common and general. The collective consciousness present in a larger tribe will encompass a smaller portion of its members’ lives, and with less intensity, than would the collective consciousness that would be present in each of its component clans if they had never been joined within it but had been small independent tribes. Such a larger tribe will also be less resistant to innovation and change than the small tribes (Durkheim 1893/2004: 131, 136). Members of a large tribe would also interact with a range of terrains with different physical features and there would be variations in the constitutional characteristics inherited by its individual members. The relationship between terrains and constitutional characteristics may facilitate specialization – in hunting, fighting, finding and identifying nutritious and curative plants, caring for and teaching children, or conciliating, negotiating, organizing, or leading the tribe. If “labour becomes more increasingly divided as societies become more voluminous and concentrated” this is “because the struggle for existence becomes more strenuous” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 206–8). But for this to lead to a division of labor, another important condition is that the individuals involved in this struggle are part of the same already cohesive society. Since under these conditions, the struggle for existence is between individuals already connected on many levels, the response of each will be to try to adjust to their new situation by developing new specializations, thereby differentiating themselves from their competitors. Typically this benefits all parties, since former rivals that competed for the same resources can now coexist by exploiting different niches within the same environment. Parallel to this struggle to survive, innovate, and expand the range of “goods” is a general enrichment in members’ intellectual capacities and sensibilities. In so far as these are in a complementary relation, the division of labor will be consolidated. Thus, while “[t]he division of labour is therefore one result of the struggle for existence … it is a gentle dénouement” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 213). Drawing attention to the difference between his conception and that of political economists, Durkheim remarks that: “For them it consists essentially in producing more. For us this greater productivity is merely a necessary consequence, a side effect of the phenomenon. If we specialise it is not to produce more but to enable us to live in the new conditions of existence created [by] us” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 217, translation modified). Organic solidarity has now emerged and Durkheim has offered up an account of its genesis as being due to changes in social organization and changes in the consciousness of individuals (which he calls the psychological level). What remains unclear, however, is how the disparate activities come to be organized into a mutually complementary division of labor. Durkheim later noted that he had erred when he “attributed to the … instinct of self-preservation” an important role in the development of the social division of labor, because this must have already existed “for its utility to be perceived and its need to be felt” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 121–2). We would add that he provides no grounds for the assumption that the supply of a disparate set of goods and services produced by innovative producers will automatically be matched by a commensurate demand by themselves and others for these particular goods and services (Durkheim 1893/2004: 216). For this to occur other than by chance, an already extant, regulated division of labor would be required. This observation can be generalized: when Durkheim tries to explain the genesis of the division of labor he either

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has to recognize that society is already differentiated and structured and/or he has to invoke extra-social factors (Pearce 2001: 62–6).

A modern malaise – the anomic division of labor Durkheim was not merely interested in examining social changes and their origins; he was also concerned with the conditions of existence of a healthy and robust modern social order. He argued that the modern division of labor could take on abnormal (“pathological”) forms and one such form he identified was the “anomic” division of labor. This may be present where individuals suffer from a lack of moral and social relatedness, unable to comprehend the relationship between their specialized activity, that of others, and the overarching goal(s) of the institutions within which they live. It may also be present where different social sectors are inadequately “adjusted” to one another, which Durkheim believed to be at the root of recurrent industrial or commercial crises, conflicts between labor and capital, and bankruptcies. Durkheim argued that the modern division of labor as such did not cause such problems. However, he suspected that the extant forms of regulation within Western industrial society were inappropriate for the key forms of social organization. During transitional periods there may be an unregulated division of labor, and societies may be (temporarily) characterized by low levels of integration and solidarity. Under such conditions, workers, in particular, suffer. Describing some excesses that were present during French industrialization at the time of his writing, Durkheim writes: “The worker is regimented, removed for the whole day from his family. … He lives ever more apart from his employer … not aware of where the operations required of him are leading” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 308). These negative consequences, argued Durkheim, are an indication that the division of labor is not adequately organized. Ideally, thought Durkheim, “The division of labour supposes that the worker, far from remaining bent over his task, does not lose sight of those cooperating with him, but acts upon them and is acted upon by them. … He knows that … his actions have a goal beyond themselves” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 308). If the relations between the different elements of the division of labor can be regulated, by implication, society as a whole and economies in particular can to some extent be planned. A “nomic” division of labor certainly requires adequate regulation of the relations between the different organs (institutional structures) that interact with each other. Regulation internal to such organs is also essential. Further, all citizens should understand the organization and social purposes of the institutions which provide them with employment, but also these features of other institutions and how they relate to the workings of society as a whole. But more is needed to nurture and secure a genuine organic solidarity. In his discussion of “the forced division of labour” and its remedies, Durkheim begins to suggest additional criteria.

Inequality and the forced division of labor In modern industrial society (capitalism) the existence of large social inequalities and the institution of inherited wealth means that (potentially) better qualified, but less prosperous people are unjustly displaced from key socially valued and influential positions by members of wealthy families who (may) have bought advantage for

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themselves, in spite of having little natural ability and/or commitment to hard work or self-development (Durkheim 1893/2004: 313–14). Relative remunerations in exchange economies are determined to a significant extent by the terms of negotiated contracts, but for such contracts to be just, all contracting parties must be placed under externally equal social conditions. Economic inequalities should not mean that one party is under more economic pressure to settle than the other. Furthermore, any regulation should be informed by negotiations between all parties, bearing in mind the interests of society as a whole (cf. Pearce 2001: 75–83). Since “there can be no rich and poor at birth without there being unjust contracts” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 318–19), it follows that societies organized around private ownership of the means of economic production seriously limit the development and sustenance of genuinely organic solidarity. Durkheim anticipated that modern industrial society would increasingly be oriented to the problem of justice. Referring to the general social needs of traditional versus modern societies, toward the end of the text, Durkheim powerfully argued that: Just as ancient peoples had above all need of a common faith to live by, we have need of justice. We can rest assured that this need will become ever more pressing if, as everything leads us to foresee, the conditions that dominate social evolution remain unchanged. … The new life that all of a sudden has arisen has not been able to organize itself thoroughly. … [I]t has not been organized so as to satisfy the need for justice that has been aroused even more passionately in our hearts. (Durkheim 1893/2004: 322, 339)

In addition to developing a powerful account of the social implications of the modern division of labor, in all of its conditions, possibilities, and consequences, Durkheim was also adamant that the fruits of scientific inquiry be socially useful. He noted at the outset that, “We would esteem our research not worth the labour of a single hour if its interest were merely speculative” (1893/2004: xxvi). In this section we have suggested that Durkheim held some radical views on social order and the conditions for the existence of genuine social solidarity under modern conditions. We will next explore the question of Durkheim’s complex relationship to socialism.

THE WORK – SOCIALISM Durkheim and socialism Durkheim’s relation to socialism is a matter of both significance and controversy. Steven Lukes says of Durkheim that he was “in his sympathies a late nineteenth century French socialist closer to Jaurès than Guesde and to German Socialism of the Chair than to any kind of revolutionary syndicalism” (Lukes 1973: 320). While Durkheim was a socialist of sorts, at least from 1888 until 1917, it is important to emphasize that his socialism was often technocratic and authoritarian. It also contained radical elements. Our focus is Durkheim’s 1903 “Note on Socialism,” which while written in a somewhat scientistic language provides intimations of aspects of Durkheim’s own position. The first question he addressed was whether or not socialist discourses

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were or could be scientific. Socialism, he wrote, “is entirely oriented to the future … a plan for the reconstruction of societies, a program for a collective life, which does not exist as yet or the way it is dreamed of,” not least because contemporary socialist analyses of past and present societies lacked credibility since they were not, nor could they be, the outcomes of rigorous research; rather, they were doctrinaire and could provide no bases for any “rigorous prediction about the future” (Durkheim 1928/1962: 39–41). He noted that “even the strongest work – the most systematic, the richest in ideas: Marx’s Capital” did not have the empirical data to even begin to solve the problems it posed; “an entire theory of value,” he went on to say, “is established in a few lines” (1928/1962: 39–41). We might note that in 1844 Marx had written: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. …The call to abandon illusions about their condition is the call to abandon a condition, which requires illusions” (Marx 1844/1970: 131). Then, in 1903, Durkheim, whether deliberately or inadvertently, but clearly somewhat echoing Marx, wrote that: “Socialism … is a cry of grief, sometimes of anger, uttered by men who feel most keenly our collective malaise.… [S]ocialism … is not a scientific formulation of social facts; it is itself a social fact of the highest importance. It is not a product of science; it is an object of science” (Durkheim 1928/1962: 41–2). Durkheim believed it was necessary to take socialism seriously. Socialism, like all “social facts,” needed to be clearly defined by determining “what it consists of, when it began, through what transformations it passed, and what determined these transformations” (Durkheim 1928/1962: 44). It was, he argued, above all a practical doctrine aiming to modify what exists by reforming it; an adequate definition needed to differentiate all that was essential from all that was inessential. Durkheim identified a number of concerns, notably a focus on “the negation of private property,” the “subordination of the individual to the collectivity,” and “the amelioration of the condition of the working classes, by introducing greater equality into economic relations”; however, since these concerns were also shared by some non-socialist thinkers, Durkheim argued that they could not provide the basis for discerning socialism’s unique and particular character (Durkheim 1928/1962: 47–51). Rather, Durkheim provided the following comprehensive definition: “We denote as socialist every doctrine which demands the connection of all economic functions or of certain among them, which are at present times diffuse, to the directing and conscious centers of society” (Durkheim 1928/1962: 54). This did not mean that “economic life” should be “put in the hands of the state,” but rather “in contact with it,” creating a “reciprocal interaction” between “economic interests” and “the directing centers of society” (Durkheim 1928/1962: 56). This rapport between the state and the economy should lead to a redefinition of both, through the creation of guild-like structures. In this new context, “the managing agents of society” would play the key role in local decision-making. If Schäffle’s work was a resource for the formulations above, it is unlikely that this was true for some of Durkheim’s other, quite sympathetic, comments. For example, Durkheim suggested that the reorganized state could undertake the functions previously fulfilled by the capitalist class, rendering the latter so irrelevant that they would disappear. The working class would then no longer be subject to unequal exchange and unjust contracts but would be rewarded according to “the social value of their services,” as determined by competent managers, thereby pro-

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ducing greater substantive equality. The working class would then achieve a “complete integration” into all aspects of economic, political, and social life (Durkheim 1928/1962: 60–1). Some socialists, thought Durkheim, had clarified the nature of their societies, helped diagnose many of their malaises, and suggested viable forms of reconstruction that might help realize their promise. These analyses were not “purely speculative and scientific” (Durkheim 1928/1962: 51) but were based on valid knowledge. But in Capital, we would argue, Marx had deployed empirical evidence solidly grounded in scholarly and often original historical research, and his development of the labor theory of value was elaborate and complex, not “established in a few lines,” and could guide aspects of socialist reorganization (Marx 1867/1965). It is equally reasonable to read Marx’s Capital as as valid a contribution to knowledge as any work of Schäffle or for that matter Durkheim. Durkheim’s own proposals to reorganize the economy and aspects of political society along functional lines were developed over many years, but most systematically in a series of lectures Durkheim delivered between 1903 and 1916, eventually published in French in 1950 and translated in 1957 as Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (Durkheim 1950/1957). Since many of his proposals bore close resemblance to those found in his “Note on Socialism,” there is no need to summarize them in detail here. But there are nevertheless some points that warrant emphasis. Durkheim argued that enterprises should be separated into different categories of industry according to their “similarity and natural affinity,” and that each group of enterprises should be required to organize themselves into separate national occupational associations and that these would be in a partnership and continuous reciprocal communication with the state, the basis of sovereignty, where “social thought” is subject to “deliberation and reflection.” But not only would the state be democratic, so would the occupational associations. Each of the latter would be organized by an “administrative council … nominated by election.” He noted that since employers and the employed have distinct interests each would require separate representation, and thus, minimally, his proposals ensconced the principle of democracy within economic life. This council would regulate such matters as “relations between employers and employed … of competitors one with another” and the redistribution of inherited wealth (Durkheim 1950/1957: 37–8, 218). Forced solidarity remained a major concern. Now, there are ambiguities in Durkheim’s formulations, which often seem to flow from his own ambivalence. For example, as we have indicated, he usually endorsed a meritocratic reward system, but in this text he suggested that even the principle of meritocracy might be superseded. Since differences in intelligence and upbringing were fortuitous, they could not justify unequal distributions of economic rewards, whereas to reward all equally was the “acme of justice.” This new principle could become a “strict obligation” and “the spring of new institutions” (Durkheim 1950/1957: 219–20). Capitalism would be transformed and indeed might become irrelevant. Then, he never specifies either how electoral colleges would be organized or how leaders would be selected and decision-makers chosen. In so far as his meritocratic and technocratic beliefs predominated, a credentialized minority would rule any “electoral college” and decision-makers in general would be selected using formal and exclusionary criteria of competence and excellence. But this model does not preclude a very democratic system: through education and experience all citizens

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could become competent as legislators and decision-makers; after all, Durkheim noted how in Rome the plebeians as a whole had over time become more intelligent, richer, more sophisticated, and more ambitious (Durkheim 1893/2004: 311). While these ambiguities contribute to differences of interpretation about Durkheim’s relation to both socialism and democracy, our position is that it is possible to both remain faithful to many of Durkheim’s concepts and analyses and develop them in a more radical direction than is often found in his own work.

THE WORK – RULES OF SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD General It is striking to note Durkheim’s remarkable ambition and confidence in naming his second major work The Rules of Sociological Method (1895/1982). Durkheim’s Rules has been called a manifesto of sorts (e.g., Thompson 1982; Cormack 1996) whose publication in 1895 announced the arrival of an empirical sociology grounded in, and faithful to, the fundamental axiom that there exists an objective and morally authoritative social reality that can and should be studied on its own terms. The general principle underlying Durkheim’s Rules and animating his broader social theory is captured well in the assertion, “It is … in the nature of society itself that we must seek the explanation of social life” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 128). Durkheim’s Rules is an important and strangely powerful text. Since its first edition it has aroused significant and widely divergent criticism, particularly in relation to the direction it sets for sociology and also as to whether or not its author consistently abided by his own methodological rules. Notwithstanding the “rounds of denunciation” (Gane 1988: 12) it has generated, its publication at the cusp of the twentieth century was nothing less than auspicious. The time had come, Durkheim believed, to render explicit the research methods that were appropriate to sociology’s system of concepts, true to its epistemological protocols, and adequate to the ontology of the social. The text aimed to explicate the method that was implicit in the Division of Labour and which his predecessors (particularly Comte, Spencer, and Mill) had insufficiently developed (see Durkheim’s “Introduction” 1895/1982: 48–9). More specifically, he aimed to articulate guidelines for the “observation” and study of social reality, develop criteria for differentiating healthy and unhealthy societies, and formulate a basis for comparing types of societies in ways that treated the social as a reality sui generis. While some commentators have derided Durkheim’s Rules for its “sociological imperialism” (e.g., Lukes, in Durkheim 1895/1982: 9) and for its “polemical ardour” (Giddens 1977: 292), these charges seem ungenerous when one understands the early but significant stage in sociology’s development within which this text was written.

Thinking sociologically – challenges Sociology comes alive at the outset of Durkheim’s Rules as a mode of understanding that requires emancipation from commonsense, traditional, introspective, mystical, and/or impressionistic (unreflective) ways of thinking. In his explication of

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sociological method, Durkheim orients to a possible sociological reader, namely, one who desires to investigate the nature of the social world in itself at the same time as s/he is alert to the obstacles and limitations presented by ordinary and familiar modes of thinking. In the opening lines to the first preface, the reader’s attention is drawn to the disruptive character of sociological thinking, and so to the intellectual challenge required for treating, as Durkheim will later put it, social facts as things: We are so little accustomed to treat social phenomena scientifically that certain of the propositions contained in this book may well surprise the reader. However, if there is to be a social science, we shall expect it not merely to paraphrase the traditional prejudices of the common many but to give us a new and different view of them; for the aim of all science is to make discoveries, and every discovery more or less disturbs accepted ideas. (Durkheim 1895/1938: xxxvii)

Durkheim acknowledged that every emerging science must address existing preconceptions and intellectual obstacles in what has been called its ideological phase. On this score, though, there is something specific about the study of the social since ideology is part of its very subject matter. After all, “Men did not wait for the coming of social science … to develop ideas on law, morality, the family, the state, or society itself, for they needed such ideas … to live” (Durkheim 1895/2004: 63; see also Giddens 1978: 35). That the sociologist is embedded in the very world s/he studies was important for Durkheim; it also posed significant challenges for inquiry, which have by no means ended with sociology’s institutional legitimation. Unlike the natural scientist, the social scientist encounters the pervasive belief that social membership in itself generates an adequate understanding of social life. Moreover, since collectively sanctioned beliefs and modes of doing (part of sociology’s very subject matter) often correspond with people’s internal conceptions and subjective experiences of the world, their social origins are generally opaque. In Durkheim’s hands, the social world is rendered both mysterious and knowable, while ordinary modes of thinking within and about it are disrupted. The unique form of “scientific rationalism” that he espoused, in short, aimed to uncover and bring to understanding the generally unrecognized properties, modes of existence, and forms of organization of the social world. Durkheim acknowledged the Cartesianism animating his call to systematically discard all of one’s preconceptions and mistrust what (one thinks) one knows about the social world. This rationalism, we would argue, leads him to problematically assume that a distinction can successfully be made between thinking with one’s “understanding” and thinking with one’s “sensibility” (e.g., Durkheim 1895/1982: 74). To be generous, he is suggesting that we try to identify and critically examine our preconceptions so that we (social scientists) do not merely reiterate commonsense notions and prejudgments in our analyses. The presumption that it is possible and/or that it would be desirable to dispassionately “order” one’s thought in such a way occasionally imbues his writing with a certain phallocentrism (Derrida 1972/1981: 49). For example, in the preface to the second edition, Durkheim refers to the sociologist as one who ideally “penetrates into the social world” keeping mindful that “he is penetrating into the unknown” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 37). Clearly, Durkheim was influenced (even intoxicated, somewhat ironically) by an enthusiasm for the achievements of science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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His commitment to differentiating the social and treating it on its own terms also had classical roots. Referring to the intellectual origins of this commitment, Durkheim noted that as a student at L’École Normale he had been introduced to Aristotle’s view that “psychology” should be explained “by psychological principles, biology by biological principles” and that subsequently he had applied this “idea to sociology” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 259).

The realm of the social – different in quality from the sum of its parts One of Durkheim’s abiding concerns was to examine society as a reality sui generis. The delineation of the boundaries of the social, accordingly, was part and parcel of his elaboration of sociological method. Under the auspices of commonsense, one might think of the social as simply the sum total of human beings and/or a nebulous collection of all that humans do. Whereas one can touch, hear, and see an individual, to see and hear “society” and to grasp how it, in turn, “touches” and moves the individual requires a particular analytic frame. When we begin to consider how any human activity is organized – from the manner by which people meet biological needs to their honoring of ancestors – however, we begin to enter the realm of the social. Speaking of the creation of a social being (and what in contemporary terms is called “primary socialization”) Durkheim notes that, “From his earliest years we oblige [the child] to eat, drink and sleep at regular hours, and to observe cleanliness, calm and obedience” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 53–4). If over time such constraint is no longer regarded as such, it is only because this “gradually gives rise to habits, to inner tendencies which render it superfluous” (1895/1982: 54). This image of the child intimates the twosided character of becoming a social member and learning to participate in the collective representations (culture) of the group. On the one hand, it requires a spirit of discipline (imposed from without), and on the other hand, membership is developed through the cultivation of deep (moral) attachments that come to be indistinguishable from one’s very (inner) constitution (see also Durkheim 1925/1961). Central to Durkheim’s social theory, and articulated most complexly in Rules, is the insight that social life is irreducible to the sum total of its parts. That is, while society cannot exist without conscious human individuals, it is not merely their sum. “[T]he whole,” Durkheim classically wrote, “does not equal the sum of its parts; it is something different, whose properties differ from those displayed by the parts from which it is formed” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 128). In the same way that “in the living cells there are only molecules of crude matter,” these molecules are, nevertheless, “in association” and such association brings into being and into play new phenomena that characterize life. Similarly, modes of association create specific realities with their own characteristics; individuals are continually being transformed (and reconstituted) through their participation in various forms of group life. It is notable that Durkheim’s formulation of the social as “different in quality” (from the sum of its parts) is commonly misrepresented as “greater than” (the sum of its parts). Lukes, for example, notes that, “Durkheim … derived from Renouvier the axiom that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, an axiom, which he held to be presupposed by his own ‘social realism’ ” (Lukes 1973: 57). Lukes is referencing Durkheim’s critical response (Durkheim 1913) to Simon Deploige’s 1911 Le conflit de la morale et de la sociologie. This was an attack by a conservative Catholic

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on those involved with L’Année Sociologique. What Durkheim actually wrote was: “it is from Renouvier that the axiom … came to us: A whole is not equal to the sum of its parts, and this axiom is basic to what Deploige calls our social realism” (Durkheim 1913/1980: 160). Stedman Jones importantly notes, “ ‘Not equal to’ is not equivalent to ‘greater than’ ” (Stedman Jones 2001: 29). Further, it is Deploige who ascribes to Durkheim a belief in “social realism.” Durkheim himself explicitly opposes hypostatization of the group: “It is not a substance, a metaphysical entity; it is only a collection of organized individuals” (Durkheim, cited in Stedman Jones 2001: 168). Unfortunately, the issue of Durkheim’s “social realism” is not so easily put to rest. True, some of Durkheim’s many discussions of emergent properties including a specific form of shared reflexivity are compatible with this understanding of the group. Of course, nothing collective can be produced if individual consciousnesses are not assumed; but this necessary condition is by itself insufficient. These consciousnesses must be combined in a certain way; social life results from this combination and is, consequently, explained by it. Individual minds, forming groups by mingling and fusing, give birth to a being … of a new sort. It is, then, in the nature of this collective individuality, not in that of the associated units, that we must seek the immediate and determining causes of the facts appearing therein. (Durkheim 1895/1938: 103–4)

Durkheim, however, also writes about “the way in which a society thinks of itself and its environment” (1895/1938: xlix), that it is not “satisfied … to move us from outside” (1912/1995: 267), and that “the collective consciousness … sometimes plays about in forms that have no aim or utility of any kind, but only the pleasure of affirming itself” (1912/1995: 426). In these usages, society, through the collective consciousness, has become a substantive collective subject with a distinctive essence (Hirst 1975: 192; Lehmann 1993: 29–33). This is metaphysical, indeed. Furthermore, and relatedly, the horde has no empirical referents; it is a concept produced to fulfill a theoretical purpose, that of making the social into a substance and one without any specified conditions of existence (Hirst 1975: 195–6).

Treating social facts as things Durkheim defines sociology as the science of institutions, i.e., the systematic study of collectively instituted beliefs and modes of behavior, and so, all of the socially sanctioned ways of thinking, acting, and feeling that he identified under the rubric of the “social fact.” These included all of the “beliefs, tendencies, and practices of the group, taken collectively” (1895/1982: 54). By its nature a social fact is collective; “several individuals, at the very least, must have interacted together, and this joint action must have resulted in a new product” (Durkheim 1895/2004: 57). Collective habits, over and above any individual instance or particular manifestation, thus come to be expressed in “definite forms” which exhibit different stages of crystallization. From the moral rule to the cut of one’s clothing, a social fact is both external to, and capable of exerting constraint over, the individual. Though individuals may particularize it (by giving it their own stamp), a social fact constitutes a relatively fixed object that is not in itself altered with each application. The social

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world is in this sense always encountered as an already-constituted world. Though members are generally incognizant of this, the rightful “author” of the social fact is the collectivity. Durkheim draws upon examples from everyday life, such as the performance of one’s “duties” as “brother, husband, or a citizen” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 50–1), to highlight this important recognition. By virtue of our social constitution, Durkheim also notes that both the external and coercive elements of collectively sanctioned ways of thinking, acting, and feeling are difficult to detect. “Even when they conform to my own sentiments and I experience their reality subjectively, that reality does not cease to be objective” (Durkheim 1895/2004: 58). To think sociologically and treat social phenomena in the way that he is recommending clearly requires a reader to estrange her/himself from the familiar (and comfortable) realm of everyday understanding. Durkheim’s controversial injunction – to treat social facts as things – may be regarded as “the most basic rule of all” (Jones 1986: 63). It serves to highlight the indisputable reality of the social fact, and is thereby foundational to the study of social life. This “reality” is most clearly revealed through the power of the collective pattern to exert constraint over and against the individual. “Everything that is real … compels recognition” (Durkheim 1895/2004: 57). While they may have different natures, neither the physical object nor the social fact can be wished away or modified through an act of will; both have to be contended with as existing dimensions of objective and external reality. Again, Durkheim draws upon ordinary examples to bring into view the generally un-noticed, but unquestionable “reality” of the social fact: If I do not submit to the conventions of society, if my dress takes no account of the customs observed in my country and class, the laughter I provoke, and being made a social outcast, produce in a milder form the same effects as actual punishment. … [E]ven when I can liberate myself from these rules and violate them successfully, it is never without having to fight against them. … Here, then, is a category of facts with very specific characteristics: they consist of ways of thinking, acting and feeling that are external to the individual and are endowed with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.… [T]hey constitute a new species of phenomena, and it is to them exclusively that the term “social” should be given. (Durkheim 1895/2004: 58–9)

Writing during a time marked by the ascendancy of the “individual,” Durkheim anticipated the likely objection of a putative utilitarian interlocutor. He acknowledged that the word “constraint,” in particular, “is in danger of infuriating those who zealously uphold out-and-out individualism,” maintaining as they do an image of an (otherwise) autonomous actor whom they claim to be “diminished” on every occasion “he is made aware that he is not dependent on himself alone” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 52). Such an objection would be deeply misguided, argues Durkheim, for we are not the sole source of our own desires. After all, utilitarianism’s cherished “individual” could only emerge under particular social conditions. Moreover, the power corresponding to socially instituted patterns is integrally connected to the prestige with which they are endowed in the group. Institutions may impose themselves upon us, but we cling to them; they compel us, and we love them; they constrain us, and we find our welfare in our adherence to them and

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in this very constraint. … There is perhaps no collective behavior which does not exercise this double action upon us, and it is contradictory in appearance only. (Durkheim 1895/1938: liv, n.5)

Durkheim later and more extensively elaborates upon the important relationship between discipline, attachment, and understanding as a basis for both human happiness and moral action in his text Moral Education; this elegant collection was published in 1925, and based upon material taken from 20 lectures in a course on moral education that Durkheim taught at the Sorbonne (1902–3). Formulating moral rules as authoritative, necessary, and constitutive social forces, he writes: “Thanks to the authority vested in them, moral rules are genuine forces, which confront our desires and needs, our appetites of all sorts, when they promise to become immoderate. Clearly, such forces are not material things but … they do activate the spirit” (Durkheim 1925/1961: 41). In our time, too, terms such as “coercion,” “pressure,” and “constraint” have very negative connotations. While it is true that Durkheim emphasizes the forceful (imposing) and “disciplinary” character of the social order, the social order is also, crucially, a moral order; this includes our positive attachments to the representations of the group. Related to this, much (but not all) of what holds power within a society is seldom noticed as such by the normally constituted member in the course of her/his everyday life. For example, while one might have (or seek) “friends” and share certain expectations with such persons, one does not typically think of the institution called “friendship” as a site of coercion, pressure, and constraint. Nevertheless, a person regarded by others as having failed to conduct her/himself in ways that are expected of a “friend,” i.e., by not living up to collectively organized ways of doing “friendship” in the context of a particular set of relationships, will undoubtedly encounter some form of resistance (e.g., being shunned or ignored, mistrusted, and/or disqualified from particular activities). Neither this individual, nor those engaged in such “penalizing” conduct, invented the category of the “friend”; it “exists independently of the particular forms that it may assume” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 57), and reveals its externality and coercive power upon being inadequately acknowledged. To criticize Durkheim’s sociology on behalf of an “autonomous individual” viewed as ideally “unconstrained” by any and all social forces would negate our deeply social nature. Moreover, to be consistent, such a criticism would have to consider all socially instituted forms – including seemingly innocuous ones like “friendship” – as equally problematic. If one accepts that we are constituted by a continuous immersion in a complexly ordered and symbolic social life, the presumed opposition between an “autonomous individual” and a “constraining society” is best understood as an untenable obfuscation.

Normal and pathological: the example of crime A society, for Durkheim, is essentially a territorially based social entity with an internal milieu and an external environment that includes other societies. It is a complex of social institutions and social forms, including a collective consciousness, which work in a sufficiently complementary manner for its development and reproduction. What it consists of, how it works, and, indeed, whether a society works, however, are not self-evident.

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To understand whether or not a particular society is working “normally” (and not “pathologically”), and/or to consider whether a particular aspect of society is “normal” (and not “pathological”), Durkheim thought it was necessary to determine which social type the society was an example of, and, also, its level of development. The strategy he recommended for making such determinations was essentially comparative. First, the analyst must work out features common to all societies. Second, s/he must tentatively identify different species (types) of society; this can be done, in part, by determining what are the significant and enduring differences between the different societies. Third, within each particular species, s/he must identify other such societies at a similar state of development. Fourth, the analyst must compare their similarities and differences. Then, it may be possible to identify a social phenomenon and define it as “normal” or as “abnormal” for a society of a particular species at a particular level of development. Crime is a good example that Durkheim uses to flesh out the distinction between “normal” and “pathological” social forms. Durkheim reveals the seemingly incontrovertible judgment of crime as “pathological” to be patently incorrect. Since crime exists in all types of societies, it must be considered “normal,” bound up with the very conditions of collective life. Moreover, Durkheim argued, crime is “an integrative element in any healthy society” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 98), a factor of social health. Crime rates in any society, though, may be disproportionately high or low. Since Durkheim believed moral flexibility and social innovation to be productive and healthy components of a modern (differentiated) society, an excessively low crime rate can be a sign of social pathology in such a society. Such a low crime rate may signify an overly repressive social order in which there is minimal and excessively restricted moral and social movement. If the figure who “dreams of transcending his era” is to be made possible, Durkheim supposed, so too must be the criminal. Accordingly, the moral consciousness must not enjoy too great an authority because then “no one would dare to attack it and it would petrify. … [T]o evolve, individual originality must be allowed to manifest itself” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 101). Durkheim’s discussion of the moral innovation of the Athenian “criminal” Socrates reveals a clearly positive historical example of this relationship. Framed around the implications of Socrates’ innovativeness for the broader collective within which he was formed and whose ethos he violated, Durkheim remarks that while Socrates’ condemnation was “entirely just” within the context of Athenian law, his crime was also something that, in fact, strengthened Athens: According to Athenian law, Socrates was a criminal and his condemnation was … just. However, his crime – his independence of thought – was useful not only for humanity but for his country. It served to prepare a way for a new morality and a new faith, which the Athenians then needed because the traditions by which they had hitherto lived no longer corresponded to the conditions of their existence. Socrates’ case is not an isolated one, for it recurs periodically in history. (1895/1982: 102)

Drawing on the same sociological principle, one can also suggest that there exists a social need for more stringent efforts to repress change and nonconformity (including independence of thought) in a society based upon mechanical solidarity.

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While Durkheim discusses rule violation in other writings, it is in the Rules that he most clearly articulates how a sociological orientation transforms pervasively taken-for-granted understandings of crime. Under the auspices of sociology, crime appears “in an entirely new light.” Rather than being viewed simply (and commonsensically) as a “parasitic element” or “unassimiliable body” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 102), the figure of the criminal can now be seen to play a “normal” and potentially useful role in collective life. While Durkheim’s formulation of societal responses to crime as a normal social fact was innovative, he never explicitly ventures to provide a sociological exploration of how it is that some engage in activities that the state defines as criminal, while others do not. Generally, he represents the regulation of conduct as ordered in relation to a single universally shared conscience collective, involving a specific set of representations which are collective; at times, though, he acknowledges that “we form a part of several groups and there exists in us several consciousnesses” (1893/2004: 67). Since any society is best understood as being composed of many small societies, there is no reason to believe that all members will have identical consciousnesses or the same orientation to the collective consciousness, hence members will have varying understandings of the permissible and the impermissible.

Classification, explanation, and comparison Durkheim was concerned with the classification of societies in relation to different types of social structures and sociologically significant elements. He was very clear about the limitations of Comte (who had “failed to recognize the existence of social species” [Durkheim 1895/1982: 109]) and the imprecision of Spencer (who left untheorized the simple societal form as a distinctive phenomenon, thus grouping together diverse societies in “astonishing confusion” [Durkheim 1895/1982: 112]). He termed this type of classificatory work social morphology, devoting the latter part of Rules to its explication. Durkheim was also concerned with the explanation of social facts, arguing that it was inadequate to reduce explanation to function (or purpose). For example, to “revive the family spirit where it has grown weak” requires something more than a common realization of its advantages to members. Rather, “we must set directly in operation those causes which alone can engender it” (Durkheim 1895/1982: 120). Durkheim recommends that to examine any phenomenon sociologically – be it the modern division of labor, socialism, or crime – both its causes and functions need to be investigated separately. Further, he recommends a comparative-historical approach for the study of complex social phenomena.

THE WORK – SUICIDE General In his third major work, Suicide (1897a/1951), Durkheim set out to explore a phenomenon found in all types of society, suicide. Arguing that “motive” was an inadequate explanation for suicide, he wished to show that the most private of human decisions, whether to live or to die (and typically explained by the particular experiences, state,

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and/or consciousness of the individual), was better understood as an effect of social relationships. It is hard to imagine a reader of this text who would not find emerging from each page “the impression that the individual is dominated by a moral reality greater than himself: namely, collective reality” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 38). The subtitle to this remarkable text, “A Study in Sociology,” revealed its author’s intent to demonstrate the fruitfulness of a distinctively sociological approach to a topic normally only considered within the scope of the individual. Stressing the sui generis character of social facts, the text offered a strong counter to psychologistic explanations, including the individualism underlying the “imitative” theory of one of his strongest rivals, the French social psychologist Gabriel Tarde. While Durkheim was initially optimistic about Suicide, its reception was mixed, at best, and he was very disappointed. Following its publication, the text was barely recognized, save some mixed reviews. It was not until well after Durkheim’s death (as late as the mid-twentieth century) that it came to be regarded as an important work (see Besnard 2000). In spite of its mixed reception, it is now generally regarded as a theoretical classic and seminal text in the social study of suicide. Suicide was Durkheim’s first major systematic empirical study. Often referred to as his most polemical text, it revealed a certain boldness in his thinking. He wholly rejected “extra-social” explanations of suicide. As in the case of crime, Durkheim argued that suicide could be theorized as a “normal” social fact, though its occurrence may be excessively high, as he argued was the case throughout Western Europe in the nineteenth century. With the aid of Mauss, extensive tables were compiled and maps from 26,000 official cases of suicide in Europe were drawn. The data were carefully categorized and analyzed in relation to a multiplicity of socio-cultural variables (including gender, marital status, religious involvement, political society, etc.). Ultimately, Durkheim wanted to show that the suicide data being considered revealed something other than the sum total of 26,000 individual choices to die. Initiating a radically new approach to the study of suicide, Durkheim effectively shifted the focus away from the individual case and towards the broader collective framework. It must be noted that Suicide was written during a period of widespread concern over such things as social integration, a seemingly waning moral authority, and what many considered to be the deep self-absorption of the modern individual; there was also significant public concern over the rising suicide rates across Europe accompanying industrialization. Over the course of 50 years, quite remarkably, suicide rates had, in some Western countries, doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 368). Durkheim suspected that these relatively high suicide rates “reflected the social malaise” characteristic of those societies at that time (Pope 1976: 9). He disagreed with the explanation of these high suicide rates as the “ransom money of civilization” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 367), that is, as just the unfortunate social cost of otherwise positive technological and intellectual “progress” of any modernizing society. By contrast, he argued that Europe’s high suicide rates should be understood in relation to the void left by the rapid, disorienting, and incomplete passage of one social order to another. Further, he believed that the sociologist can (and should) offer insights into remedying this state of affairs; to this end, towards the end of the study Durkheim offers some suggestions for the strengthening of weak and fragmentary social ties, necessary to the development of the new social and moral order.

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Defining suicide Durkheim defined suicide as “all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 44). The act of suicide could include either the expenditure of some energy (positive) or a refusal to do something necessary for one’s survival (negative). While “the suicide’s resolve” is typically accounted for in terms of his/her personality characteristics and life experiences, rather, “[t]he causes of death are outside rather than within, us, and are effective only if we venture into their sphere of activity” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 43). While the phenomenon of suicide has a specificity that Durkheim wanted to preserve, he acknowledged that, in actuality, the line demarcating the suicide from the person who dies prematurely due to her/his engagement (or non-engagement) in a particular activity is not always clear-cut, and that, in fact, the difference between certain forms of premature death and suicide proper is only a matter of degree. A hypothetical example he provides is “the scholar who dies from excessive devotion to study” who cannot unreasonably “be said to have killed himself by his labor” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 45–6). This is an interesting example for Durkheim to have used given that his own death, which followed a physical collapse said to have been caused in part by his extreme overwork, in the broader context of a generally over-extended and beleaguered academic community in wartime France, could be read along similar lines. We will only note that Durkheim wrote moving obituaries for two of his dear friends whose accidental deaths could also fit his own broad definitions of suicide; Victor Hommay – whose death Durkheim called a “miserable and tragic accident” – fell off a ledge while reading at L’École Normale, and Octave Hamelin drowned during a heroic attempt to rescue two young women (likely his nieces) at sea.

Social suicide rates The existence of definite social suicide rates was central to Durkheim’s study for how could the relatively constant rates amongst different countries, groups (e.g., Protestants, Catholics, and Jews), and categories (e.g., persons who are single, married, or divorced) be explained on individual terms? As he put it, “At each moment of its history … each society has a definite aptitude for suicide … the suicide-rate is therefore a factual order, unified and definite, as is shown by both its permanence and its variability” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 48, 51). At the same time, his study set out to reveal the generally unacknowledged degree to which particular social institutions and states are consequential, not merely technical, dimensions of people’s lives. Elaborating upon the significance of the social suicide rates and their indexing of the implications of social institutional arrangements and states, Durkheim writes: [W]hen it appears that the variations through which it passes at different times of the day, month, year merely reflect the rhythm of social life; and that marriage, divorce, the family, religious society, the army, etc. affect it in accordance with definite laws … these states and institutions will no longer be regarded simply as characterless, ineffective, ideological arrangements. Rather they will be felt to be real, living, active forces. (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 38–9)

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It should be noted that, unlike in Durkheim’s time, the contemporary sociologist would be expected to consider the role of the coroner in the determination of suicide rates, and, in particular, the complex and socially ordered processes by which coroners “decide” if a given death is to be counted as a suicide or not (see Douglas 1967; Atkinson 1978). Such decision-making processes clearly shape what comes to be understood as the formal suicide rate (of any group). Since Durkheim relied on officially recorded suicide rates, his data may not have “captured” what he presumed they did. Questions can then legitimately be raised about their “validity.” Nevertheless, it is the case that to the extent that relatively stable suicide rates within particular social groups are identified, and that, when compared with other groups, there are notable – but stable – differences between groups, then it is still reasonable to assume that such regularities (and differences) must index systematic forms of ordering in the social world of some kind (and that these can be accounted for). Thus, the same general point that Durkheim made about social suicide rates might also be applied to coroners’ decision-making practices.

Egoistic and altruistic suicide Durkheim developed a suicide typology organized around the poles of social integration and social regulation. He believed he had identified four main forms of suicide – egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic – and that their relative frequency in any particular society was a consequence of the relations between such social phenomena as the degrees of social regulation and integration operating within a society. Whereas egoistic (excessive individuation) and altruistic (insufficient individuation) suicide were organized around the continuum of social integration, anomic and fatalistic suicide were organized around the continuum of social regulation. Excessive egoism was, for Durkheim, one of the major problems facing his time. Giving primacy to individual over collective ends, the egoist imagines her/himself to be self-sufficient, the source of her/his own fate, particularly of her/his own successes, and, reluctantly but inescapably, the source of her/his own failures. S/he lives her/his life as if this is true, celebrating her/his “autonomy” and independence of conventional institutions. Though he was a friend of a certain version of modern individualism, Durkheim argued that modern European society cultivated an excessively egoistic relation to the world. In fact, it could be, and often was, a source of terrible (albeit poorly understood) suffering, for, “However individualized a man may be there is always something collective remaining: the very depression and melancholy resulting from this exaggerated individualism” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 294). Deriving from this, he identifies “egoistic suicide” as the kind of suicide that occurs “when the bond attaching man to life relaxes because that attaching him to society is itself slack” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 214–15). For the egoistic actor, “The incidents of private life which seem the direct inspiration of suicide” and which may appear to be the primary cause – from the romantic break-up to the thwarted job promotion – “are in reality only incidental causes” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 215). The important distinction Durkheim makes between “occasions” and “causes” helps to illuminate why he was so suspicious of “motive” as an adequate account of suicide. The actor lacking sufficiently strong ties to society is vulnerable to yielding to the “slightest shock of circumstance.”

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Durkheim begins his consideration of egoistic suicide with a discussion of religion. He notes the relatively higher rates of suicide amongst Protestant rather than Catholic countries, and that in Europe Jews’ aptitude for suicide was low. While the “facts” may be known, how are they to be accounted for? In answer to this question, he argues that what is most essential is the presence (or absence) of a “sufficiently intense collective life” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 170). Since Protestantism encouraged free inquiry, members shared fewer beliefs and engaged in fewer rituals than Catholics. Catholicism integrated members more strongly through a more encompassing set of beliefs and practices. What was notable about Judaism, argued Durkheim, was that while it was typically urban and intellectually oriented, the exceptional solidarity, due in part to a historical experience of persecution, gave its members protection against suicide. Thus, “if religion protects man against the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him … but because it is a society” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 170). Durkheim considered the relationship between suicide and the family along similar lines. Though his discussion is extremely complex and he works through a variety of different relationships and variations (e.g., marital status, gender, age, presence of children, size of family, etc.), he is led to the general conclusion that, “As suicides diminish, family density regularly increases” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 199). While the institution of marriage appears to offer immunity against suicide (though with variations in gender, age, presence of children), this is not due to greater life happiness or “conjugal joy.” Quite the contrary, Durkheim suggested, for “an unmarried person has in fact an easier life than a married one” by virtue of fewer “burdens and responsibilities” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 171). What is at stake, rather, is the degree of intensity of the common life that any given social pattern (of which marriage is merely an example) supports. A married person with several children in an extensive family, for instance, is more likely to be drawn into a plurality of relationships and routine social events in ways that render an egoistic relation to the world less possible. The ability of a group to protect its members will depend upon the degree of integration of the group, which, in turn, will “reflect the intensity” of its collective life, and how “active and constant is the intercourse among its members” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 202). Durkheim also considers political societies in his examination of egoistic suicide. He notices a strong correlation between “great social disturbances and great popular wars” and a “stronger integration of society” due primarily to such things as the “rousing of collective sentiments,” the “stimulation of partisan spirit,” and the coordination of activity toward a single end (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 208). As in the case of religion and the family, the correlation between suicide and political involvement suggests that an intensification of communal engagement and the cultivation of strong and enduring social bonds offer social members protection against suicide. Altruistic suicide is located at the other end of the continuum of social integration: excessively high. Whereas egoistic suicide takes shape under conditions in which the ego lives its own life, thus “obeying itself alone,” altruistic suicide occurs when the “ego is not its own property.” The social group may “compel” a member to sacrifice her/himself on its behalf – men as they become too old or sick to be warriors, women whose husbands have died, retainers and servants whose masters have died. Durkheim comments: “For society to be able … to compel some of its members

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to kill themselves, the individual personality can have little value.” In other cases, while “public opinion does not formally require” suicide, it is favorable to it (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 220–2). A third possibility is that an individual, such as a mystic, will kill himself in order to “strip himself of his personal being in order to be engulfed in something which he regards as his true essence.… [H]e feels that he exists in it and it alone, and strives so violently to blend himself with it in order to have being” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 220–5). Altruistic suicide may then be obligatory, optional, or acute. A possible example of altruistic suicide today is the martyr or the suicide bomber who dies on behalf of group goals (Best 2010); a similarly structured example of this relationship is that of the sports team member who is encouraged to “sacrifice the body” during a game or simply to “take one for the team.” Clearly, a high degree of social integration is not always or simply in all circumstances beneficial for the individual. Durkheim draws upon examples from various metaphysical and religious systems in his examination of altruistic suicide. Given its emphasis upon individual autonomy, one would not expect altruistic suicide to be widespread in modern societies. There is an exception, though, “a special environment where altruistic suicide is chronic,” and that is the army (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 228). It is the army’s very nature that the individual is subordinated to the interests of the group; at the same time as s/he may willingly die on the battlefield on behalf of group goals, s/he will also, likely, be more concerned about success in safeguarding its honor more than his/her own (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 239). Reminding his reader that the study of Suicide is not merely about the seemingly excessive phenomenon of self-killing, Durkheim remarks that, in fact, “Every sort of suicide is … merely the exaggerated or deflected form of a virtue” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 240). This alludes to his previous qualifications regarding the definition of suicide, namely, that suicide should not be read as an “isolated class of monstrous phenomena, unrelated to other forms of conduct,” but that it can more usefully be examined as “the exaggerated form of common practices” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 45).

Anomic and fatalistic suicide Durkheim opens his discussion of anomic suicide by challenging the common sense that economic distress, in and of itself, must lead to an increase in suicide; he argues, on the contrary, that poverty may offer protection against suicide (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 245). Qualifying Durkheim somewhat, we would suggest, some of the social responses to poverty (e.g., mutual aid and forms of solidaristic action) may offer protection against suicide. On the other hand, “crises of prosperity” may have the result of increasing suicide rates. How is this so? Disturbances to equilibrium are significantly, sometimes very dangerously, disruptive to people, argues Durkheim, even if they appear on the surface to be positive (such as cases of unexpected wealth or sudden prestige). Durkheim’s chapter on anomic suicide is set against the backdrop of several examples of industrial and commercial crises in Europe. Most generally, he understands anomic suicide as that suicide which results from the human suffering due to an absence of adequate social regulation. He provides a deeply sociological account of

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the social conditions of human contentment, even happiness. He argues that human beings are potentially insatiable, and thus that their happiness depends upon their ability to formulate and seek goals that are realizable in light of the particularities of their circumstances. To lack realizable goals, reference points, and thus limits, then, is to “condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 248). After all, there is no possibility of progress if we are not striving to accomplish particular goals or if our goal is “infinity” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 248). A society in which there exists little social regulation (that is, an anomic state) is disturbing, destructive, and (even) mortally dangerous to its members. Durkheim identifies another problem: a society may encourage its members to orient themselves to limitless acquisition, to greed, almost as if it was a moral duty (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 256). Clearly, according to Durkheim, industrial and commercial societies had developed in a somewhat pathological manner and were major sources of anomic suicide in the late nineteenth century. Widowhood and divorce, Durkheim noted, can also engender a type of domestic anomie amongst those affected, given the significant “disturbance” corresponding with the new state within which one lives one’s life, but were much less significant during his period. Durkheim argues that there are kindred ties between anomic and egoistic suicide; both correspond with an insufficient presence of society (of social bonds in the case of egoism, of moral guidance and regulation in the case of anomie). At the other extreme on the continuum of social regulation, Durkheim identified a fourth suicide category, “fatalistic” suicide. Its marginality for Durkheim is evident in that his discussion of it is restricted to a single footnote. Deriving from “excessive integration,” fatalistic suicide is “that of persons with their futures pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by excessive discipline,” which may be physical or moral (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 276). It must be noted that in this discussion Durkheim displays little concern for how social regulation is in fact produced or whether it is just. If we reconsider the implications of his discussion of the contemporary phenomenon of the forced division of labor, it is clear that there are many, indeed entire social classes, that likewise see “their futures pitilessly blocked.” Indeed, one might suggest that, far from being the opposite of anomie, fatalism conceals anomie under conditions of forced solidarity (Pearce 2001).

Practical implications As Suicide’s final chapter “Practical Consequences” makes clear, Durkheim hoped that his study would provide suggestions for militating against some of the “maladjustments” taking place within European societies. Thus beyond its place within a particular sociological movement, Suicide must also be read as an instance of Durkheim’s deployment of social science to make sense of his own times and in ways that offered possible “solutions” to some of the destructive elements of those times. Although social conditions can be improved in ways that better integrate and regulate members, Durkheim did not envision a utopian (or bland) society free of negative emotions or painful experiences. He emphasized, to this end, that melancholy and sorrow are necessary elements of human existence, tied irrevocably to happiness and joy; however, where they “occupy too much place in life” they become destructive. Durkheim argued, however, that during his time, egoism and anomie were amongst

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the most pressing of social problems; suicide rates were but one manifestation of this more general collective malaise. A key source of this malaise was the inadequacy of social integration and regulation, but Durkheim believed that the occupational groups or corporations that he advocated could play a key role in limiting the occurrence and hence the effects of these social evils (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 378). An important implication of Durkheim’s inquiry into suicide is that both egoistic and altruistic orientations, and the institutions in which they are imbricated, are necessary for a stable, balanced, and potentially fulfilling individual and collective life, as least under conditions of organic solidarity. What is also required is a nomic order which is just and which integrates forms of social regulation in ways that are not excessive (i.e., which allows for individual interpretation and elaboration). Further, if an individual requires both an active and satisfying reciprocal involvement in social life that includes a separate sphere within which to develop an independent and autonomous selfhood, these are clearly complementary and their presence mitigates the dangers of anomie and fatalism. Over 100 years after its publication, Durkheim’s Suicide remains a fascinating inquiry into the question of the conditions under which persons are more or less likely to end their own lives, revealing from beginning to end both the power and the opacity of the social. After all, “Never would consciousness have dreamt, of its own accord, of the necessity which annually reproduces demographic phenomena in equal numbers, had it not received a suggestion from without” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 311–13).

THE WORK – THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE Religion and the social – early writings Durkheim’s writings on religion can be read as deep and profound meditations on the integral relationship between collective existence and the religio-sacred. In his great masterpiece, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim invites his reader to consider religion as a “fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity” (Durkheim 1912/1995: 1), perhaps the most fundamental and permanent aspect of our humanity. Durkheim’s formulation of god as essentially society writ large highlights both our remarkable (human) capacity for complex symbolization and, at the same time, our remarkable ability to obfuscate the very source of our ideals: society. [T]here is something eternal in religion that is destined to outlive the succession of particular symbols in which religious thought has clothed itself. There can be no society that does not experience the need at regular intervals to maintain and strengthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and its distinct individuality. This moral remaking can only be achieved through meetings, assemblies, and congregations in which the individuals, pressing close to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments. (Durkheim 1912/1995: 429)

These writings reveal important unities in his thought, bringing together such enduring themes as: the social order as a deeply moral order, sacralization as a constitutive element of collective life, the human capacity for complex symbolization, the renewing and transformative dimensions of shared rituals, and the creative

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effervescent dimensions of group life. It is with this in mind that we now discuss a range of Durkheim’s texts which display the development of his understanding of the religio-sacred over time. In his early work Durkheim believed religion to be “a form of custom” which, like law, makes explicit how people are expected to conduct themselves, and, like morality, asserts itself over both conduct and conscience. It is premised upon “faith,” that is, “any belief experienced or accepted without argument,” which could involve a deity or ideal (such as “progress”). Rather than considering beliefs as mere prejudices, Durkheim proposed they instead be considered as established judgments that summarize experience undergone by others. Since “[a] society without prejudices would be like an organism without reflexes,” social viability requires “a collective discipline” that imposes taken-for-granted beliefs “on every mind with the overpowering authority of habit” (Durkheim 1886/1975: 21–2). Now, at the same moment that this definition dissolves much of religion’s specificity, it also ensconces religiosity as an aspect of all viable collectivities. This is relatively clear in the Division of Labour. In the case of societies based upon mechanical solidarity, crime, after all, is not only subject to legal sanctions but is experienced as sacrilegious. Further, in its more rudimentary forms, religion consists of a combination of animism and the implicit worship of the collectivity, by its members. The collective consciousness, law, and religion clearly overlap, one with the other, to a considerable degree. A continuous process of social differentiation generally means that “political, economic and scientific functions break free from [religion’s] influence” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 119). In this context, Durkheim understands religion in a somewhat restricted sense, as an institutionalized structure. Now, it is true that religion, a shared morality, and the collective consciousness are less intense and less allencompassing in a modern society (just as individual consciousnesses are more autonomous) than in less differentiated ones, yet at the same time, in modern societies there emerge distinctive social groupings (each with their own specific moralities and forms of worship) and more differentiated and autonomous individuals, which, taken together, form a variety of contractual, authority-, and status-based relationships. All are subject to evaluation, often by the courts, in relation to social solidarity, and/or violate deeply held values such as equality and justice. These criteria, because they emanate directly from the conscience collective, are imbued with sacred qualities. The collective consciousness and religiosity, in the broader sense, never completely disappear. After all, as Durkheim writes, “There exist no societies where assaults upon national sentiments or national institutions have ever been tolerated” (Durkheim 1893/2004: 11). In Suicide Durkheim re-emphasized both the sui generis nature and the centrality of the collective consciousness. He explicitly linked religion (broadly speaking) and the collective consciousness when he noted of “religion” that it is “the system of symbols by means of which society becomes conscious of itself; it is the characteristic way of thinking of collective existence” (Durkheim 1897a/1951: 312). Religion is the substratum of the social, for as Durkheim puts it elsewhere, “in principle everything is religious” (Durkheim 1897b/1982: 173). Soon after the publication of Suicide, Durkheim wrote “Individualism and the Intellectuals.” In it, as we noted previously, he argued that contemporary individualism involved the sacralization of the human person and his (or her) protection from

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profanation, with the same respect accorded the collectivity (Durkheim 1898a/1975: 62). Here, an important new distinction is introduced, that between the “sacred” and the “profane.” This also marks a return to Durkheim’s earlier and broader view of the religious. Then, in his article “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena” (1899), he lists further possible referents of the sacred, including “the flag, the country, this or that political organization or hero or historical event … the French Revolution or Joan of Arc … the moral superiority of democracy, the reality of progress and the idea of equality” (Durkheim 1899/1975: 91). As he also emphasizes, religion involves not merely a set of beliefs but also a set of practices, both of which are obligatory (Durkheim 1899/1975: 93).

Religious life and sacrificial practices For the next 13 years Durkheim continued his work on religion. He wrote reviews and articles for L’Année Sociologique and other journals on religion; and, along with Marcel Mauss, he wrote Primitive Classification (Durkheim and Mauss 1903/1963). A few years later he wrote “The Determination of Moral Facts,” where he made the “scandalous” remark: “I see in the divinity only society transfigured and transformed” (Durkheim 1906/1974: 52). In 1912, Durkheim published his final and much celebrated book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Consolidating his earlier work, he states that religious phenomena consist of beliefs, representations of states of opinion (belief) or modes of action (rites). These beliefs presuppose the classification of real or ideal things, into the sacred and the profane; “Sacred things are things protected and isolated by prohibitions; profane things are those things to which the prohibitions apply” (Durkheim 1912/1995: 38). For each society, particular collective representations in its collective consciousness determine what is sacred and what is profane. Since any particular object or being may be categorized in one society as sacred and in another as profane, their sacredness does not derive from qualities which are always and everywhere seen as admirable, but rather qualities are seen as admirable because in a particular society they are an aspect of a sacred thing or being. Now, typically, when religious phenomena become institutionalized as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things … which unite into one single moral community … all those who adhere to it,” then a church has been established (Durkheim 1912/1995: 44). And, acts of worship by members of a particular moral community will strengthen “the ties between the faithful and their god – the god being only a figurative representation of society” – and “strengthen the ties between the individual and the society” (Durkheim 1912/1995: 227). Religion, Durkheim’s sociological understanding enables us to grasp, is something created by the community, for the community; it is the community – and what it values – that is the source of all religious experience. Sacred objects and beings, which Durkheim reiterates may or may not include gods (Durkheim 1912/1995: 28), are usually generated and identified in ceremonial religious assemblies during moments of collective effervescence (Durkheim 1912/1995: 218–20, 238). Often in these ritual processes relatively ordinary things – such as bread, wine, kangaroos, witchetty grubs – are believed to be transformed into sacred objects. The creation or re-affirmation of collective representations is an integral part of these intensely effervescent social rituals. In these processes, the nature of the once

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“ordinary” object becomes redefined; the object is (now) in essence “sacred”. For example, bread and wine may be seen to be (symbolically or in substance) the body and blood of Jesus, and kangaroos and witchetty grubs may become the gods of particular clans; their sacredness “is superadded to them” (Durkheim 1912/1995: 349). When these ceremonial communities dissolve and people return to their more dispersed (and isolated) mundane existences, and these superadded “collective representations” lose their original energy, “[s]acred beings may seem to lose their reality” but the “collective representations that refer to sacred beings” can be renewed by plunging “them again into the very source of religious life: assembled groups. … The shared faith comes to life again. … People are more confident because they feel stronger, and they are stronger in reality” (Durkheim 1912/1995: 350). For Durkheim sacrifice is integral to all human societies and ritual sacrifice is a key component of many sacred beliefs and rituals. Such rituals often mediate between the sacred and the profane, for society needs both realms, and it is essential both that they are kept separated but that there is also movement between them. Sacrifice can make this possible, for it comprises two essential elements, i.e. a gift, an act of renunciation and an act of communion (Durkheim 1912/1995: 344). Durkheim’s discussion of sacrifice is rather cryptic and needs to be supplemented by the most comprehensive discussion in the Durkheimian tradition – the article “Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function,” written by Hubert and Mauss (1898/1964) in the context of an ongoing conversation with Durkheim. They note that a complete sacrificial ritual will involve, first, an exit from a profane place and time; second, an entrance into a sacralized place and time; and then, third, an exit from the sacred scene back to the profane world (Hubert and Mauss 1898/1964: 25). They then distinguish between the functions of the sacrifier, the person, who may be individual or collective (“a family, a clan, a tribe, a nation, a secret society” [Hubert and Mauss 1898/1964: 10]), whose desire motivates the sacrifice, and the sacrificer, the person who officiates at the ritual. For the sacrifier, ritual sacrifice provides “a means of communication between the sacred and the profane,” a communication made safe “through the mediation of a victim … which in the course of the ceremony is destroyed” (Hubert and Mauss 1898/1964: 97). “[T]hrough the consecration of a victim,” sacrifice, it is hoped, will improve the spiritual and/or material condition “of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of a certain object with which he is concerned” (Hubert and Mauss 1898/1964: 15). Thus sacrificial consecrations generate a religious power that passes to the profane sphere where the sacrifier is thereby elevated above and beyond his/her ordinary nature. The victim, the sacrifier, and, to a lesser extent, the sacrificer are all sacralized; this social relationship implies that the more sacrificial rituals in which social members play a role, the more morally elevated they become within their collectivity. This is not only true of individuals, but also of subcollectivities, the clergy. These considerations help to explain why there is often a desire for contact with the sacred realm. Sacrifice may also have an effect on God or the gods, but what effect? In major monotheistic traditions, where God is believed to be perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent, it is reasonable to say that the answer must be little or none. However, in many polytheistic religions, while gods are seen as greater than humanity, they are not greater than (nor outside of) the cosmic order; the cosmic order as a whole encompasses both humanity and the gods. True, when humans fulfill their obligations and

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make sacrifices to these gods, the gods are believed to initiate important cycles of birth, growth, death, and rebirth; but this is an incomplete picture. Since it is humanity’s desires that motivate sacrifice, the divinities are dependent on these for their continued existence, and for their ability to play their part in the cosmic order. Human beings play at least as significant a role as the gods in the workings of the sacrificial mechanism, possibly effecting interconnections between a whole series of social and, indeed, spiritual or cosmic levels (Herrenschmidt 1982). One might, for example, explore the similarities and differences in the roles played by divine and human sacrifice in the formulation, justification, and enactment of their “manifest destiny” to bring “order” and “civilization” to their respective spheres of influence by the Mexican Aztec city-state and by the United States of America (Pearce 2010). Durkheim argued that for many religions, there are two different kinds of sacred beings: some are benevolent “guardians of physical and moral order” whereas others are “evil and impure powers” (Durkheim 1912/1995: 412–13). This cosmology helps provide an explanation of the capriciousness of fate and why there is often little relationship between religiosity and success. This works well enough when gods are merely tribal; then, for example, success or defeat in war attests to the relative powers and roles of a complex of gods. It becomes more of a problem when societies at war are monotheistic. After all, monotheists believe that God, their God, is omnipotent, omniscient, morally pure and on their side. If one side wins, though, how does the other live with its defeat? How persuasive is theodicy when confronted with the suffering of the brave, the good, and the innocent? More dramatically, each God and all gods together can seem increasingly false, as all nations – even when victorious – suffer the devastating consequences of total war. Religion was only too often revealed to Europeans, in particular at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, as providing little more than a pious mantle for brutal nation states, as together they callously sacrificed millions of human lives, on the bloody altars of nationalism.

ASSESSMENT Durkheim’s alleged conservatism There are many different interpretations of Durkheim’s work, varying in their degree of sympathy and engagement. Generations of sociology students have been introduced to Durkheim as a thinker who is essentially conservative. This conservatism is said to be twofold. First there is Durkheim the positivist, a social determinist thinker committed to an empiricist methodology, a believer in the unity of all sciences. While Durkheim was committed to “scientific rationalism,” as we hope to have shown, it is crude and inaccurate to characterize his subtle theorizing methodology as essentially positivist (see Durkheim 1895/1982: 33). Second, there is Durkheim the functionalist (or more accurately, we meet Durkheim the precursor to Parsons). True, the evolutionary organicist metaphor plays a role in some of Durkheim’s writings, just as his notion of society’s conscience collective resembles Parsons’ central value system in some ways. But, as we have developed throughout this text, these particular dimensions of Durkheim are parts of a much broader, distinctive, and complex social

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theory. To reduce the complexities of Durkheim’s thought in such a way, we strongly argue, is to circumvent so much of what was, and continues to be, exciting and generative from Durkheimian social theory (see Ramp 2008). Bearing these comments in mind, we note that there are many writers who hold to the view that Durkheim’s sociology and politics are generally conservative. Like many other influential sociologists since the 1950s, Robert Nisbet identified Durkheim as a thoroughly conservative thinker. He argued that Durkheim was overwhelmingly motivated by a concern with sustaining order, authority, and tradition, and that his strongest influences came from conservative thinkers, including Louis Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, and Felicité Lamennais (Nisbet 1952, 1965, 1966; for Durkheim’s critical view of these thinkers see Durkheim 1928/1962: 168, 274). Other scholars, such as Lewis Coser (1962), share a judgment of Durkheim as politically conservative; whereas Nisbet identified this as a strength Coser considered it to be both a conceptual and a political weakness. Paul Nizan (1931/1971: 79, 167), along similar lines, identified the theme of Book 3 of Durkheim’s The Division of Labour as “order and peace,” going so far as to argue that Durkheim’s primary educational goal was to produce “the man … society wants him to be” (see Durkheim 1922/1956: 71, 123). Melvin Richter (1960) is another commentator who emphasized the conservative elements in Durkheim’s thought, though in a more nuanced way; more positively, he also relates Durkheim’s work to the sophisticated “New Liberalism” of T. H. Green (1836–82). Durkheim’s relation to politics and social change (including why he may have refrained from supporting the labor and feminist movements of his time) was complex. While he was by no means uncritical of the industrial (capitalist) society around him, as we have pointed out, he was also optimistic that it could (and would) slowly but surely improve, in what were to a large extent socialist directions, bringing about new forms of social integration and solidarity. Durkheim believed that a shift in the conscience collective itself was essential for this; it was only through evolutionary changes of and within major societal institutions –generally a slow process – that he thought meaningful and enduring social transformations could be achieved. Although the attribution of conservatism may be overstated, there is no doubt that in Durkheim one can find conceptualizations that lend themselves to a conservative political reading, particularly in regard to social movements and social change. For example, it is fair to say that his writings display an inordinate trust in the major institutions within modern society; this includes the view that these institutions are grounded in a legitimate authority and, further, that the social actor has an unquestionable obligation to work within and through the social-institutional (and so, political) framework that s/he inherits. Durkheim’s emphasis upon social order imbues his work with unquestionably conservative hues, to the degree that it is almost comical to imagine him engaging in civil disobedience. After all, he disagreed with the formation of unions amongst civil servants, believing that they would be destructive to the broader social body and undermine national interests (Durkheim 1908/1986: 151, 146). He was, in fact, opposed to all forms of extraparliamentary political action, even though the extant political and economic framework structurally advantaged and differentially empowered some interests over others. Effectively this meant that, however inadvertently, Durkheim colluded with the relative disempowerment of working-class people, not least by showing little

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interest in understanding how and why many of them supported trade unions and left-wing political parties. Indeed he had no sense of the value of working-class selforganization, nor did he pose the question of whether or not forceful collective action might be necessary to overcome the well-placed and well-armed opponents of the “natural evolution” of (modern) societies towards greater justice. Durkheim’s opposition to the feminist movement was another manifestation of his more general anxiety about forms of (and methods for achieving) structurally significant social change. Bert Adams and Rosalyn Sydie suggest this when they argue that: “Durkheim’s sociological imagination seemed to have deserted him when it came to the question of gender. The moral health of modern society was the matter of paramount importance … and he regarded feminist demands at the turn of the century as jeopardizing social harmony and stability” (Adams and Sydie 2001: 114). As Adams and Sydie highlight, Durkheim’s treatment of gender reveals a clear failure on his part to fully follow through on his own sociological program. Jennifer Lehmann, along similar lines, judges Durkheim as conservative in relation “to women, children and the family” (1993: 8). As Lehmann and other critical feminist theorists have shown (e.g., Sydie 1994b), in addition to his general wariness of social movements and extra-parliamentary political actions, deep within Durkheim’s conceptualizations of social order and human subjectivities lurks an often essentialist conception of gender and sexuality. On the broad subject of politics, we argue that every thinker – from Mary Wollstonecraft to Martin Heidegger – should be read in relation to his/her times. In this spirit, Durkheim must bear responsibility for his opposition to the feminist movement of his time. Comparing him on this subject with other male thinkers of his period, Gane observes that: Durkheim followed [Schäffle’s] line of maximal defense of women with its highly conservative implications and paternalistic stance. Instead of catching the major current, as Hertz was able to do, and before him Enfantin, Mill, Bebel and Engels, and developing the necessary connections which might attach all “individuals” to society through education, and contributing to the formation and strengthening of a moral authority capable of sustaining the extension of citizenship, even of contributing to the demystification of the relations between the sexes, he took the opposite line, of rejecting such claims and measures even to the point of advocating indissoluble marriage. (Gane 1993: 58)

Though we are suggesting that Durkheim’s treatment of gender was problematic, we agree with Mary Ann Lamanna’s (2001: 172) wariness of simplistic categorizations of Durkheim as an “anti-feminist” thinker. Moreover, it is possible to be critical of Durkheim’s writings on women while also finding something of sociological value there, for example in his writings on incest (Durkheim 1898b/1963; Gane 1993: 39–45). It is also worth noting that the identification of the reductionist naturalization of women in Durkheim’s work has helped developed awareness of it as a social fact that contributes to a concealed, but powerful, homoeroticism in sacral group life (Friedland 2005). A task for those of us who are sympathetic to, and even inspired by, Durkheimian social theory is to develop and extend it in ways that can better address class and gender inequalities, along with other contemporary social, political, and sociological

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relevances and concerns. Though we would argue that many of the criticisms Durkheim’s work has generated raise important questions about his ideas and categories that need to be thought about and addressed, we do not think that they invalidate his work as a whole or in any essential way. After all, and as we now briefly address, there already exists a significant corpus of work by theorists who have found and continue to find Durkheim’s work a powerful resource for radical theorizing.

IMPACT Durkheim is often referred to as modern sociology’s most significant founding figure and in our judgment this is a just assessment. As we have emphasized, Durkheim’s efforts to establish the intellectual parameters of the systematic study of “the social” through powerful, rigorous, and innovative examinations and, more politically, through the tireless and productive waging of necessary intellectual battles, which led to key moments in sociology’s institutional recognition, were staggering. Thankfully, it is all too easy to take this work for granted today given the success of this project, as evidenced by the many different sociology departments, sociology majors, sociology journals, and (what Durkheim hoped would become) different branches of sociological inquiry that exist across the global academic landscape today. Though we have emphasized his sociological contributions, the influence of Durkheim’s thought extends well beyond the confines of modern sociology. Like other great theorists, Durkheim’s ideas were nourished through his lifelong engagement with diverse thinkers, disciplines, and schools of thought; at the same time, his writings have both challenged and influenced other equally diverse thinkers, disciplines, and schools of thought. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for instance, Durkheimian social theory had an impact on political economy (e.g., François Simiand), law (e.g., Emmanuel Lévy), linguistics (e.g., Ferdinand de Saussure), psychology (e.g., Henri Wallon), philosophy (e.g., Lucien Lévy-Bruhl), sinology (e.g., Marcel Granet), and history (e.g., Marc Bloch). Subsequently, Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss became important figures in the shaping of French ethnology. Their work also influenced British anthropology (e.g., Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edward Evans-Pritchard, and later Mary Douglas). It was also a significant resource in the structuralist thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the post-structuralism of Roland Barthes. More recently Durkheim’s work has been taken up as an important resource within religious studies (e.g., Mark Cladis, Robert Alun Jones, Ivan Strenski, Terry Godlove) and cultural history (e.g., Lynn Hunt and Jean Elisabeth Pedersen). Within sociology proper, Durkheim’s influence has been enormous and space does not permit us to go into depth on this here. In addition to the obvious areas of sociological theory, methodology, crime/law, work, and religion, we shall note a few of the more under-acknowledged and lesser-known areas within sociology where his thought has left important marks. While Durkheim is not typically associated with variants of interpretive sociology, the great dramaturgical sociologist, Erving Goffman, acknowledged his indebtedness to Durkheimian sociology; in particular, Durkheim’s work on the sacred was an important resource in Goffman’s analyses of the ritual order (see Collins 1980; Burns 1992). Aspects of Durkheim’s work have

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also been important in the development of certain ethnomethodological principles (Garfinkel 2002; Rawls 2004). Durkheim’s influence is present in heterogeneous substantive areas within sociology (areas which also often cross rigid disciplinary borders); some examples include: sport, collective behavior, deviance, education, and community. Drawing particularly upon his conceptualizations of the symbolic order, developments within cultural sociology have turned renewed attention to the Durkheimian tradition (e.g., Alexander and Smith 2005). Perhaps the most imaginative developments of sociology took place in Paris in the 1930s. This was the exciting and quite unpredictable encounter between French sociology and the French avant-garde. Sociologists, dissident surrealists, students of Mauss, literary figures, philosophers, artists, and others joined together to create three overlapping institutions – the Collège de Sociologie, dedicated to developing a sacred sociology; a journal, Acéphales, inspired by a Nietzschean anarchism; and a secret sacrificial society which, it was hoped, would, through its rituals, generate occasions of collective effervescence. The primary sociological inspiration for these endeavors was, of all people, the “conservative” sociologist Émile Durkheim, and his nephew Marcel Mauss (Richman 2002; Pearce 2003). Much of our text has been dedicated to what, we hope, is a rigorous engagement with, and exegesis of, many of Durkheim’s major texts and ideas, paying careful attention to his theoretical concerns, and also to the development of his key concepts and distinctions. In so doing we hope to have evoked a sense of Durkheim’s marvelously original, stimulating, challenging, and robustly sociological way of thinking about the nature of society, including its role in constituting us as social beings. Durkheim’s thought is also very complex, subtle, and incomplete. In the strongest sense, it invites us to think differently about our selves, our times, and our shared human condition.

Reader’s Guide to Émile Durkheim There are many extensive and useful secondary sources that deal comprehensively, appreciatively, critically, and comparatively with the social theory of Émile Durkheim. All of the texts that we have drawn upon in this essay are valuable resources; however, for the reader who would benefit from more direction in engaging with Durkheim, we include some specific suggestions. Steven Lukes’s highly regarded intellectual biography, which we have drawn upon extensively here, titled Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (1973), is an excellent point of entry, providing valuable detail and historical context for reading Durkheim. Marcel Fournier has recently published an extensive biography titled Émile Durkheim (2007). There are numerous insightful and accessible monographs that deal with Durkheim’s work in a fairly comprehensive sense and space only permits our naming of a few; we note, in particular: Dominick La Capra’s (1972) Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher, Anthony Giddens’ (1978) Durkheim, Steve Fenton’s (1984) Durkheim and Modern Sociology, and Robert Alun Jones’s (1986) Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. For more in-depth treatments of specific dimensions of Durkheim’s thought, we recommend: Paul Q. Hirst’s (1975) Durkheim, Bernard and Epistemology (philosophy of science), Paul Q. Hirst’s (1994) Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (imaginative development of Durkheim’s professional ethics and civic morals), Mike Gane’s (1992) The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss (political repositioning), Jennifer M. Lehmann’s (1993)

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Deconstructing Durkheim: a Post-Post-Structuralist Critique (epistemology), Frank Pearce’s (2001) The Radical Durkheim (Marxist-Durkheimian reconstitution), Susan Stedman Jones’s (2001) Durkheim Reconsidered (philosophical and political context), Michèle Richman’s (2002) Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie (Georges Bataille and sacred sociology), Ivan Strenski’s (2006) The New Durkheim (interdisciplinary applications), and Edward Tiryakian’s (2009) For Durkheim: Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology (historical and cultural applications). There are several excellent monographs and collections that address specific works by Durkheim, of which we highlight: Steve Taylor’s (1982) Durkheim and the Study of Suicide, Mike Gane’s (1988) On Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering, and W. Watts Miller’s (1998) edited collection On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and W. S. F. Pickering and Geoffrey Walford’s (2000) edited collection Durkheim’s Suicide: A Century of Research and Debate (the last two were published through the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies). There are also many recent and innovative edited collections addressing various dimensions of Durkheimian sociology; we note in particular: Philippe Besnard’s (1983) The Sociological Domain: Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology, Jeffrey C. Alexander’s (1988) Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, W. S. F. Pickering and Massimo Rosati’s (2008) Suffering and Evil: The Durkheimian Legacy, and S. Romi Mukherjee’s (2010) Durkheim and Violence, not to mention the lively (and online) scholarly journal, Durkheimian Studies/Études Durkheimiennes. Terry Godlove’s (2005) edited collection Teaching Durkheim provides a valuable resource for the more pedagogically oriented reader of Durkheim. Lastly, while we recommend reading Durkheim’s primary works in their entirety (as of any theorist), there are some valuable collections of abridged readings available. Of these, we recommend in particular: Kenneth Thompson’s (2004) Readings from Emile Durkheim (for which he has also written a useful supplementary text), Anthony Giddens’s (1972, 1996) two collections of readings, Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings and Durkheim on Politics and the State, Robert N. Bellah’s (1973) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, and Mark Traugott’s (1978) Emile Durkheim on Institutional Analysis. It is important to be aware that there are many other excellent works that we do not have the space to include here and that the majority of the texts above are limited to the English language.

Note 1 This listing of authors is purely alphabetical.

Bibliography Writings of Émile Durkheim 1884/2004. Durkheim’s Philosophy Lectures: Notes from the Lycée de Sens Course, 1883– 1884. Trans. Neil Gross and Robert Alun Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1885/1978. “Review of Albert Schaeffle, Bau und Leben des Sozialen Körpers: Erster Band.” Revue philosophique 19: 84–101. In Émile Durkheim on Institutional Analysis. Ed. and trans. Mark Traugott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 93–114. 1886/1975. “Herbert Spencer – Ecclesiastical Institutions: being Part VI of the Principles of Sociology.” In Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies. Ed. W. S. F. Pickering. Trans. Jacqueline Redding and W. S. F. Pickering. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 13–23.

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1887a. “La Philosophie dans les universités allemandes.” Revue internationale de l’enseignement 13: 313–38, 423–40. 1887b/1993. “La Science positive de la morale en Allemagne.” Revue philosophique 24: 33–58, 113–42, 275–84. In Ethics and the Sociology of Morals: Émile Durkheim. Trans. Robert T. Hall. New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 57–135. 1888. “Le Programme économique de M. Schaeffle.” Revue d’Économie Politique 2: 3–7. 1889/1978. “Review of Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.” In Emile Durkheim on Institutional Analysis. Ed. and trans. Mark Traugott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 115–22. 1892/1960. “Montesquieu’s Contribution to the Rise of Social Science.” Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology. Ed. Émile Durkheim. Trans. R. Manheim. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 1–64. 1893/1933. De la division du travail social: Étude sur l’Organisation des Sociétés Supérieurs. The Division of Labour in Society. Trans. W. D. Halls. London: Macmillan Company. 1893/2004. De la division du travail social: Étude sur l’Organisation des Sociétés Supérieurs. The Division of Labour in Society. Ed. K. Thompson. Trans. Margaret Thompson. Readings from Emile Durkheim. London: Routledge, pp. 23–47. 1895/1938. Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. The Rules of Sociological Method. Trans. George Simpson. New York: Free Press. 1895/1982. Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. Ed. Steven Lukes. Trans. W. D. Halls. London: Macmillan. 1895/2004. Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. The Rules of Sociological Method. Ed. K. Thompson. Trans. Margaret Thompson. Readings from Emile Durkheim. London: Routledge, pp. 53–79. 1897a/1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. Glencoe: Free Press of Glencoe. 1897b/1982. “Marxism and Sociology: Review of Antonio Labriola ‘Essais sur la conception materialiste de l’histoire’.” In The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. Ed. Steven Lukes. Trans. W. D. Halls. London: Macmillan, pp. 167–74. 1898a/1975. “Individualism and the Intellectuals.” In Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies. Ed. W. S. F. Pickering. Trans. S. and J. Lukes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 59–73. 1898b/1963. “La prohibition de l’inceste et ses origines.” “The Origins and Development of the Incest Taboo.” In Incest: The Nature and Origin of the Taboo. Ed. and trans. Edward Sagarin. New York: Lyle Stewart. 1899/1975. “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena.” In Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies. Ed. W. S. F. Pickering. Trans. Jacqueline Redding and W. S. F. Pickering. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 74–99. 1900/1973. “Sociology in France in the Nineteenth Century.” In Émile Durkheim: On Morality and Society. Ed. Robert N. Bellah. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 3–22. 1901/1973. “Two Laws of Penal Evolution.” Economy and Society 2(3): 285–308. 1903/1963 (with Marcel Mauss). Primitive Classification. Trans. Rodney Needham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1906/1974. “The Determination of Social Facts.” In Sociology and Philosophy. Ed. and trans. D. F. Pocock. New York: Free Press. 1908/1986. “A Debate over Civil Service Unions.” In Durkheim on Politics and the State. Ed. Anthony Giddens. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 145–53. 1909/1977. “Sociology and Social Sciences.” In Emile Durkheim on Institutional Analysis. Ed. and trans. Mark Traugott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 71–87.

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1912/1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen Fields. New York: Free Press. 1913/1980. “Review of Simon Deploige: Le Conflit de la morale et de la sociologie.” In Emile Durkheim: Contributions to L’Année Sociologique. Ed. Yash Nandan. Trans. J. French. New York: Free Press, pp. 159–61. 1915a. “Germany Above AlI”: German Mentality and the War. Translation of Qui a voulou la guerre?: Les origins de la guerre d’après les documents diplomatiques. Paris: Colin. 1915b. L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout: la mentalité allemande et la guerre. Paris: Colin. 1922/1956. Education and Sociology. Ed. and trans. S. D. Fox. Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe. 1925/1961. Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education. Ed. Everett K. Wilson. Trans. Everett K. Wilson and Herman Schurer. New York: Free Press. 1928/1962. Socialism. Trans. Charlotte Sattler. New York: Collier Books. 1938/1977. The Evolution of Educational Thought. Trans. Peter Collins. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1950/1957. Leçons de sociologie: physiques des moeurs et du droit. Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Trans. Cornelia Brookfield. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Further Reading Adams, Bert N. and R. A. Sydie (2001) Sociological Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. (1988) Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Philip Smith (eds.) (2005) The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allen, N. J., W. S. F. Pickering, and W. Watts Miller (eds.) (1998) On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: Routledge. Atkinson, John Maxwell (1978) Discovering Suicide. London: Macmillan. Bellah, Robert N. (1973) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Besnard, Philippe (1983) The Sociological Domain: Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Besnard, Philippe (2000) “The Fortunes of Durkheim’s Suicide: Reception and Legacy.” In W. S. F. Pickering and Geoffrey Walford (eds.), Durkheim’s Suicide: A Century of Research and Debate. New York: Routledge, pp. 97–125. Best, Shaun (2010) “Liquid Terrorism: Altruistic Fundamentalism in the Context of Liquid Modernity.” Sociology 44 (August): 678–94. Burns, Tom (1992) Erving Goffman. New York: Routledge. Cobban, Alfred (1965) A History of Modern France, Volume 2: 1799–1871. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Collins, Randall (1980) “Erving Goffman and the Development of Modern Social Theory.” In Jason Ditton (ed.), The View from Goffman. London: Macmillan. Cormack, Patricia (1996) “The Paradox of Durkheim’s Manifesto: Reconsidering The Rules of Sociological Method.” Theory & Society 25: 85–104. Coser, Lewis A. (1960) “Durkheim’s Conservatism and Its Implications for His Sociological Theory.” In Kurt Wolff (ed.), Essays on Sociology and Philosophy by Emile Durkheim et al. New York: Harper Torchbooks, pp. 211–32. Coser, Lewis A. (1977) Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, 2nd edn. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Derrida, Jacques (1972/1981) Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Jack (1967) The Social Meanings of Suicide. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Edwards, Stewart (1977) The Paris Commune 1871. New York: Quadrangle Books. Fenton, Steve (1984) Durkheim and Modern Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fournier, Marcel (2007) Émile Durkheim. Collection: Histoire de la pensée. Paris: Éditions Fayard. Friedland, Roger (2005) “Drag Kings at the Totem Ball: The Erotics of Collective Representations in Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud.” In Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 239–73. Furet, François (1988/1992) Revolutionary France, 1770–1880. Oxford: Blackwell. Gane, Mike (1988) On Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Routledge. Gane, Mike (ed.) (1992) The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss. London: Routledge. Gane, Mike (1993) Harmless Lovers? Gender, Theory and Personal Relationships. New York: Routledge. Garfinkel, Harold (2002) Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Giddens, Anthony (1972) Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, Anthony (1977) Studies in Social and Political Theory. London: Hutchinson. Giddens, Anthony (1978) Durkheim. Glasgow: Fontana. Giddens, Anthony (1996) Durkheim on Politics and the State. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gildea, Robert (2008) Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799–1914. London: Penguin. Godlove, Terry F., Jr. (2005) Teaching Durkheim. Oxford: AAR. Herrenschmidt, Olivier (1982) “Sacrifice: Symbolic or Effective?” In Michael Izard and Pierre Smith (eds.), Between Belief and Transgression: Structuralist Essays in Religion, History and Myth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 24–42. Hilbert, Richard A. (1991) “Ethnomethodological Recovery of Durkheim.” Sociological Perspectives 34(3): 337–57. Hilbert, Richard A. (1992) The Classical Roots of Ethnomethodology: Durkheim, Weber, and Garfinkel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hirst, Paul Q. (1975) Durkheim, Bernard and Epistemology. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hirst, Paul Q. (1994) Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hirst, Paul Q. and Penny Woolley (1982) Social Relations and Human Attributes. London: Tavistock. Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss (1898/1964) Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Trans. W. D. Halls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jessop, B. (2007) State Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jones, Robert Alun (1986) Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. London: Sage. Koch, H. W. (ed.) (1984) Origins of the First World War: Great Power Rivalry. London: Palgrave Macmillan. La Capra, Dominick (1972) Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Lamanna, Mary Ann (2001) Emile Durkheim on the Family. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lehman, Jennifer M. (1993) Deconstructing Durkheim: A Post-Post-Structuralist Critique. London: Routledge. Lehman, Jennifer M. (1994) Durkheim and Women. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lemert, Charles (2006) Durkheim’s Ghosts: Cultural Logics and Social Things. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lukes, Steven (1973) Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lukes, Steven (1982) “Introduction.” In Steven Lukes (ed.), Durkheim: The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. London: Macmillan, pp. 1–27. Marshall, Barbara (2002) “Snips and Snails and Theorists’ Tales: Classical Sociological Theory and the Making of Sex.” Journal of Classical Sociology 2(2): 135–55. Marx, Karl (1844/1970) Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl (1867/1965) Capital, vol. 1. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Meštrovic´, Stjepan, G. (1988) Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Mukherjee, S. Romi (2010) Durkheim and Violence: International Social Science Journal. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell/UNESCO. Nisbet, Robert (1952) “Conservatism and Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 18: 165–75. Nisbet, Robert (1965) Emile Durkheim. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Nisbet, Robert (1966) The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books. Nizan, Paul (1931/1971) The Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order. Trans. Paul Fittingoff. New York: Monthly Review Press. Pearce, Frank (2001) The Radical Durkheim, 2nd edn. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Pearce, Frank (2003) “The Collège de sociologie.” Special issue of Economy and Society. Ed. Frank Pearce. Economy and Society 32: 1–154. Pearce, Frank (2006) “A Modest Companion to Durkheim: A Review of Jeffrey Alexander and Phil Smith The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim.” Durkheimian Studies/Études Durkheimiennes 12: 149–60. Pearce, Frank (2010) “Obligatory Sacrifice and Imperial Projects.” In William Chambliss, Raymond Michalowski, and Ronald Kramer (eds.), State Crime in the Global Age. Uffculme: Willan Publishing, pp. 45–66. Pickering, W. S. F. (2000) “Reflections on the Death of Emile Durkheim.” In W. S. F. Pickering and Geoffrey Walford (eds.), Durkheim’s Suicide: A Century of Research and Debate. New York: Routledge, pp. 11–27. Pickering, W. S. F. and Massimo Rosati (2008) Suffering and Evil: The Durkheimian Legacy. New York: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books. Pickering, W. S. F. and Geoffrey Walford (eds.) Durkheim’s Suicide: A Century of Research and Debate. New York: Routledge. Pope, Whitney (1976) Durkheim’s Suicide: A Classic Analyzed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ramp, William (2008) “Durkheim Redux.” Journal of Classical Sociology 8(2): 147–57. Rawls, Anne (2004) Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richman, Michèle (2002) Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Richter, Melvin (1960) “Durkheim’s Politics and Political Theory.” In Kurt Wolff (ed.), Essays on Sociology and Philosophy by Emile Durkheim et al. New York: Harper Torchbooks, pp. 170–210. Ritzer, George (2000) Classical Sociological Theory, 3rd edn. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Rueschermeyer, D., E. H. Stephens, and J. D. Stevens (1992) Capitalist Development and Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Dorothy E. (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Stedman Jones, Susan (2001) Durkheim Reconsidered. Cambridge: Polity Press. Strenski, Ivan (2006) The New Durkheim. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sydie, Rosalind A. (1994a) Natural Women, Cultured Men: A Feminist Perspective on Sociological Theory. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Sydie, Rosalind A. (1994b) “Sex and the Sociological Fathers.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 31: 117–38. Taylor, Steve (1982) Durkheim and the Study of Suicide. London: Hutchinson. Thompson, Kenneth (1982) Emile Durkheim. London: Routledge. Thompson, Kenneth (2004) Readings from Emile Durkheim. London: Routledge. Tiryakian, Edward (2009) For Durkheim: Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Tönnies, Ferdinand (1887/1955) Community and Association: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Trans. C. P. Loomis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Traugott, Mark (1978) Emile Durkheim on Institutional Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman JUDITH A. ALLEN

INTRODUCTION Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was the most intellectually significant Western feminist theorist of the 1890–1920 period. This chapter examines the nature and limits of Gilman’s attempt to integrate a reform Darwinist feminist account of sexual oppression into modern social theory. Her most important theoretical work was Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898), translated into seven languages and in its ninth edition by 1920. Gilman held that heterosexuality had become the means by which men subjected women through an economic dependency naturalized as the outcome of female sexual functions. Human societies perverted evolution, exaggerating sex differences in cultural patterns later called “gender,” but which she called “androcentric culture” (1892b, 1911a). These patterns retarded women by confining them to “sex work.” Sexual relations had to transform for women to contribute to the human race’s progress – which she called “race work.” However warranted, though, the more desirable “human” world would not inevitably supersede an androcentric one (1911c). It would take the political struggle that came to be called “feminism” during her lifetime. Dubbed “the Dean of American feminists” by admirers and “the high priestess of feminism” by detractors, her theories led her into the era’s key feminist campaigns: woman suffrage from the 1880s, the abolition of regulated prostitution from the 1890s, and legalized birth control from the 1920s (Bureau of Vocation Information 1915: 46–67; unidentified newscutting, 1916). One reviewer called her “the ablest woman in the United States …. Whatever she says is bound to be listened to …. She is the Bernard Shaw of America; or should we say that Bernard Shaw is the Charlotte Perkins Gilman of England?” (unidentified newscutting, 1914). Her international The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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conferences and lecture tours secured her theories’ currency and influence upon contemporaries. She shared international socialist platforms with August Bebel, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Edward Carpenter, and addressed suffragette meetings with the Pankhursts (Knight 1994, vol. 1: 603, 605, 609, 611; Allen 1994: 221–2). Activists worldwide invited her to visit, extolling the power of her lectures on sexual subordination (Allen 2009: 141–4). Alongside international newspaper reviews and accounts, Gilman garnered immense press attention in the United States. At its most extensive in 1911–15, when through public lectures her theories received coverage every couple of weeks, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger lamented that Gilman had “too much publicity” (New York Times 1914). Gilman had an immense impact that was, arguably, singular among historical feminists. Journalists compared her with South African feminist, Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) – whom Gilman revered – and the Swede, Ellen Key (1849–1926) – whom Gilman deplored. Their accord and disputes defined “feminism” from its late nineteenth-century French origins to its twentieth-century Anglophone currency (Cott 1987: 1–16). An outline of Gilman’s theoretical works, their sequence from the early 1890s to the 1920s, is the chief task of this chapter. Biographical elements significant in Gilman’s development as a feminist theorist provide a brief prelude, along with features of the social and intellectual context of her work. A final task is a scrutiny of responses to her theories by both contemporaries and later assessors.

BIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS AND EVENTS Three biographical facts influenced Gilman’s intellectual development. First, her English and colonial family undertook public service, intellectual erudition, and political dissent as part of their strong regional identities. Second, she was raised in an impoverished single-parent home. Third, she spent her early adulthood in a disastrous first marriage to an impecunious artist. Gilman’s forebears were seventeenthcentury New England colonists. Her mother Mary Fitch Westcott’s paternal ancestors were descended from Rhode Island’s founding dissenters from Puritan New England theocracy, originating in fourteenth-century Devonshire in England, while her mother’s maternal family, the Fitches, were descended from Norman aristocrats settled in eleventh-century Essex until, in 1640, James Fitch departed for Connecticut. Her father’s forebears too were English: her grandfather, Thomas Perkins, was descended from founding Warwickshire-born Connecticut colonist, John Perkins (1583–1654), from an originally thirteenth-century Norman family. Finally, his mother, Mary Foote Beecher, was a sibling of the famous Beecher clan of writers, abolitionists, and adult suffragists, originating from Kent through their ancestor, Connecticut colonist John Beecher (1594–1637). Gilman was strongly influenced by her Beecher relatives. Watching her great aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), inspired Gilman to paint – training that secured her paid work as an advertising postcard designer (Davis 2010: 13, 21; Knight 2006b). Stowe’s brother, Gilman’s great uncle Henry Ward Beecher, was the popular Brooklyn preacher and abolitionist suffragist engulfed in an infamous 1874 adultery scandal with a parishioner. Her sister Isabella Beecher Hooker was a

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noted woman suffragist and author of women’s rights treatises, while their father, called the century’s greatest orator, was Reverend Lyman Beecher (White 2003). Born in Hartford, Connecticut, homogenous ethnic, religious, and regional characteristics led to Gilman’s New Englander identity, unaltered by residences elsewhere. She embraced the family cause of social reform in wishing to improve the world (Davis 2010: 12). Soon, however, she found that her “world service” mission challenged gender expectations of her class, race, and region, as well as immediate family circumstances. Critically challenging Gilman’s life aspirations was a catastrophe of her childhood. Her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, deserted his wife Mary and two surviving (of four) children, Thomas Adie and Charlotte Anna Perkins, following the 1866 death of Gilman’s infant sister and repeated medical advice that further births risked Mrs. Perkins’s health and life. The high odds of conception ended Perkins’s conjugal rights – and he would not husband without conjugality. With rejection of his wife, Perkins equally would not father. His desertion revealed the contingency of women’s and children’s status positions in resource distribution. Any “cultural capital” associated with his distinguished family proved nontransferable and attenuated by gender dynamics. A Yale drop-out and literary dilettante, Perkins became a librarian first in Boston, then in San Francisco as head of the Public Library in the 1880s. Once gone, his wife and children lost the Beecher cultural mantle (Davis 2010: 29–30). Support of their mother fell to Gilman, hardships here magnified by gender, class, and race norms. Gilman was barred from higher education and remunerative labor available to her brother Thomas. Though somehow funds were secured to send Thomas to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he promptly failed to thrive, no largesse facilitated his clever sister’s higher education (Veeder 1988: 43). Eventually, she had two years’ art tuition at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1870s, hardly comparable with Thomas’s opportunities. His settlement in Utah, generating three marriages (1882, 1890, and 1912) and families, underlined Gilman’s responsibility for their mother. Through art school, she befriended Grace Ellery Channing from Pasadena (who remained important throughout her life) and her first husband, artist Charles Walter Stetson. The third factor in the genesis of Gilman’s feminist social theory was her decade of reluctant marriage to Stetson. They battled constantly over her Beecher “world service” mission. Stetson embraced Bohemian “hydraulic” discourses of male sexuality: constant coitus was necessary to prevent unfulfilled erotic desires from obstructing artistic creativity. Gilman’s immediate pregnancy exacerbated her tensions over confinement to housework and childcare – her only child, Katharine, was born in March 1885. Stetson’s diaries documented her nightly “weeping fits” and sexual withdrawal, though he continued to insist on his conjugal rights (Hill 1988: 279–86). They fought over his regular use of prostitute models for lascivious nudes (Knight 1994, vol. 1: 349). He reneged on his promise to cease painting if it was unprofitable, impelling loans for basic utilities. Father, brother, now husband: the male breadwinners closest to Gilman all failed. Yet unpaid domestic duties and social customs barred her from paid work. Most aggravatingly, Stetson ridiculed her contact with local women’s rights reformers and her reading on “the Woman Question.” Her disappointment over the defeat of an April 1887 Rhode Island woman suffrage

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referendum and her husband’s misogynist dismissal of “the cause” coincided exactly with her “breakdown” and repair to Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell’s Philadelphia clinic 11 days later for “the rest cure” – fictionalized in her famous 1892 story, “The Yellow Wall-paper” (Allen 2009: 37–39; Knight 1994, vol. 1: 349; 2006a: 82–4; Gilman 1892a). Though returning after a month, improved, she soon relapsed. For another year they battled. Stetson reasserted conjugal rights, lest she neglect maternal, domestic, and wifely duties. His diaries detail her lack of desire for him, a fact which he claimed justified use of prostitutes or a mistress. Yet, she had a pregnancy scare, suggesting that he ignored her erotic withdrawal and insisted on his conjugal rights – later feminists theorizing such behavior as “marital rape.” Meanwhile, Gilman declared herself unfit for marriage, regaling him with talk of “pistols and chloroform” at bedtime (Hill 1988: 342). In October 1888, Grace Channing helped her liquidate an inheritance from an aunt, and Gilman moved her mother and daughter with her to Pasadena (Lane 1991: 25). Stetson followed and spent 1889 seeking reconciliation. Finally, he courted and became engaged to Channing, filing for divorce in 1890, finally secured in 1894 (Davis 2010: 113–17). Thereafter, Gilman had new relationships entailing Nationalist and other political connections, notably with San Francisco Call journalist and “loving friend” Adeline E. Knapp. Knapp paid for Gilman (with her daughter and mother) to live with her in Oakland in 1891. Indebtedness ensured that once again Gilman exchanged domestic services in return. Painfully, she realized that a loving relationship with a woman might be just as oppressive as marriage if it entailed economic dependence; heterosexuality might not be inherently causal in women’s domestic subjugation (Gilman 1935a: 53–4; Allen 2009: 54). By late 1892, their relationship had soured, and their co-residence ended in mid1893, a few months after Gilman’s mother’s death (Gilman 1935a: 143–4). Mary Perkins’s passing also ended childcare for Gilman’s daughter Katharine. An indebted Gilman could not simultaneously do paid work and care for “Kate,” dramatized by a series of childhood accidents while Gilman was away at work (Knight 1994, vol. 1: 570–1, 581; Allen 2009: 59–60). Sadly defeated, Gilman sent Kate back to her soon-remarried father. Thereafter, relations with Knapp further deteriorated, undermining Gilman’s editorial efforts (Knight 1994, vol. 1: 597; Allen 2009: 61). Finally, Gilman left San Francisco for the itinerant lecturer’s life, accepting Chicago Progressive settlement house founder Jane Addams’s invitation to live at Hull House (Allen 2009: 63). A legal inquiry re-united her with her first cousin George Houghton Gilman, who became her warm companion, friend, and eventually lover (Hill 1997: 356–7). From 1897, he engaged her intellectually, contributing critically and intimately to Gilman’s greatest work, Women and Economics (1898). Unless she could devise ways for women to “work and love too,” as men did, that is without being compelled to marry to survive, she would not marry him (Allen 2009: 65–70). That she did so in 1900 marked their creation of a partnership vastly different from her previous marriage, with three decades of productive writing, editing, and lecturing. When her spouse died from a sudden stroke in 1934, Gilman had already been diagnosed with breast cancer. She finalized her affairs, and departed for Pasadena for a last time with daughter, grandchildren, and Grace Channing Stetson. Then she committed suicide in August, 1935 (Davis 2010: 395).

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SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT Though these biographical elements help to situate Gilman’s emergence as a feminist social theorist, others with comparable experiences did not theorize the historicity of women’s subjection in its specifically sexual dimensions. Gilman made her feminist contribution to modern social theory during a golden age of congenial intellectual interrogations. Sex and sexed differences permeated creative writing, scholarship, and reform advocacy in ruminations upon sex relations, the future of marriage, and “the Woman Question.” Critics like John Stuart Mill, Henrik Ibsen, and Frederich Engels proposed alternatives, while others claimed the present patriarchal status quo was an outcome of human progress (Coward 1983: 20, 31–5, 38–42, 68–9). Moreover, the advent of the Progressive Era heightened the longer tradition of evening public lectures as a source of urban news, adult education, and entertainment, with popular lecturers lauded as celebrities. A diverse array of newspapers and periodicals critically framed Gilman’s context. The editing, reviewing, and circulation of cultural criticism were remarkably vigorous, further facilitating her theorizing of sexual oppression at the moment of the Anglophone birth of “feminism” as an explicit analytical category. This coincided with reform campaigns targeting political corruption, slum clearance, prostitution, venereal disease, adulterated food, unrestricted immigration, and race riots (McGerr 2003). At 17 Gilman secured a scholarly reading list from her estranged librarian father to redress her lack of university education. He recommended works on the origins of patriarchal societies, primitive marriage, and sexual customs, framed in dialogue with Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) (Allen 2009: 380n.). Many intellectuals believed that male supremacy was a social and historical development rather than a “natural” fact. Ancient mothers ruled the world with cultures centered on the needs of children, creating homes, furnishings, agriculture, and all known industries. Men’s transitory relationships to mothers entailed periodic sexual access only for reproduction, a feature which led some scholars to characterize these earlier societies as linear predecessors of patriarchy. Elizabeth Cady Stanton – a feminist forebear often compared with Gilman – appropriated these matriarchal theories toward feminist ends. Ancient men, improvident hunters and warriors, grew “jealous of women’s comfortable home life,” gradually assuming dominance, imposing “permanency” in “sex relations” instead of female-chosen periodicity (Stanton 1891: 219–24). Newly forming social sciences convinced Gilman that, far from natural or Godgiven, female economic dependency monstrously hijacked evolutionary patterns (Gilman 1898: 134, 136, 138). She became a reform Darwinist, along with many peer intellectuals, while retaining Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, which underlay much philanthropy and optimistic Reconstruction and Progressive Era period social policy. Gilman soon applied reform Darwinism to sexual issues, concluding that erotic life had not always oppressed women. Her personal problems proceeded from provisional historical developments. Corrective intervention was both possible and necessary for human progress. Negative consequences of androcentric conditions could end via sound strategies and innovative

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practices (Gilman 1911a: 41, 41, 57). Hence, her indignant 1898 account of sexual relations and women’s humiliating degradation – that is, Women and Economics – derives dynamism from its reform Darwinist intellectual framework. Partly assisted by the work of a key founder of academic sociology – Lester Frank Ward (1841– 1913) – she devised an unrivaled articulation of the problem of women’s oppression, propelling her toward a “world service” defined by intellectual labor of the ethicist and sociologist (Ward 1883, 1888; Palmeri 1983). If many scholars speculated about earlier female rule, no predecessor matched Ward’s multidisciplinary contributions. His “gynaecocentric theory” traced the rise of androcentric culture. In treating male sex selection as a given of human evolution, Darwin had left this difference between humans and other mammals unexplained. Conversely, Ward held that women’s selection of stronger, larger, smarter, and more handsome mates led to human encephalization and rationality. Males sought constant rather than periodic coitus in line with their narrow evolutionary function as fertilizers. Motivated by their belated discovery of paternity, they subjugated women through rape and violence, installing male sex selection, with all its dire consequences (Ward 1883: 608–14, 651–63; 1903: 300). Ward’s bold theory of human society as originally mother-ruled – “gynaecocentric” – ended by ancient men collectively and forcibly establishing androcracy – man-centered culture with male-initiated sex selection – hinged on sex differences evolving to the point of mismatch. The male’s species function installed constant rather than periodic sexual desire. Mismatch between the sexes – one governed by sexual periodicity, the other by constant and indiscriminate desire – set the conditions for prostitution “naturally” (Allen 2004). Women’s loss of the “scepter” of sex selection modified female menstruation and ovulation, their enslavement also unleashing “sexuosocial” inequities in duties, education, and rights, while their impractical, embellished dress gratified their sexual masters. Assigned domestic and the lowest-status non-domestic labor refused by men, women suffered inequality in education and career opportunities, everywhere “destitute of both intellectual energy and aspiration.” Men heightened women’s dependence through the rape and violence initially vouchsafing male sex selection, along with polygamy, marriage, prostitution, and other forms of degradation. This seizure of sex selection was a victory “for male indulgence” (Ward 1883: 607–8). Ward advocated a Progressive future succeeding androcracy, by ending women’s subordination via a sex equality that would establish monogamy based on mutual sex selection (Ward 1903). Hence, he deplored sex divisions in industry, leisure, and politics, urging sexual integration in all spheres to reduce solely sexual definition of women. Equal rights and responsibilities would follow, with an end to the fiction that women required men’s protection (Allen 2004). Ward anchored the subjection of women within his analysis of social organization and evolution. The most popular version of his “gynaecocentric theory” was a short 1888 article, while the most elaborate academic version was chapter XIV of his opus, Pure Sociology (Ward 1888, 1903). Though an inspired Gilman initially embraced his theory, by 1900 she qualified key elements. She disputed his evolutionary claims for rape and sexual violence – its implicit corollary, a victimized womanhood – and his neglect of economic motives in generating androcentric culture (Gilman 1908a: 24).

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THEORIES: COMPONENTS AND SEQUENCE OF DEVELOPMENT Gilman’s standing as the preeminent transatlantic early twentieth-century feminist social theorist rests on the range and breadth of her contributions. She identified women as a sexed group, subordinated by, and in the interests of, the men of their cultures, providing a theoretical account of the origins and causes of women’s “sex subjection” – today more typically called “oppression.” By undertaking specific analysis and “thick description” of the operation of this “sex subjection,” she criticized its usual justifications, while also devising reform proposals. Her 1935 article, “The Right to Die,” was the last of nearly 1,500 nonfiction articles and chapters she had published since 1883, most of them stressing economic independence and emancipation from domestic work, in order to end the intimate and erotic dimensions of “sex slavery” (Gilman 1935b; Scharnhorst 1985a). Gilman grounded her analysis in evolutionary and historical analyses of sexuality and women’s subjection. Evolutionary biology, archaeology, and ancient human history convinced her of the historicity of sex differentiation. While its original purpose was for species diversification, excessive male dominance now harmed human prospects. Seeking to ameliorate women’s subjection, she held that humans – the only species capable of altering evolution culturally – erred in maintaining women’s economic dependence on men in sex subjection long after any “race” benefits (Gilman 1898: 45–6, 54–9). With hypothesized eras when “mothers ruled the world” and an explanation of later male domination and female subordination, she built a platform from which to denounce androcentric culture and urge the construction of a “human world.” Thus, she sought “a biological basis” for fighting women’s subjection. Distinct from predecessors, she interjected feminist theory into political culture by relating sexuality and sexual relations to current social science debates, greatly influencing her peers (Palmeri 1983; Egan 1987; Magner 1992). Accounting for origins of sexual relations was a critical axis of her theory. Her interrogations were historical and evolutionary, portraying human life as embroiled in transformation and improvement. History proved vital to her efforts to challenge – preferably end – male dominance over women. She located women’s subjection in “the sex relation itself.” Were that relation unresponsive to changed environments then hers would have been a counsel to despair. To understand the social, psychic, demographic, and thus evolutionary consequences of sexuality, she explored the historicity of shifts in sexual patterns. She sketched a history of sex itself within human epochs. Using Ward’s terms, “gynaecocentric” – womancentered – and “androcentric” – man-centered – she situated these characterizations within the evolutionary past, seeking to free women to achieve a “human” world (Gilman 1908c, 1924). Men’s constant demand for coitus as the “human” norm overturned millennia of female-initiated and reproduction-related sexual periodicity among Homo sapiens. It grounded androcentric culture, women’s ancient enslavement ending their “humanness” and economic independence. Her sex was defeated by “sexuo-economic” causes. Gilman here deployed Darwinist theories of sex selection to mandate women’s renegotiation of conjugal sexuality, reduce unreciprocated sexual demands, and, thereby, institute “voluntary motherhood” (Gilman 1898: 7, 25–8).

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In this way, she grafted reform Darwinist tenets onto the prevailing analysis of sex subjection inherited from earlier forebears like Margaret Fuller and John Stuart Mill. She modified their liberal justice and equality case for ending women’s subjection to men, since prevailing Darwinian discourses made claims for women’s equality unpersuasive if assumed to mean sameness in capacities. Indeed, many authorities now conceptualized women as being as different from men as to be a separate species. Gilman’s approach required no claims of present female equality or sameness. Indeed, hers was a theoretical narrative of species disaster, a wholesale volitional stunting of the human race through the retarding of women. She specifically theorized female inequality, explaining its contingent genealogy with its outcome in toxic androcentric femininity. She diagnosed women’s oppression with rich descriptions of androcentric cultures’ operations with their abundant “masculist products,” including prostitution, misogynist world religions, and warfare (Gilman 1898, 1903, 1911a, 1923a, 1925). Most particularly, her theory of human sexual evolution repudiated squarely male conjugal rights, prostitution, and sexual slavery. Moreover, her focus on work matched her socialist commitments (Gilman 1904a, 1910b, 1911b, 1925). Gilman contrasted “sex work” – labor ascribed by sexual characteristics and performed usually by women for men – and “race work” – work derived from common human characteristics and benefiting the human race collectively (Gilman 1898: 37–8; 1929b: 116). Indeed, socialists’ backwardness on the “Woman Question” disappointed her and led her to expound, instead, a revolutionary concept of work as originally “maternal” and, thereby, reviled within androcentric culture (Gilman 1904a). Ultimately, though, Gilman insisted that the damage was correctable because sex subjection was neither necessary nor inherent. It was amenable to beneficial alteration. Gilman’s canonic feminist contribution to feminist social theory was her distinctive reform Darwinist feminist framework, retained even after its foundations were challenged by new developments in late Progressive Era science (Gilman 1929a, 1931, 1932). Lecturing, editing, writing, and publishing formed her core activities as a theorist. Well-traveled nationwide, particularly in the West, Midwest, and the South, she often presented up to 50 lectures a year. Moreover, on European trips in 1896, 1899, 1904, 1905, and 1913, she addressed suffragists, socialists, and other reform audiences. She worked as an editor episodically – in 1886–7, 1894–5, 1897–8, and 1904 – until 1909–16, when she edited the Forerunner (Allen 2003). Four phases of theoretical development and publication marked Gilman’s contributions. The first was 1886–96 when she attempted to reconcile then prevailing and primarily Anglophone versions of “the Woman Question” and other politicophilosophical positions, especially reform Darwinism, and socialism. The second phase spanned 1897 to 1910, when she developed her distinctive sexuo-economic analysis in Women and Economics (1898) and elaborated its implications in subsequent texts. In a third phase from 1911 until 1922 she passionately engaged with the revitalized woman suffrage movement, inspiring her distinctive focus on the categories of “feminism,” “masculism,” and “androcentrism,” theoretical efforts framed by suffragette militancy and World War I. Her final period of social theory from 1923 until her death in 1935 exposed the limits of her reform Darwinist intellectual framework, as she debated differences with younger, sexually-libertarian feminists,

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criticized androcentrism in world religions, offered feminist arguments for restricted immigration, and advocated birth control in tandem with Margaret Sanger. Her 1886–96 work attempted to integrate utopian socialism and both reform Darwinism and the combined feminist legacies of texts by liberals like John Stuart Mill, abolitionists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and colonial writers like Olive Schreiner (Mill 1869; Schreiner 1890; Stanton 1891). Such integration led her to advocate reform (Allen 2009: 242). Hence, her first writing tackled prostitution, the double standard of sexual morality, dress reform, sexual enslavement, and women’s economic confinement through marriage, while fiction pieces explored depression, desire, infanticide, madness, and sex evolution (Gilman 1890, 1891, 1892a, 1893). Gilman denounced the poisonous impact of economic marginality and dependence for adult women. If not of itself the origin of women’s oppression, heterosexuality had become its seemingly universal, yet entirely historical framework, embodied in economic contracts like marriage and prostitution. This was a crucial refinement. The same dynamics occurred whenever one creature got its food, its means of living, from another. Social and psychical subordination followed the material facts. In the second phase of Gilman’s theoretical development (1897–1910) she coined the term “sexuo-economic” to convey the links she saw between the erotic and the material (Gilman 1898). She outlined this theoretical framework in Women and Economics, and thereafter elaborated particular elements of her analysis in subsequent writings that became her books, Concerning Children (1900), The Home, Its Work and Influence (1903), and Human Work (1904a). Here she laid out her theory of work as “maternal” in its origins, reviled in male supremacist societies because associated with the original slavery, that of women (Gilman 1904a: 72, 207, 214, 64, 281). Yet men became workers, forcibly ejecting women and appropriating their industries while securing female sexual slavery by ensuring women’s dependence and captivity. Paradoxically, this led to male species advance and “the maternalizing of man” by being forced to feed those he had made his dependents. Unpaid home cooking required six hours’ labor daily by women to provide three family meals, most doing so without the assistance of servants (Gilman 1898: 127; 1903: 118). Woman suffrage was to be a tributary into the “human” qualities needed to counter women’s androcentric oversexualization. First confronting organized antisuffragism back in the failed spring 1887 Providence referendum, Gilman insisted that the vote was a crucial tool for key reforms (Gilman 1897, 1904b, 1908b, 1910b). She identified anti-suffragism as an effort to block the development of “human” qualities in women and their entering into social as well as private sexual relations, which (in an unpublished 1908 essay) she contended was the defining objective of “feminism,” a new word in the political lexicon (Gilman 1908d). In an important novel of this second phase, she imagined a world in which women were unshackled from primitive private “home industries.” What Diantha Did (1910a) was the story of a woman’s experiment in the professionalization of cooking for communities, disrupting cultural synonymy of “wife” and “cook.” Other writings from this period addressed town planning and worlds in which women and men both “worked and loved too,” by housework, childcare, and home-maintenance becoming degendered, professionalized, and well-paid careers (Allen 2009: 214–20). Gilman began her 28-page monthly journal the Forerunner in late 1909. It comprised themed articles, serialized treatises, poetry, and regular critical columns like

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“Comment and Review,” often addressing reform issues. Elsewhere, for instance in the American Journal of Sociology, she published a critique of unmodified Social Darwinism and an article urging the provision of higher education, training, and work for segregated African Americans in the South (Gilman 1907, 1908a). The third period of Gilman’s theoretical development, stretching from 1911 until 1922, received immense stimulus from the revival of the woman suffrage movement, nationally and internationally, as the signature feminist demand of the era. Gilman became one of the key faces and voices of that campaign in New York and nationwide, the witty and sarcastic adversary of anti-suffrage forces. Indeed, Gilman reached the peak of her public currency through a widely reported public lecture series on feminism, and one on its enemies in the cultural phenomenon of “masculism.” She coined this latter term to characterize misogyny erupting not only around the suffrage issue, but in the broader cultural discourses surrounding World War I and its aftermath (Gilman 1912a, 1912b, 1913d, 1914b, 1914c, 1914d, 1914e, 1914f, 1915a, 1915b). During this third period, her longstanding concern about prostitution reached new intensity in tandem with the various state inquiries into prostitution initiated nationwide, just before and during the war. With a focus on male demand rather than the usual focus on supply and regulation, she sketched a vision of alternatives to prevailing patterns of prostitution and sexual relations by urging the ending of cultural conditions facilitating male demand. Its cessation was a precondition for a world with a “natural” mutually-initiated erotic life. She would not allow analysis of prostitution to be displaced onto the dynamics of class, ethnicity, or race. For her, it was always and finally about sex, with male erotic dominance exceeding any distant natural boundaries to the detriment of evolution (Allen 1999). Gilman also exhibited the optimism of other feminists of her era in that she saw nothing inherent, or inevitable, about existing sex relations. Therefore, she sought to intervene against prostitution and the eugenic outcomes of male sex demand and female economic dependency underlying the “social evil.” She believed that prostitution could end within three generations (Allen 2009: 262). Another novel, Moving the Mountain, in 1911, advanced her most detailed exposition of an imagined future. It was set in a post-socialist 1940 New York, exemplifying the enactment of urgently needed changes in sexual, domestic, social, economic, and civic relations, all anchored by women’s citizenship as the “great cultural awakening” underpinning narrative momentum. Gilman stressed that such changes were already in train, with women already embracing “race work” (Gilman 1911c). The 1911–16 furor over “teacher mothers” dramatized her claim. Despite courts declaring New York City school board efforts to ban married female teachers unconstitutional, the board’s officials fired any married teacher who became pregnant. Gilman ridiculed such masculist attempts to resist women pushing toward industrial specialization and away from general home trades, “one of the largest and most vitally important movements of the day.” She declared that women were never going back: “They have definitely come out” (Gilman 1914a: 26–7). Ultimately, the “teacher mother” episode was the struggle for maternity leave – still not universally recognized as a right in American workplaces, and decidedly meager compared with other industrialized nations. Gilman held that, politically, mothers formed a collision with patriarchy that working spinsters, widows, and “girls” did not. Since most women

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were wives and mothers at some point, until “mothers” earn their livings, “women will not” (Gilman 1916a: 65–6). The otherwise unfriendly New York Times praised Gilman’s principal nonfiction treatise of this third period, The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911), as a “remarkable book and her best work ever” (New York Times 1911). Her dual or two-volume utopian novel(s), serialized in the Forerunner, “Herland” (1915c) and “With Her in Ourland” (1916b), offered a stinging feminist critique of wartime American culture and politics. Gilman attended international suffrage conferences and during this period came under sustained attack as the public face and voice of feminism, “the High Priestess” as she came to be called in the context of increasing public contention over the newly publicized category “feminism.” Meanwhile, she published further serialized treatises on subjects such as women’s absurd dress, social ethics, and war, while shorter articles addressed her criticisms of lynching and race riots, unfair trusts and monopolies, and food adulteration (Gilman 1914g, 1915d, 1916c). Finally, the fourth period of Gilman’s theoretical development from 1923 until her death in 1935 entailed her unsuccessful efforts to reconcile her longstanding reform Darwinist feminism with the discrediting of Darwinian theories of sexual selection, alongside competing theories of human subjectivity, including the psychoanalysis and sexology of the Jazz Age. The generation gap between herself and younger feminists forcefully erupted in debates over birth control, sexual experimentation, Freud’s theories, and the flapper (Gilman 1924, 1929b, 1931, 1935a). Meanwhile, war had altered her earlier Lamarckian optimism about the transmission of culturally-acquired traits. She now held that the “fittest” would not necessarily survive against competition from the overly fertile. And she lent to debates on immigration restriction a feminist twang: peoples with cultures more patriarchal than America threatened women’s gains. Just as reformers secured a vision for girls’ lives beyond domestic drudgery, unassimilated ethnic groups’ “backward” concepts of gender threatened fragile consensus for fostering modernized “human” women (Gilman 1923b). Her curiously partial autobiography (1935a) and unpublished text on ethics (1930) also explored some of these themes. Her major treatise of this final period, however, was her favorably reviewed interwar text, His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers (1923a). Gilman contended that androcentric world religions universalized primitive male experiences and marginalized women. Thereby they promoted female dependence and sexual slavery, while excluding feminine perspectives from world theologies and women from most ecclesiastical hierarchies. Centered on afterlife, religions deprecated life on earth, yet obsessively regulated female sexualities. Theologies extolled self-expression, dominance, and combat, casting the deity in a deadly struggle with an opposing nemesis – a devil or evil spirit – emphasizing death and tests of faith in the pursuit of virtue or enlightenment among worshipers (Gilman 1923a: 8, 48). The longevity of women’s suppression here ensured that “ultra-masculinity has interfered with normal social evolution” – her interrogation here less theological than ethical. Indeed, Christian Europe had proved just as warlike as previously “heathen” cultures, its chattel slavery modeled on the first slavery – woman slavery. Further, Christian America maintained slavery “after every other advanced people had outgrown it,” as well as

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savagely perpetrating “the slow torturing to death of helpless prisoners, which we cover by the term ‘lynching’ ” (Gilman 1923a: 297–8). Gilman was a late convert to birth control. She had objected less to women’s chosen birth spacing or prevention than to prospects of birth control becoming a masculist tool defining women’s sexuality solely in androcentric terms, noting women’s “weary disillusionment” with “an unromantic dutiful submission to an unromantic physical indulgence” (Gilman 1922: 32). Though, by 1927, she applauded Sanger’s demands “on strictly feminist grounds,” this was resignation before a sexological reality that she would have preferred to be otherwise (Gilman 1927: 623). Recent coital frequency studies disclosed average rates of coitus that would challenge women seeking just two or three children – couples in their twenties reported three to four times a week, two to three times in the thirties, and one to two in the forties (Dickinson & Beam 1931 57, 80, 106, 148, 174). Wives risked either constant unplanned offspring or the “loathsome” practice of abortion, deplored by her fictional Herlanders confronting “Ourland” in 1916 (Allen 2009: 320). Still, feminist birth control discourses seemed individualistic and inattentive to related matters of eugenics, overpopulation, and world peace. Just as she had urged a broader, multi-focused woman suffrage movement in the 1900s and “larger feminism” in the 1910s, now in the 1920s Gilman advocated a “larger” birth control movement. Birth control was damage control and the particular obligation of the poorest and least fit of parents, requiring repeal of legal and religious obstacles (Gilman 1927: 627–9; 1932: 108–9).

CONTEMPORARY AND SUBSEQUENT IMPACT ON SOCIAL THEORY Carrie Chapman Catt, former leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, asserted that Gilman had “revolutionized” the place of women in America (New York Post 1922). The press covered Gilman’s discourses more fully – critically and otherwise – than those of any feminist theorist to date. British newspapers, too, reviewed her favorably and praised her “exceptional ability” and “great courage,” while extolling her Women and Economics for its “originality of concept and brilliancy of exposition.” Hailed as an instant classic, reviewers held that it surpassed all works on “the Woman Question” since John Stuart Mill’s magisterial The Subjection of Women (1869) (Scharnhorst 1985b: 55–6). Her books reached thousands; her ideas were appropriated by many others – from socialist novelist Upton Sinclair to journalists like Bessie Beatty (Allen 2009: 179–80, 285–6). Contemporaries treated her as feminism’s chief theorist. As such, those invested in other political movements and intellectual positions often criticized her increasingly visible feminist contributions. Scholarly discussion of feminism from the Progressive Era compared Gilman with others such as Olive Schreiner and Ellen Key – eventually, she became testily embroiled with the latter in debates over the definition and characterizing of “feminism.” Allegedly an anti-suffragist who condemned Anglophone feminist aspirations for economic independence, Key dubbed Gilman an “amaternalist” feminist, instead extolling sex differences, free love, and above all state endowment of individual motherhood irrespective of marital status (Key 1912). Gilman saw all this as regression, inimical to half a century’s efforts to foster women’s “human” qualities (Gilman 1913a, 1913c). Initially, Gilman refused

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the label feminist, because if it included figures like Key, then it clearly did not capture her own position. Briefly, she attempted the typology “feminine feminist” versus “humanist” feminist, but this achieved no currency and, similarly, Gilman’s efforts to call herself a “humanist” rather than a feminist came to nothing (Gilman 1914b: 45). For her peers, she remained feminism’s personification (Current Opinion 1913, 1914). Her lectures generated responses by other lecturers, writers, and reviewers, as well as more serious studies and critiques of feminism (Current Literature 1904; Pictorial Review 1911). As such, she was a principal target for anti-feminist critics. Socialists were central among Gilman’s critics. Libertarian socialist Floyd Dell opened his book Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism (1913) with a chapter on Gilman. He declared that, of all the women who represented feminism, Gilman should be considered first because, “from a superficial view,” she was the most intransigent feminist of them all (Dell 1913: 22). Fabian William E. Walling regretted Gilman’s closer association with feminism than socialism, blaming this on adherence to Ward’s reform Darwinism. Walling saw such evolutionism as an intellectual limitation that inhibited revolutionary politics (Walling 1913: 365–6). Alternatively, Fabian socialists Prestonia Mann Martin and John Martin disdained Gilman’s feminism as theoretically dangerous and politically unsound. They objected to her minimizing of the salience of sex differences and biological reproduction in the distribution of human resources and activities, finding her reforms proposals as naive as they were impracticable, not least burdening women with the duty to vote. Worse still, Gilman’s influential treatise, The Man-Made World, represented men as “either useless or malevolent,” implicitly urging a woman’s uprising in which “the drones will be slain, their corpses swept from the hive …. The feminist millennium will have arrived!” Her evident mission was “to alienate the affections of women from men,” her feminism a betrayal at best, and at worst, privileged and class blind (Martin & Martin 1915: 31). From the political Right, conservative economist Correa Moylan Walsh criticized Gilman’s theoretical debt to Ward in a skeptical ridicule of her accounts of sex differences and capacities. He delighted in Ellen Key’s denunciation of “amaternalism” and her own stress “upon the unlikeness of men and women.” Walsh rejected any challenge to existing male sex right, fearing feminist modifications of gender norms via woman suffrage, economic independence, and voluntary motherhood (Walsh 1917: 198–9). Similarly, the Progressive Era New York Times editors and many of its contributors opposed woman suffrage and pilloried Gilman’s alternative visions for domestic living, kitchenless homes, and the freeing of women to contribute to human advancement, “to work and love too,” as men did (Allen 2009: 153–5, 269). Press coverage, friendly and hostile, documented Gilman’s contemporary impact. Local coverage of her articles, poems, and talks began in the 1880s, and national coverage began in the early 1890s. Press articles addressed her Californian literary and Nationalist circles and her lecturing itinerary, as well as her divorce and move to Chicago to join Jane Addams. The 1898 publication of Women and Economics cemented her association with the “Woman Question,” the press gradually adopting “feminism” after about 1908. Her European travels of 1896 and 1899, with multiple language distribution of Women and Economics, generated international interest in her previous and subsequent work, shaping contemporary interpretations of her

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work. Whether Gilman deflected adverse divorce publicity or defended suffragettes against slander, the press affected her livelihood. Newspapers made her name a household word, assisting her efforts to support herself lecturing, writing, and editing. After Women and Economics (1898) established her intellectual significance, her other publications received close attention. Newspaper profiles in countries, states, and towns she visited gave verbatim reports of her lectures and interchanges with audiences, many of which remain in her papers as newscuttings. As a public intellectual without either an academic salary or any reliable source of private income, the public supported her living, or at least that was her goal.

ASSESSMENT: LIMITS, LATER DEVELOPMENTS, CRITICISMS Gilmaniana has become a large and increasingly contentious area of current scholarship. Though Gilman’s sociological treatises on sexual arrangements and relations accounted for her Progressive Era intellectual prominence, initial efforts to reappraise her work by postwar historians and social scientists were promptly overtaken by literary critics (Degler 1956, 1966). Fiction constituted overall about a third of Gilman’s published oeuvre (much of it written rapidly, according to her, to fill her magazine pages and to supplement meager earnings), authoritatively documented in Scharnhorst’s 1985 Gilman bibliography (Scharnhorst 1985a). Yet it is her fiction that preoccupies the bulk of Gilman criticism and commentaries, a pattern prevailing since the 1970s. Consequently, though her important nonfiction works of social theory have been collected for first stand-alone publication or reissued during the past four decades, most have only one or perhaps two new versions available, several with new introductions. This reissuing effort for her nonfiction is completely dwarfed, however, by the scale of new editions of the fiction third of her work. Most of the mainly literary criticism and cultural studies works published on Gilman since the 1970s center upon her 1892 13-page short story, “The Yellow Wall-paper.” It was reissued 20 times between 1920 and 1970 (usually within thematic American short story anthologies), but from 1970 until the centenary of Women and Economics in 1998, “The Yellow Wall-paper” was reissued at least 85 times, with many more in the subsequent decade (Dock 1998: 120–1; Cox 1999: 138). Gilman’s utopian novel, Herland, has been the next most popular reissue, while gradually most of her other originally serialized novels have come back in print. Accordingly, hundreds of articles, scores of book chapters, and many books offer diverse analyses of this Gilman fiction. Meanwhile, this scale of interest in her fiction writing generates considerable interest in her life and biography, generating, in turn, edited publication of her diaries, her letters, even her notes, jottings, and early artworks, and resulting in several biographies and biographical studies (Knight 1994; Hill 1997; Knight 2000, 2006b; Knight & Tuttle 2009; Davis 2010). This interest shows no signs of abating, judging by the profusion of Gilman dissertations of the past decade, most addressing her literary works, a scholarly trajectory that will be further energized by the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America’s recent digitization of its large collection of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers.

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Gilmaniana then skews decisively towards literary criticism rather than social theory (Allen 2009: 8–11). Today scholars debate Gilman’s work with little consensus. Appraisals span the gamut from adulation to denunciation. Yet many of them are framed by “presentist” criteria and an array of current intellectual and political paradigms – from psychoanalysis to post-colonial anti-racism – anachronistically introduced into readings of the past hence distorted by lack of attention to context and contingency. Presentists evaluate Gilman’s theoretical corpus according to her prescience for feminist concerns today, a process easily facilitated by Gilman’s familiarity through her letters, diaries, and writings – she becomes a subject for reader identification. Sometimes the result has been over-identification, often signaled by scholars referring to her as “Charlotte,” rather than “Gilman,” as they would, and do, refer to “Freud” rather than “Sigmund” or “Ward” instead of “Lester” (Hill 1980; Lane 1991; Allen 2009: 330; Davis 2010). Other female theorists so treated include anarchist Emma Goldman and birth control activist Margaret Sanger – a strategy which privileges psychology and biography over theoretical endeavors (Frankel 1996: 903). As problematic as commentator identification with Gilman via presentist criteria has been its obverse. The more presentist the critical standpoint in recent work, the more caustic have been assessments of Gilman’s theories. Unapologetically, critics condemn Gilman for failing to anticipate current values and ethics. A sequel to previous over-identification then has been denunciation of a Gilman incorrigibly mired in problematic Progressive Era discourses – an embarrassing compendium of elitism, racism, anti-semitism, nativism, and imperialism. These discourses mandate her downgrading in the canon and diagnosis of contamination within any feminism indebted to her – recommendations both inquisitorial and epidemiological. Gilman’s socialism and class consciousness are one node in critical commentary. Some claim that she was insufficiently socialist or class conscious, as an elitist who shamelessly traded on her Beecher heritage (Hill 1980: 172; 1997: 32; Gaudelius 1999: 25). Others disagree, citing 1890s–1910s socialists’ claiming her as a comrade and her abiding concern with workers’ conditions and the economically-marginal (Ganobcsik-Williams 1999: 31; Wienen 2003). Canonizers and critics alike have been vexed by Gilman’s stances on racial and ethnic issues, a major theme of current Gilmaniana. Her earliest 1970s feminist admirers were disturbed by nativist and anti-semitic utterances in her writings, lamenting these racial and ethnic lapses from otherwise admirable ideas (Hill 1980: 172–3). Others urge the inseparable interpenetration between feminism and racist ethnocentrism throughout Gilman’s work, specifically in an intellectual female subject “built on the repression of difference, manifest in an unconscious ethnocentric hostility to ‘yellowness,’ ” advocacy of white supremacy, and opposition to unrestricted immigration (Lanser 1989: 437–41). Thus, for these latter critics, there is no admirable Gilman theory to be disentangled, pristine, from a reprehensible Gilman discourse. Her embrace of a hierarchy of civilizations and association of oversexualization with primitivism amounted to a grounding of feminism in racial bonds between white men and women, predicated on the “exclusion of nonwhite men and women,” making Gilman’s feminism “at its very base racist” (Bederman 1995: 122). Mired in fear of “white women’s degradation”

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by profligate men into a common rank with women of all other (inferior) races, that fear of hybridity haunts the totality of her works’ quest for a racially pure “radically segregationist aesthetic,” a united local culture keeping the world at bay and assimilating women into white male public culture – white women’s racial equality with white men (Peyser 1998: 89–90; Newman 1999: 134, 136). Critics on this trajectory depict Gilman as comprehensively reactionary, eugenic, white supremacist, and subjugationist, making her racialization of feminism the chief, and, for some, the only significant matter for interrogation in her theoretical work (Hudak 2003: 458; Weinbaum 2004: 67; Nadkarni 2006: 222; Fessenden 2007: 172, 173, 179). Alternatively, others refuse anti-racist insistence that Gilman studies must be anchored by exposé of her racialization of feminism. Privileging such a framework is disproportionately occlusive of her still considerable theoretical value (Knight 2000). As well, such a confined brief far exceeds the undeniable observation that most white feminists shared the racial prejudices of their period. Instead, this body of criticism extends into “over generalizing and understating the range and complexity of feminist thought in arguing that racism constituted feminism, making it a racialized theory of gender oppression,” one historian noting that problematic overreaching of this kind can be found in fields centered upon “image, representation, and literary depiction” (Kolchin 2002: 161). Others recall moreover that, in a long career of many developments, Gilman’s “strong theoretical commitment to racial harmony” and unconventional support for interracial marriages meant that, at times, she offered striking criticisms of Jim Crow America. Specifically, she deplored the color line and anti-miscegenation laws, literacy requirements targeting African American voters, anti-semitism, lynching, missionary imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines, environmental destruction, “native” dispossession via the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and “race pride” among white Americans (Lanser 1989: 429, 433–5; Deegan 1997: 45–6; Gilman 1913b: 89–90). With pervasive discourses of naturalized racial hierarchies uncontested into the early twentieth century, Gilman’s racialized utterances and ethnic intolerance naturally elicit dismay. Yet she embraced a reform Darwinist framework. Like her social scientist peers, she attributed racial and ethnic differences to environment, opportunity, and cultural circumstances, stressing human agency to effect change, positions that appalled Jim Crow racist subjugationists. As Beecher forebears combated chattel slavery, she, in turn, denounced Jim Crow as an immoral response to its consequences and aftermath (Gilman 1908a, 1916b; Allen 2009: 288–99). Gilman’s controversial status among scholars today partly reflects the magnitude of the problems she attempted to theorize – explaining sex and gender differences, theorizing sex divisions of labor, sex asymmetries in distributions of resources and patterns of erotic desire. Yet, she achieved considerable integration of feminist demands into a political and cultural milieu now found ethically repulsive by many critics. Her efforts to use both reform Darwinism and Progressivism towards feminist transformation can be all too easily dismissed as naive foolishness by wise present-day readers. Still, the passionate engagement that her writings can still inspire is a sharp reminder that feminists, no less and no more than other social theorists, write within and for their own time. They have no jurisdiction over their future readers’ time. Arguably, the more intelligible and credible a feminist theorist

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was in their own historical period, the less likely will be the appreciation of successor generations. The challenge for readers today is to imaginatively investigate the context of a social theorist like Gilman, given her immersion in her own era’s categories. In this she was not unusual. Mary Wollstonecraft made her 1792 case through embrace and critique of Enlightenment discourses. The same could be observed of John Stuart Mill’s feminism’s relation to mid-nineteenth-century liberalism, Virginia Woolf’s to modernism, or Simone de Beauvoir’s to wartime French existentialism and psychoanalysis. Gilman’s acclaim as the feminist theorist of her era helps in understanding the necessary historicity of feminist theorists’ contribution to social theory. Such understanding is valuable not only in itself, but also it greatly assists analytical precision as we attempt to characterize feminism as accurately as possible within the full gamut of related social theories today.

Reader’s Guide to Charlotte Perkins Gilman The best published sampler of Gilman’s nonfiction work is Larry Ceplair, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Nonfiction Reader (1992). Her most important contributions to social theory, Women and Economics (1898), The Home, Its Work and Influence (1903), Human Work (1904), The Man-Made World (1911), and His Religion and Hers (1923), each have one or more reissues; their publication details are listed in the bibliography, as are those for the collection or reissue of the novels advancing her feminist social theories – What Diantha Did (1910), Moving the Mountain (1911), The Crux (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916). A full bibliography of Gilman’s publications can be found in Gary Scharnhorst, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Bibliography (1985, 2nd edn., 2003).

Bibliography Writings of Gilman Books 1898. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. Reissued and ed. Carl N. Degler. San Francisco: Harper Torchbooks, 1966; centenary edn., ed. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 1900. Concerning Children. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. 1903. The Home, Its Work and Influence. New York: McClure, Phillips. Reissued and ed. Michael Kimmel. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2002. 1904a. Human Work. New York: McClure, Phillips. Reissued and ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Mary M. Moynihan. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2005. 1910a. What Diantha Did. New York: Charlton. Reissued and ed. Charlotte J. Rich. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 1911a. The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture. New York: Charlton. Reissued and ed. Mary A. Hill. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001. 1911b. The Crux. New York: Charlton. Reissued and ed. Jennifer S. Tuttle. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. 1911c. Moving the Mountain. New York: Charlton.

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1923a. His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. New York: Century Co. Reissued, Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1976. 1935a. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Appleton-Century.

Articles, serials, and other publications 1890. “Similar Cases.” Nationalist 2 (April): 165–6. 1891. “The Giant Wisteria.” New England Magazine 4 (June): 480–5. 1892a. “The Yellow Wall-paper.” New England Magazine 5 (January): 647–56. 1892b. “Masculine, Feminine, and Human.” Woman’s Journal 23 (9 July): 220. 1893. “The Rocking Chair.” Worthington’s Illustrated 1 (May): 453–9. 1897. “Women Do Not Want It.” Woman’s Journal 28 (January 23): 30. 1904b. “What Shall the Suffrage Clubs Do?” Woman’s Journal 35 (March 19): 90. 1907. “Social Darwinism.” American Journal of Sociology 12 (March): 713–14. 1908a. “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem.” American Journal of Sociology 14 (July): 78–85. 1908b. “Woman and the Ballot.” Marsh’s Magazine 1 (October): 5, 12. 1910b. “Woman and the State.” Forerunner 2 (October): 10–14. 1912a. “Women and Democracy.” Forerunner 3 (February): 33–7 1912b. “Woman Suffrage and the Average Mind.” Forerunner 3 (June): 148–53 1913a. “On Ellen Key and the Woman Movement.” Forerunner 4 (February): 35–8. 1913b. “Race Pride.” Forerunner 4 (April): 89–90. 1913c. “Education for Motherhood.” Forerunner 4 (October): 259–62 1913d. “The Brute in Man.” Forerunner 4 (December): 316–17. 1914a. “Comment and Review.” Forerunner 5 (January): 26–7. 1914b. “As to ‘Feminism’.” Forerunner 5 (February): 45. 1914c. “An Anti-Suffrage Meeting.” Forerunner 5 (February): 52. 1914d. “The Biological Anti-Feminist.” Forerunner 5 (March): 6. 1914e. “Is Feminism Really So Dreadful?” Delineator 85 (August): 6. 1914f. “Masculism at Its Worst.” Forerunner 6 (October): 257–8. 1914g. “Social Ethics.” Forerunner 6 (January–December). In Social Ethics: Sociology and the Future of Society. Collected and ed. Mary Jo Deegan and Michael R. Hill. London: Praeger, 2004. 1915a. “A ‘Debate’ on Suffrage.” Forerunner 6 (January): 10–11. 1915b. “An Anti-Suffrage Meeting.” Forerunner 6 (February): 51–2. 1915c. “Herland.” Forerunner 6 (January–December): 12–17, 38–44, 65–72, 94–100, 123–9, 150–5, 181–7, 207–13, 237–43, 287–93, 319–25. 1915d. “The Dress of Women.” Forerunner 7 (January–December). In The Dress of Women: A Critical Introduction to the Symbolism and Sociology of Clothing. Collected and ed. Michael R. Hill and Mary Jo Deegan. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. 1916a. “Maternity Benefits and Reformers.” Forerunner 7 (March): 65–6. 1916b. “With Her in Ourland.” Forerunner 7 (April, June, November): 93–8, 152–7, 291–7. In With Her in Ourland. Collected and ed. Mary Jo Deegan and Michael R. Hill. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publications, 1997. 1916c. “Growth and Combat.” Forerunner 7 (February, March): 47–53, 76–82. 1922. “Back of Birth Control.” Birth Control Review 6 (March): 31–3. 1923b. “Is America Too Hospitable?” Forum 70 (October): 1983–9. 1924. “Toward Monogamy.” In Freda Kirchwey (ed.), Our Changing Morality. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, pp. 53–66. 1925. “Washtubs and Women’s Duty: Is a Mother’s Business Child Culture or Housework?” Century 110 (June): 152–9.

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1927. “Progress through Birth Control.” North American Review 224 (December): 622–9. 1929a. “Sex and Race Progress.” In Samuel D. Schmalhausen and V. F. Calverton (eds.), Sex in Civilization. New York: Macaulay, pp. 109–26. 1929b. “Feminism and Social Progress.” In Brownell Baker (ed.), Problems of Civilization. New York: Van Nostrand, pp. 115–42. 1931. “Parasitism and Civilized Vice.” In V. F. Calverton and Samuel D. Schmalhausen (eds.), Woman’s Coming of Age. New York: Liveright, pp. 110–26. 1932. “Birth Control, Religion, and the Unfit.” Nation (January 27): 108–9. 1935b. “The Right to Die.” Forum 94 (November): 297–300.

Unpublished writings 1908c. “Notes on the Overthrow.” March 5, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library [hereafter CPGP] 177/336/24. 1908d. “Feminism.” CPGP 177/175. 1930. “Pernicious Adam: A Study in Ethics.” CPGP 177/227.

Further Reading Allen, Judith A. (1994) Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism, 1880–1925. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Allen, Judith A. (1999) “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Prostitution and Frontier Sexual Contracts.” In Jill Rudd and Val Gough (eds.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 173–99. Allen, Judith A. (2003) “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Feminism, and Progressivism.” In Michael J. Hogan (ed.), Imperialism and Reform in the Progressive Era – A Rhetorical History of the United States, vol. 6. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, pp. 427–69. Allen, Judith A. (2004) “The Overthrow of Gynaecocentric Culture: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Lester Frank Ward.” In Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight (eds.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, pp. 59–86. Allen, Judith A. (2009) The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bederman, Gail (1995) Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bureau of Vocational Information (1915) “Women in Industry” (October 15), Records, 1911–26. Schlesinger Library, 1908/32. Ceplair, Larry (1992) Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Nonfiction Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Cott, Nancy F. (1987) The Grounding of Modern Feminism. Yale University Press, New Haven. Coward, Rosalind (1983) Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Cox, F. Brett (1999) “Review: A Monument of Feminist Horror.” Science Fiction Studies 26 (March): 137–9. Current Literature (1904) “Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” 36 (May): 511. Current Opinion (1913) “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Reply to Ellen Key.” 54 (March): 220–1. Current Opinion (1914) “The Conflict between ‘Human’ and ‘Female’ Feminism.” 56 (April): 291–2.

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Davis, Cynthia J. (2010) Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Deegan, Mary Jo (1997) “Introduction.” In Mary Jo Deegan and Michael R. Hill (eds.), With Her in Ourland. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publications, pp. 1–57. Degler, Carl N. (1956) “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theory and Practice of Feminism.” American Quarterly 8 (Spring): 21–39. Degler, Carl N. (1966) “Introduction.” In Carl N. Degler (ed.), Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. San Francisco: Harper Torchbooks, Dell, Floyd (1913) Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism. Chicago: Forbes. Dickinson, Robert Latou and Lura Beam (1931) A Thousand Marriages: A Medical Study of Sex Adjustment. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins. Dock, Julie Bates (1998) Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ and the History of Its Publication and Reception. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press. Egan, Maureen (1987) “Evolutionary Theory in the Social Philosophy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Hypatia 4 (Spring): 102–19. Fessenden, Tracy (2007) Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frankel, Oz (1996) “Whatever Happened to ‘Red Emma’? From Alien Rebel to American Icon.” Journal of American History 83 (December): 903–42. Ganobcsik-Williams, Lisa (1999) “The Intellectualism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Evolutionary Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Gender.” In Jill Rudd and Val Gough (eds.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 16–41. Gaudelius, Yvonne (1999) “Kitchenless Houses and Homes.” In Jill Rudd and Val Gough (eds.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 111–26. Hill, Mary Armfield (1980) Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hill, Mary Armfield (ed.) (1988) Endure: The Diaries of Charles Walter Stetson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hill, Mary Armfield (1997) A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897–1900. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Hudak, Jennifer (2003) “The Social Inventor: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the (Re) Production of Perfection.” Women’s Studies 32 (June): 455–77. Key, Ellen S. (1912) The Woman Movement. New York: G. P. Putnam. Knight, Denise D. (ed.) (1994) The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Volume 1, 1879–87, Volume 2, 1890–1935. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Knight, Denise D. (2000) “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Shadow of Racism.” American Literary Realism 32 (Winter): 159–69. Knight, Denise D. (2006a) “‘I am getting angry enough to do something desperate’: The Question of Female Madness.” In Shawn St. Jean (ed.), “The Yellow Wall-paper.” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual Critical Edition. Athens: Ohio University Press, pp. 73–87. Knight, Denise D. (2006b) “ ‘I could paint still life as well as anyone on earth’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the World of Art.” Women’s Studies 35 (July–August): 475–92.

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Knight, Denise and Jennifer S. Tuttle (eds.) (2009) The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Kolchin, Peter (2002) “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America.” Journal of American History 89 (June): 154–73. Lane, Ann J. (1991) To Herland and Beyond: A Life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Meridian. Lanser, Susan S. (1989) “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America.” Feminist Studies 15 (Fall): 415–41. Magner, Lois N. (1992) “Darwinism and the Woman Question: The Evolving Views of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” In Joanne B. Karpinski (ed.), Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: G. K. Hall, pp. 115–28. Martin, Prestonia and John Martin (1915) Feminism: Its Fallacies and Follies. New York: Dodd, Mead. McGerr, Michael (2003) “A Fierce Discontent”: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920. New York: Free Press. Mill, John Stuart (1869) The Subjection of Women. London: Longman, Green, Reader and Dyer. Nadkarni, Asa (2006) “Eugenic Feminism: Asian Reproduction in the U.S. National Imaginary.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39 (Spring): 221–44. New York Post (1922) “‘America’s Greatest Women’: Mrs. Catt Gives Own List Of.” June 5. CPGP 177/295/1. New York Times (1911) [Review of Gilman, The Man-Made World] (January 15): 14. New York Times (1914) “Bars Article from Mail.” (January 15): 9. Newman, Louise (1999) White Women’s Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Palmeri, Ann (1983) “Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Forerunner of a Feminist Social Science.” In Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 97–119. Peyser, Thomas Galt (1998) Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pictorial Review (1911) “Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Writer, Public Speaker, Advanced Thinker.” 13 (October): 14. Scharnhorst, Gary (1985a) Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press (2nd edn., 2003). Scharnhorst, Gary (1985b) Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne. Schreiner, Olive (1890) “Three Dreams in a Desert.” In Dreams. London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1891) “The Matriarchate; or, Mother-Age.” In Rachel Avery (ed.), Transactions of the International Council of Women. Philadelphia: Lippincott, pp. 218–27. Unidentified newscutting (1914) “Living out of a Laboratory.” CPGP 177/282/1. Unidentified newscutting (1916) “Men are Worried.” CPGP 177/295/2. Veeder, William (1988) “Who Is Jane? The Intricate Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Arizona Quarterly 44 (Autumn): 40–79. Walling, William English (1913) The Larger Aspects of Socialism. New York: Macmillan. Walsh, Correa Moylan (1917) Feminism. New York: Sturgis & Walton. Ward, Lester Frank (1883) Dynamic Sociology, 2 vols. New York: Appleton. Ward, Lester Frank (1888) “Our Better Halves.” Forum 6 (November): 266–75.

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Ward, Lester Frank (1903) Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society. New York: Macmillan. Weinbaum, Alys Eve (2004) Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. White, Barbara (2003) The Beecher Sisters. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wienen, Mark W. Van (2003) “‘A Rose by Any Other Name’: Charlotte Perkins Stetson (Gilman) and the Case for American Reform Socialism.” American Quarterly 55 (December): 603–34.

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11 Max Weber STEPHEN KALBERG

The religion of brotherliness has always clashed with the orders and values of this world, and the more consistently its demands have been carried through, the sharper the clash has been. The split has usually become wider the more the values of the world have been rationalized and sublimated in terms of their own laws. And that is what matters here. (1946b: 330) The sociological writings of Max Weber (1864–1920) are read widely throughout the world. His broad-ranging questions and concerns still speak to us 90 years after his death. Those who seek to understand the internal workings and dynamics of modern and pre-modern societies alike appreciate and learn from his concepts and theories even today. Social scientists and historians in all corners of the globe stand now under a strong obligation to become acquainted with the central dimensions of Weberian sociology. Weber is perhaps today best known for his attempts to define the uniqueness of the modern West and to provide rigorous causal explanations for its specific historical development. However, far from offering a justification for Western industrial societies, his sociological and political writings evidence a profound ambivalence toward them. Although impressed by their capacity to sustain high standards of living, Weber feared that many of their prominent elements opposed values and ideals he held dear: ethical action, the individual’s autonomy, the personality unified by reference to a constellation of noble values, and a universal ideal of compassion. What constraints, he queried, would the modern industrial society impose upon its inhabitants in the future? Would configurations of binding values remain? Would a firm foundation for ethical decisions continue to exist? At the dawning of the twentieth century, Weber asked, “where are we headed?” and “how shall we live with dignity in this new era?” He worried that the modern epoch might become The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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a “steel-hard casing” of impersonal, instrumental relationships incapable of nourishing values, ideals, and compassion. On behalf of an understanding of these major themes in Weber’s sociology, and his distinct mode of sociological analysis, this chapter focuses upon two large goals. First, it seeks to demarcate the main orientations of his sociological writings by reference to the intellectual and social contexts of his time. Intense debates surrounding the origins of the modern social sciences influenced Weber’s thinking in significant ways and entered deeply into the formation of his “interpretive understanding” (Verstehen) sociology. In addition, his works responded directly to the secularization, industrialization, and urbanization transformations occurring on a wide scale 100 years ago. Second, in addressing Weber’s central studies, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of the questions, themes, theories, methodologies, and procedures overarching and interlocking these investigations. The major streams of thought and research strategies in his pivotal treatises – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (PE; 2011), Economy and Society (E&S; 1968), and the Economic Ethics of the World Religions series (EEWR; 1946b, 1946c, 1951, 1952, 1958) – are outlined. His books and essays, if explored without reference to his focal orientations, appear fragmented. A loud proclamation – “Weber’s sociology lacks cohesiveness” – dominated the reception of his works for decades. Weber’s search for answers to his burning quest to comprehend the particular features of Western modernity and the causes of its unique development pushed him to pursue an extraordinarily comparative research agenda. He was convinced that the uniqueness of the West – and especially the modern West – could be isolated, and the causes for its specific historical trajectory defined, only through extensive comparative investigations. Hence, Weber’s questions led him to a series of massive works. Remarkably, his inquiries spanned the histories of China, India, and the civilizations of Western antiquity; they traversed as well, with full sovereignty, across each century of the West’s 2,600-year development. Along the way he explored, in detailed investigations, for example, Old Testament prophecy and the Bible, the salvation doctrines of Buddhism, Hinduism, ancient Judaism, early Christianity, medieval Catholicism, and ascetic Protestantism, the decline of the Roman Empire, the accounting practices of medieval trading companies, the possibilities for democracy in Russia, and the rise of the caste system in India, Confucianism in China, and monotheism in ancient Israel. Weber’s approach abjured a focus upon single factors, such as economic or religious forces, and sought to offer multidimensional analyses that evaluated – through precise comparisons – the causal weight of both “ideas” and “interests.” Moreover, he expanded his inquiries in his later years even beyond a concern with the uniqueness of the West and the causes at the core of its particular pathway. Weber wished also, utilizing the rigorous research strategies and impartial procedures of his interpretive sociology, to comprehend how people in different civilizations and epochs, in light of indigenous and singular configurations of groups, attributed meaning on a regular basis to certain types of activity. How do people do so? How does meaning arise in specific groups? It crystallizes largely in reference to constellations of particular religious, rulership (Herrschaft), economic, legal, family, and social honor (status) patterns of action, he maintained, and becomes embedded in them. Weber further attempted to chart the social configurations that facilitated – or hindered – the origin and expansion of an ethos of compassion and ethical action generally.

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Surely his exploration of these themes can be understood as a manifestation of his deep concern that the modern West stood at the precipice of a potentially debilitating crisis of meaning. A quest to demarcate realistic parameters for viable social change in the modern West also drove his research. Weber sought to investigate these large-scale themes impartially even though the activities of peoples across the globe at times appeared to him, from the point of view of his own values, odd and even bizarre. The analysis of Weber’s sociology presented here holds that his wide-ranging queries and themes, and his rigorous research on their behalf, remain remarkably viable even today. The organization of this chapter mirrors the above questions and research strategies. The intellectual context in reference to which Weber’s works originated is first explored. His thematic concerns and research agenda were influenced on the one hand by an eventful and civic-oriented personal history and, on the other hand, by the dominant intellectual currents established by the great scholars of the nineteenth century. Both his rejection of all attempts on the basis of social science research to establish generally applicable and “true” values, general laws, and “objective facts,” and his strict opposition to all monocausal modes of explanation, will be discussed in detail. His aim to formulate a particular type of comparative-historical sociology – one that places subjective meaning at its core – will also be thoroughly scrutinized. The second major section explores Weber’s methodology. His sociology of interpretive understanding, four types of social action, and central methodological construct – the ideal type – will be explained; his notion of “value-freedom” and the overarching aim of his sociology will be investigated. We then turn to his three major works: PE, E&S, and EEWR. The examination of these treatises includes discussions of basic features of Weber’s research procedures, such as his perpetual intertwining of the past with the present and his elevation of hypothesis-forming models to a central position in his sociology. The third section explores Weber’s sociology in reference to the turn-of-thecentury society in which it was written. His positions in respect to the urgent problems of his time now capture our attention. In particular, his analysis of, and suggestions to address, the crisis of democracy confronted by his society are scrutinized. No less noteworthy in this regard is Weber’s view that the social sciences in the modern world should not be expected to offer a new world view; rather, they appropriately fulfill relatively modest tasks only. This chapter concludes with a general evaluation of Weberian sociology. Several weaknesses and dilemmas are examined, though also an array of strengths offered by an approach that constructs sociological theory on the basis of context-based and multicausal modes of procedures anchored in ideal type models, a rigorous comparative methodology, and the subjective meaning of persons in groups.

THE PERSON Max Weber was born in Erfurt, Germany, into a distinguished and cosmopolitan family of entrepreneurs, scholars, politicians, and strong women. Most of his younger years were spent in Berlin, where he attended a series of excellent schools that required a strenuous regimen of study. Recognized early on as an exceptional student,

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he developed a precocious love of learning and a particular fondness for philosophy, literature, and ancient and medieval history. His teenage essays and letters comment upon, among many others, the merits of Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer, and analyze in depth the societies of the Renaissance and ancient Rome. They also demonstrate, as the eldest child, an abiding affection for his many siblings and a concern for his overworked, devout mother. Although strongly influenced by his father, a central figure in the city government of Berlin and the state government of Prussia, and an elected member of the Reichstag, he deplored his patriarchal ways and insensitive treatment of his wife. Weber studied economic history, law, and philosophy at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Göttingen. In Berlin he became the protégé of the legal historian Goldschmidt and the Roman historian Mommsen, and in 1893 was appointed, at an unusually young age, to a chair in commercial law at Berlin’s Humboldt University. He accepted, in 1894, a chair in economics and finance in Freiburg, and in economics in Heidelberg in 1896. At the age of 33, having recently married a distant cousin, Marianne Schnitger, Weber evicted his visiting father, who had mistreated his mother, from their Heidelberg home. His father’s death soon afterwards seems to have served as the catalyst for a paralyzing mental illness that endured for more than five years. During much of this time Weber traveled and passively pondered the fate of persons living in the new world of secularism, urbanism, and capitalism. A trip to the United States in 1904 played a significant part in his recovery. Journeying across much of the East, South, and Midwest, he gained an appreciation for America’s dynamism, energy, and uniqueness, as well as for the self-reliance and distrust of authority widespread in the United States. His most famous work, PE, was completed soon after his return to Germany. Although unable to teach until 1918, Weber began once again to publish on a vast array of topics. His interest in the “ascetic Protestantism” of the American Calvinist (Presbyterian), Methodist, Baptist, Quaker, and Mennonite churches derived in part from the religiosity of his Huguenot mother, Helene, and her sister, Ida Baumgarten. As Christian social activists and admirers of mid-century American Unitarianism and English progressive theology, the pious sisters transmitted to the young Weber a heightened sensitivity to moral questions, an appreciation of the ways in which the life of dignity and meaning must be guided by ethical standards, and a respect for the worth and uniqueness of every person. Marianne reaffirmed these values, although they opposed the lessons taught by Max’s father: the necessity to avoid “naive idealism,” to confront the ways of the world in a pragmatic, even amoral, fashion, and to avoid personal sacrifice. Nonetheless, Weber waged impassioned battles throughout his life on behalf of ethical positions and scolded relentlessly all who lacked a rigorous sense of justice and social responsibility. As his student Paul Honigsheim reports, Weber became a man possessed whenever threats to the autonomy of the individual were discussed (see Honigsheim 1968: 6, 43) – whether to mothers seeking custody of their children, women students at German universities, or bohemian social outcasts and political rebels. Not surprisingly, his concerns for the fate of the German nation, and for the future of Western civilization, led him perpetually into the arena of politics. Vigorously opposed to the definition of this realm as one of Realpolitik, “sober realism,” or

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wheeling and dealing, he called out vehemently for politicians to act by reference to a stern moral code: an “ethic of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik).1

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT Long before Weber formulated his sociology, many seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury thinkers in the West had sought to discover, through the systematic investigation of the natural and social worlds, proof of the existence of an all-powerful supernatural Being. If the centipede’s 100 legs moved in a coordinated fashion, this extraordinary achievement must itself indicate the intelligence of a superior Being as its creator (see Weber 2005: 325). Moreover, the “hand of God” must be at work as it was in the social world’s “natural laws,” it was believed. Once proven, God’s existence implied the necessity for “His children” to follow His commandments. Hence, the investigation of the natural and social worlds held out the promise of embattled Christianity’s renascence. The “divine order” would appear on earth and the triumph of Christian compassion and universal love would then banish the danger of a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” Although the nineteenth century brought these hopeful and optimistic investigations to a close, social thinkers in the West only grudgingly set aside an idea prominent in all salvation religions: all history and all activities of the human species possess a higher meaning and direction. Even as openly theological explanations for the purpose of life and history waned, the notion remained that a component more majestic than everyday activity was bestowed upon human life. Whether Utilitarians in England at the beginning of the century or Spencerian Social Darwinists at its end; whether Hegelians or Marxists in Germany; whether followers of Saint-Simon or Comte in France: all these schools of thought, although otherwise so different, articulated the idea that history moved in a lawful manner and in an evolutionary direction. It thus contained a meaning all its own. In his expansive historical studies, the distinguished mid-century historian Ranke discovered the values of Christian Humanism at work through the ages, and the idealist philosopher Hegel charted the history of the West as a progressive realization of the idea of freedom. Even thoroughly secularized German intellectuals at the end of the century – the philosopher Heinrich Rickert, for example – argued that history offered evidence for a firm hierarchy of true values, indeed ones capable of guiding our lives today. The economic historian Gustav Schmoller sought to discover, through historical research, the underlying moral justification for the development of modern capitalism. History retained a teleology and an “objective meaning” for all these thinkers. Conformity with its unified value system would ensure progress, as well as, in the end, the just ordering of society. Throughout the nineteenth century, and despite the turning by Marx of ethereal Hegelian thought “on its head,” a rearguard reluctance to abandon the notion of a transcendental guiding force – now in a sublimated and impersonal form rather than understood as the direct Will of a monotheistic God – prevailed. Even Marx’s “scientific socialism” formulated “dialectical laws of history”; the present, he argued, must be understood as only one of many historical stages, all of which lead along a predestined route toward more advanced societies.

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Protestant Christianity’s optimistic view regarding man’s capacity to master his sinful human nature and to improve earthly existence constituted the facilitating cultural background for a flourishing of the secular ideas of Progress, Reason, and Freedom, as well as for all ideals of natural justice and all value hierarchies. Max Weber’s works stand directly antagonistic to these ideas of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. With his sociology a new position for the human species crystallized, one steadfastly opposed to the notion that history possessed an independent meaning: persons now existed as the unequivocal makers of their destinies and as the center and cause of their activities. At the dawning of the twentieth century, Weber insisted that meaning could arise only out of their struggles to mold “meaningful lives” and the choices they made on this behalf. “Every single important activity and ultimately life as a whole, if it is not to be permitted to run on as an event in nature but is instead to be consciously guided, is a series of ultimate decisions through which the soul … chooses its own destiny; that is, the meaning of its activity and existence” (1949: 18, translation altered, original emphasis; see also 1949: 81; 2005: 331, 334–5). Several currents of thought that placed the individual in the forefront came here to a synthesis: the Enlightenment’s individual endowed with Reason and Rationality, the creative and introspective individual of the German romantics (mainly Goethe and Schiller), and ascetic Protestantism’s activity-oriented individual.2 The same antagonism to the notion that the flow of history contained a transcendental meaning accounts as well for Weber’s principled opposition to the grounding of knowledge and activity beyond the empirical realm. With the prominent exception of Nietzsche, he saw more acutely than his contemporaries that, once the axial turn from theocentrism and quasi-theocentrism to anthropocentrism had been taken, a unifying set of quasi-religious values, the “course of history,” or the Idea of Progress could no longer offer the ultimate foundation for the social sciences. The study of the meaning-seeking person must now move to the forefront and must be firmly rooted in reality: “The type of social science in which we are interested is an empirical science of concrete reality” (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft) (1949: 72, original emphasis). Although the secular and industrial character of turn-of-the-century Germany directly influenced the formation of this central tenet of Weber’s sociology, as he himself acknowledged, it must not be concluded that his works are empowered to investigate only those few epochs and civilizations in which individualism had come to the fore and unified constellations of values had vanished. On the contrary, a radically comparative and historical reach characterizes his research. He knew well that subjective meaning may be created in a vast variety of ways; indeed, his research revealed that for millennia the overriding beacon of light and guiding force for persons had originated from diverse orientations to the supernatural realm (see 2005: 331). Even though the notion of subjective meaning stands at the core of Weber’s sociology, and hence the individualism dominant in his own epoch’s “value ideas” (Wertideen) is manifest in its fundamental axioms, Weber’s methodology emphatically leaves open – to be studied empirically – the extent to which the formation of subjective meaning is influenced by the mundane world or the supernatural realm. This monumental shift to a radically empirical sociology rooted in subjective meaning must be acknowledged as foundational to Weber’s entire sociology. Cognizance of this turn allows its central features to become more easily comprehensible.

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The rejection of the search for true values, general laws, and objective facts Weber’s rejection of values rooted in religions and quasi-supernatural ideas as the basis for his sociology, and his focus upon empirical reality and subjective meaning, led him to oppose unequivocally the many attempts at the end of the nineteenth century to define the aim of science as the creation of new constellations of values appropriate to the industrial society. His distinguished colleagues Rickert, Dilthey, Schmoller, Roscher, and Knies had all agreed that investigations of social life must be carried out in order to substantiate ideals and norms – indeed, even in the name of science. They feared that urban, secular, and capitalist societies would be devoid of values, and this abhorrent vacuum must be filled by values discovered by science. Their nightmare vision would otherwise soon become reality: persons would become mere drifting “atoms” devoid of a reflective and introspective capacity, a sense of compassion and deep obligation to others, and – not least – a sense of true community (Gemeinschaft). As religion declined, a new source for desperately needed values must be found. Science offered new hope. The notion that science should be viewed as the legitimate source of personal values was more than Weber could bear. He saw in such proposals yet another clandestine intrusion of quasi-religious legacies – now into a domain appropriately defined as exclusively involving empirical investigation. Moreover, he denied the possibility that science could serve as the source of values, for an “objective science” cannot exist. Even the hope for such a science is a deception, one rooted ultimately in a bygone world of unified values. It has now become clear, Weber asserts, that each epoch – perhaps even every generation or decade – calls forth its own “culturally significant value-ideas.” Invariably, he insists, our observations of empirical reality take place in reference to these. The empirical ground upon which science is based “changes” continually (see 1949: 72–8). This unavoidable “value-relevance” (Wertbeziehung) of our observations always renders certain events and occurrences visible to us and occludes others. Only some “realities” are thrown into relief by the culturally significant values of any specific age: those today, for example, are embodied by terms such as “equality for all,” freedom, individual rights, equal opportunity, globalization, etc., and dichotomies such as capitalism/socialism and First World/Third World. The specific vantage points dominant in any era allow us to see only a selected slice of the past and present. Consequently, our search today for knowledge cannot take the same form – as a search for concealed absolutes – as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for the ultimate precondition for such a quest no longer exists: a widespread belief in a set of unified values. For the same reason, our knowledge can no longer be anchored in the quasi-religious ideas of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, owing to the invariably perspectival character of our knowledge, we can hope neither to find “general laws” in history nor to write history as Ranke proposed: “as it actually occurred.” Thus, in the famous “debate over methods” (Methodenstreit), Weber opposed both the “nomothetic” position held by Menger – the formulation of general laws must be the task of the social sciences – and the “ideographic” position held by Schmoller’s “historical school of economics”: to offer exact and full descriptions of specific cases must be the goal.3

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Weber admonished vehemently and repeatedly that all attempts to create values through science must now be seen as illusions. All such deceptions must be cast aside in the new post-religion and post-quasi-religion epoch: The fate of a cultural epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know, however completely we may investigate history, we cannot learn its real meaning from the results of our research. Rather, we must be able to create this meaning ourselves. Moreover, we must acknowledge that “Weltanschauungen” never can be the product of the advance of empirically-based knowledge. Finally, we must recognize that the highest ideals – and those which move us most deeply – become effective influences upon us only as a consequence of their struggle with other ideals. These ideals are just as sacred to others as ours are to us. (1949: 57, translation altered, original emphasis; see also 1949: 18) We know of no ideals that can be demonstrated scientifically. Undoubtedly, the task of pulling them out of one’s own breast is all the more difficult in an epoch in which culture has otherwise become so subjective. But we simply have no fool’s paradise and no streets paved with gold to promise, either in this world or the next, either in thought or in action. It is the stigma of our human dignity as men that the peace of our souls can never be as great as the peace of those who dream of such a paradise. (1909: 420)

The embrace of multicausality The search for a single “guiding hand,” whether that of a monotheistic God, Adam Smith’s “laws of the market,” or Karl Marx’s class conflict, remained anathema to Weber. He perceived all such overarching forces as residuals of now-antiquated world views characterized by religious and quasi-religious ideas. Indeed, Weber’s adamant refusal to define the “general laws of social life” (Menger), the “stages of historical development” (Bücher, Marx), or Evolution4 as the central point of departure for his causal explanations5 paved the way for a focus upon empirical reality and subjective meaning. As importantly, it also provided the underlying precondition for his embrace of radically multicausal modes of explanation. Having abandoned reference to all forms of “necessity” as history’s moving force, the innumerable values, conventions, customs, emotions, and pragmatic interests of persons rose to the fore in Weber’s sociology as the causal conventions, customs, that determine the contours of the past and the present. His empirical research convinced him that historical change required “carrier” strata and groups. Moreover, these carriers were, for example, at times political and rulership groups, at other times status groups or economic groups, and at still other times religious groups. His investigations across a vast palette of themes, epochs, and civilizations yielded in this respect a clear conclusion: rather than a causal “resting point,” Weber found only continuous movement across, above all, rulership, economic, religious, and legal groups, status groups, and familial and clan groups (see, for example, 1968: 341). Without powerful carriers, even Hegel’s “spirit” or Ranke’s Christian Humanism could not move history. Nor could religious or secular world views or the theodicy dilemma presented by unjust suffering.

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From Eurocentrism to a comparative sociology of subjective meaning However weakened by secularization, capitalism, and urbanization, the West’s overarching set of values remained influential in the nineteenth century and formed a measuring rod against which European social scientists evaluated societies around the globe with respect to their relative “evolution.” Had they experienced the same degree of “advancement” as the modern West? Weber’s rejection of the nineteenth century’s quasi-religious value constellations implied both a skepticism regarding the widespread belief in “progress” and an awareness of its contingency. It also laid the foundation for his sociology’s radically comparative character and its break from Eurocentric ideas. The shift to a fully anthropocentric sociology of subjective meaning and empirical reality had the effect of delegitimizing all Western-centric value configurations. As the underlying justification for a social science oriented exclusively to the “ideas of the West” disappeared, firm standards in terms of which other cultures could be observed and evaluated vanished as well. While his colleagues viewed this development with extreme trepidation and correctly perceived Weber’s methodology as threatening at its core the “superiority of the West,” as well as frequently the very essence of their being, Weber noted an overriding advantage for research: social scientists were now set free to investigate “the other” on its own terms. This liberation from a fixed point of orientation meant to him that unconstrained empirical explorations of subjective meaning in Eastern and Western, ancient and modern, civilizations could now be conducted. However, Weber advocated such a radical swing of the pendulum not only owing to advantages he saw for a social science methodology. Rather, an even larger dynamic induced him to bestow an unqualified legitimacy upon de-centered, inter-civilizational research. “Unconstrained” comparative studies were now urgently needed in order effectively to address immediate questions in his own civilization: In what precise ways can the modern West be said to be unique? What are the parameters of possible social change in the West? How does the orientation of activity to values and the formation of subjective meaning as such take place? How can comparative-historical studies focusing upon the formation of subjective meaning in civilizations far and wide shed light upon – and assist resolution of – the crisis of meaning widespread in rapidly industrializing Western societies? Whereas these same questions deeply troubled Weber’s colleagues as well, he alone comprehended the potential achievements of a sociology that, through rigorous empirical research, would be capable of isolating the boundaries of cases and developments, defining significant causal forces, and drawing conclusions regarding the circumstances under which social transformation likely occurs, action becomes oriented to values, and subjective meaning is formed. Such a sociology would cast a sharp beam of light upon the modern West’s dilemmas and conundra – and persons would then be able to make informed decisions and to take clear ethical positions (2005: 333–4). The massiveness and extreme thoroughness of Weber’s comparative studies cannot be understood without cognizance of this motivating concern.6

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Conflict and ethical action Weber’s mode of research was decentered in a further manner. In breaking from all schools of thought that stressed unifying constellations of values, transcendentally anchored value hierarchies, and – through Progress and Evolution – humanity’s common and peaceful future, his sociology banished an array of presuppositions that placed obstacles against empirical analysis. Importantly, having done so, his research could better assess the extent to which mundane conflict appears, as well as its contours and causes. For him, the “struggle for existence” did not take place on the grand stage of “human evolution” and in response to a “survival of the fittest” law, as for Social Darwinists, but exclusively as a result of the hard choices that accompany everyday activity. History unfolded out of these decisions, yet not in a unilinear or directed fashion. Paradox, irony, and unforeseen consequences, Weber insists, were manifest perpetually,7 as well as restless, undirected conflict. The various major domains of life (the family sphere and the religion, economy, law, rulership, and social honor arenas),8 he argues, rather than congealing into a synthesis to drive Progress or to propel a Parsonsian “value-generalization” process, frequently follow their own laws of development and often stand in relations of irreconcilable conflict to one another (see 1946b; 1949: 18; 2005: 330–8). In formulating “an empirical science of concrete reality” and emphasizing that persons rather than God, “natural laws,” or Evolution, endow history with meaning, Weber’s sociology unavoidably confronts several pivotal questions. How will our action be oriented in patterned ways such that groups are formed? How do we act responsibly? How is ethical action grounded? The liberation from religion-based world views and their legacies led naturally to a degree of freedom, yet just this development called forth the question of how individuals, in industrialized, secularized, bureaucratized, and capitalist societies, make choices. Weber’s rejection of all schools that defined the modern person’s freedom as simply the “philistine freedom of private convenience” (Löwith 1970: 122) rendered these queries all the more urgent, as did his opposition to Nietzsche’s answers: his insistence that action occurs embedded within contexts prevented Weber from placing faith in prophets and great “supermen” (2005: 339). Moreover, he argued that secularism, industrialism, and the Enlightenment had already empowered “the people” with rights to such an extent that Nietzsche’s call for authoritarian “heroes” went too far; they would inevitably circumscribe the open space of uncircumscribed decision making indispensable if ethically-based choices are to occur. Weber knew well that the social science he proposed failed to offer ethical guidance. He remained acutely aware that this position disappointed in particular the younger generation of his time (see 2005: 324–35, 328–9). Would the elevation of subjective meaning and “concrete empirical reality” to the forefront be beneficial in the end? Or would the modern individual, cast adrift from all directing and obligatory values and traditions, and now forced to locate and then cultivate meaning by reference to his own “demons,” become either an opportunistic actor or psychologically paralyzed? Weber rejected the loud calls for “a romantic irrational heroism which sacrifices itself amid the delirium of self-decomposition” (Salomon 1935b: 384) and scorned, as utopian, all hopes that a politicized proletariat would usher in a more just society. Would configurations of binding values capable of anchoring ethical decisions

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remain viable? Would the type of human being (Menschentyp) oriented to and unified by values survive? These crucial questions can best be addressed by turning first to Weber’s sociology and then to the social context in which he wrote.

THE THEORY Some interpreters view Weber as a “theorist of ideas,” yet others see him as a “theorist of interests.” While the former focus upon The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and emphasize the strong role in his sociology of values, religion, and culture, the latter take his analytic opus Economy and Society as their main source and assert that Weber offers a non-Marxist conflict theory rooted in domination, power, conflict, and individual interests. Still others understand him mainly as a gifted taxonomist engaged in the creation of a vast armament of concepts – “ideal types” – intended to establish the discipline of sociology on a secure conceptual foundation. In fact, each of these interpretations legitimately flows from his complex sociological writings (see Kalberg 1998: 208–14; 2008). However, these commentaries all run astray both by denying the plausibility of opposing interpretations and by casting their focus too narrowly. The broader themes that overcome the seeming fragmentation of Weber’s sociology are too often neglected: the ways in which he links ideas and interests, his concern to define the uniqueness of “Western rationalism” and “modern Western rationalism” and to provide causal explanations of their origins, his search to understand which constellations of groups give rise to widespread notions of compassion, ethical action, and individual autonomy, his attempt to analyze how action becomes substantively oriented to values, and his focus upon the manner in which persons, in different social settings, create meaning for their lives. This discussion of Weber’s sociology seeks to articulate these central themes while calling attention to the forceful ways in which values, culture, and religion come to the fore in his sociology; domination, power, conflict, and individual interests remain central; and “clear concepts” serve as indispensable foundational cornerstones. This large task can best be pursued by addressing his three major works – PE, E&S, and the Economic Ethics of the World Religions series – and by a brief scrutiny of the major contours of his sociology of civilizations. Before doing so, a turn to central aspects of the methodology underlying his sociology is indispensable.

Weber’s methodology Weber’s sociology departs from a critique of all approaches that view societies as quasi-organic, holistic units and their separate “parts” as components fully integrated into a larger “system” of objective structures. All organic schools of thought understand the larger collectivity within which the individual acts as a delimited structure, and social action and interaction as particularistic expressions of this “whole.” German romantic and conservative thought, as well as the sociologies of Comte, Durkheim, and Parsons fall within this tradition. Organic theories generally postulate a degree of societal integration questionable to Weber. He never viewed societies as clearly formed and closed entities with

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delineated boundaries. Seeing the likelihood for fragmentation, tension, open conflict, and domination and the use of power, Weber rejects the notion that societies can be best understood as unified. Moreover, according to him, if organic theories are utilized other than as a means of facilitating preliminary conceptualization, a high risk of “reification” arises: “society” and the “organic whole” may become viewed as the fundamental unit of analysis rather than the individual (1968: 14–15). This may occur to such an extent that persons are incorrectly understood as simply the “socialized products” of societal forces. Weber argues, to the contrary, that all are capable of interpreting their social realities, bestowing “subjective meaning” upon certain aspects of them, and initiating independent action: “[We are] cultural beings endowed with the capacity and will to take a deliberate stand toward the world and to lend it meaning (Sinn)” (1949: 81, translation altered, original emphasis). Many of the pivotal axioms of his methodology remain important to sociology even today. Only a few of its foundational components can be examined: interpretive understanding, the four types of social action, subjective meaning, valueneutrality, and the ideal type. Finally, the aim of Weber’s sociology will be noted.

Interpretive understanding and subjective meaning At the core of Weber’s sociology stands the attempt by sociologists to “understand interpretively” (verstehen) the ways in which persons view their own “social action.” This subjectively meaningful action constitutes the social scientist’s concern rather than merely “reactive” or “imitative” behavior (as occurs, for example, when persons in a crowd expect rain and simultaneously open their umbrellas). Social action, he insists, involves both a “meaningful orientation of behavior to that of others” and the individual’s interpretive, or reflective, capacity (1968: 22–4). Persons are social, but not only social. They are endowed with the ability to actively interpret situations, interactions, and relationships by reference to values, beliefs, interests, emotions, power, authority, law, traditions, ideas, etc. Sociology … is a science that offers an interpretive understanding of social action and, in doing so, provides a causal explanation of its course and effects. We shall speak of “action” insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior – be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Action is “social” insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course. (1968: 4, translation altered, original emphasis)9

The central position of meaningful action separates Weber’s sociology fundamentally from all behaviorist, structuralist, and positivist schools. Sociologists can understand the meaningfulness of others’ actions either through “rational understanding,” which involves an intellectual grasp of the meaning actors attribute to their actions, or through “intuitive” (or “empathic”) understanding, which refers to the comprehension of “the emotional context in which the action [takes] place” (1968: 5). Thus, for example, the motivation behind the orientation of civil servants to a bureaucracy’s impersonal statutes and prescriptions can be understood by the sociologist, as can the motivation behind the orientation of good friends to one another. To the extent that this occurs, a causal explanation of action, Weber argues, is provided. Because it attends alone to external activity, stimulus/

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response behaviorism neglects the issues foremost to Weber: the diverse possible motives behind observable activity, the manner in which the subjective meaningfulness of the act varies accordingly, and the significant differences that follow in respect to action. This capacity of the human species to lend meaning to conduct implies, Weber asserts emphatically, that the social sciences should never adopt natural science methodologies.

The four types of social action and subjective meaning Social action can be best conceptualized as involving one of four “types of meaningful action”: means-end rational, value-rational, affectual, or traditional action. Each type refers to ideal-typical (see below) motivational orientations of actors. Weber defines action as means-end rational (zweckrational) “when the end, the means, and the secondary results are all rationally taken into account and weighed. This involves a rational consideration of alternative means to the end, of the relations of the end to the secondary consequences, and finally of the relative importance of different possible ends” (1968: 26). Similarly, persons possess the capacity to act value-rationally. This occurs when social action is “determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success …. Value-rational action always involves ‘commands’ or ‘demands’ which, in the actor’s opinion, are binding (verbindlich) on him.” In addition, “determined by the actor’s specific affects and feeling states,” affectual action, which involves an emotional attachment, must be distinguished clearly from value-rational and means-end rational action. Finally, traditional action, “determined by ingrained habituation” and age-old customs and conventions, often approaches merely a routine reaction to common stimuli. It lacks a highly self-conscious aspect and stands on the borderline of subjectively meaningful action (see 1968: 24–6).10 Each type of meaningful action can be found in all epochs and all civilizations. The social action of even “primitive” peoples may be means-end rational (see, for example, 1968: 400, 422–6), and modern man is not endowed with a greater inherent capacity for a certain type of action than his ancestors. However, as a result of identifiable social configurations, some epochs may tend predominantly to call forth a particular type of action. Weber is convinced that, by utilizing the types of social action typology as a heuristic tool, sociologists can understand – and hence explain causally – even the ways in which the social action of persons living in radically different cultures is subjectively meaningful. Assuming that, as a result of intensive study, researchers have succeeded in becoming thoroughly familiar with a particular social context and hence capable of imagining themselves “into” it, an assessment can be made of the extent to which actions approximate one of the types of social action. The subjective meaningfulness of the motives for these actions – whether customs and conventions, means-end rational calculations, orientations to emotions, or orientations to values – then becomes understandable.11 In this manner, Weber’s “interpretive” sociology enables the sociologist to comprehend action in terms of the actor’s own intentions.12 This foundational emphasis upon a pluralism of motives distinguishes Weber’s sociology unequivocally from all schools of behaviorism, all approaches that place

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social structures at the forefront (for example, those rooted in Durkheim’s “social facts” or Marx’s classes), and all positivist approaches that endow norms, roles, and rules with a determining power over persons. Even when social action seems tightly bonded to a social structure, a heterogeneity of motives must be recognized. A great array of motives within a single “external form” is, Weber argues, both analytically and empirically possible and sociologically significant. The subjective meaningfulness of action varies even within the firm organizational structure of the political or religious sect.13 However, just this reasoning leads Weber to a conundrum: for what variety of subjective motives do persons orient their social action in common, such that demarcated groupings are formulated? This question assumes a great urgency, for he is convinced that the absence of such orientations – toward, for example, the state, bureaucratic organizations, traditions, and values – means that “structures” cease to exist. The state, for example, in the end is nothing more than the patterned actionorientations of its politicians, judges, civil servants, and citizens.14 Far from formal methodological postulates only, these foundational distinctions directly anchor Weber’s empirical studies, as will become apparent. The investigation of the subjective meaning of action stood at the very center, for example, of his famous “Protestant ethic thesis.” Yet Weber engaged in a massive empirical effort to understand the subjective meaning of “the other” on its own terms throughout his comparative-historical sociology, whether, for example, that of the Confucian scholar, the Buddhist monk, the Hindu Brahmin, the prophets of the Old Testament, feudal rulers, monarchs and kings, or functionaries in bureaucracies. For what subjective reasons do people render obedience to authority? Weber wished to understand the diverse ways in which persons subjectively “make sense” of their activities. He argues that sociologists should attempt to do so even when the subjective “meaning-complexes” they discover seem strange or odd to them.

Value-freedom and value-relevance Hence, Weber’s sociology does not seek to discover “an objectively ‘correct’ meaning or one which is ‘true’ in some metaphysical sense” (1968: 4).15 Moreover, neither empathy toward nor hostility against the actors under investigation is central here. Researchers are obligated, with respect to the research process, to set aside their ideological preferences, personal values, likes, and dislikes (of Puritans, for example, or the bureaucracy’s functionaries) as much as humanly possible and to make every effort to remain fair and impartial. Clear standards of inquiry as well as an unbiased observation, measurement, comparison, and evaluation of the sources must be the prescriptive ideal of social scientists. Researchers must strive to uphold this ideal even if the habits, values, and practices of the groups under investigation are discovered to be repulsive. To maintain such an “objective” and “value-free” (Wertfreiheit) posture with respect to the gathering and evaluation of data, Weber knew, is not an easy task. We are all “cultural beings,” and hence values remain inextricably intertwined with our thinking and action; a thin line separates “facts” from “values,” and values intrude even into our modes of observation. Indeed, modern Western science itself arose as a consequence of a series of specific economic, political, stratification, and cultural

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developments. Nonetheless, the social scientist must make a concerted effort to distinguish empirically-based arguments and conclusions from normative – or value-based – arguments and conclusions. The latter should be excluded. However, with regard to a foundational aspect of the research process, values remain appropriately central, Weber insists: the selection of topics. Far from “objective” in some metaphysical or predetermined sense, our choice – unavoidably so, for him – is directly related to our values (Wertbezogenheit) and our interests. A sociologist, for example, who strongly believes that persons of different ethnic groupings should be treated equally, may be drawn – as a result of this value – to study how civil rights movements have assisted heretofore excluded groups to acquire basic rights. Yet, with respect to the investigative task of the social sciences, Weber again argues that researchers must strive to exclude all personal values: that is, valuejudgments that pronounce, in the name of science, a particular activity or way of life as noble or base, ultimately rational or irrational, provincial or cosmopolitan. The social sciences will not – and should not – assist us to decide with certainty which values are superior or inferior. Those of the Sermon on the Mount cannot be proven scientifically to be “better” than those of the Rig Vedas. Nor can social scientists argue that specific values should guide the lives of people in a specific situation. Science provides “the tools and the training for thought,” insight, and awareness of “inconsistent facts.” It also offers clarity in respect to the various primary and secondary consequences of utilizing a certain means to reach a specified goal – and hence confronts us with choices. However, it must never be allowed to take responsibility for our decisions (2005: 331–6; 1949). Weber pronounced such an ethos of “value-neutrality” as indispensable to the definition of sociology – if it wished to be a social science rather than a political endeavor: “Science today is a ‘vocation’ organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the world” (2005: 334–5). How does the sociologist best proceed to ascertain subjective meaning in the groups under investigation? How is this task accomplished in an unbiased fashion? An answer to these questions requires a brief discussion of Weber’s ideal-typical mode of analysis.

Ideal types Although Weber takes the meaningful action of individuals as his basic unit of analysis, his interpretive sociology never views social life as an “endless drift” of solitary and unconnected action-orientations. The diverse ways in which persons act in concert in groups captures his attention rather than the social action of the isolated individual. Indeed, he defines the sociological enterprise as oriented to the investigation of the subjective meaning of persons in delimited groups and the identification of regularities of action: “There can be observed, within the realm of social action, actual empirical regularities; that is, courses of action that are repeated by the actor or (possibly also: simultaneously) occur among numerous actors because the subjective meaning is typically meant to be the same. Sociological

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investigation is concerned with these typical modes of action” (1968: 29, translation altered, original emphasis). Such patterned action can result, he argues, not only from an orientation to values, but also to affectual, traditional, and even means-end rational action. A fundamental theme in his sociology explores the various ways in which, as a consequence of configurations of empirical causes, merely imitative and reactive behavior is uprooted from its random flow and transformed into meaning-based regularities anchored in one of the four types of social action. Weber’s major heuristic concept – the ideal type – “documents” these regularities of meaningful action as they occur in groups. These research tools chart the actionorientations of individuals in groups – and nothing more. His ideal type “the Puritan,” for example, identifies the regular action of these believers (for example, an orientation toward methodical work and an ascetic style of life). Hence, Weber’s sociology steers away from a focus upon isolated action, detailed historical narrative, and diffuse, non-empirical concepts (such as “society,” “social differentiation,” and “the question of social order”). Instead, it seeks to capture patterned action through the formation of ideal types. This level of analysis prevails throughout his texts. How are ideal types formed? It does not involve simply a summarization or classification of social action. Rather, and although construction of the ideal type is rooted thoroughly in empirical reality, it is formulated, first, through a conscious exaggeration of the essential features of a pattern of action of interest to the sociologist, and, second, through a synthesis of these characteristic action-orientations into an internally unified and logically rigorous concept: An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more viewpoints and by the combination of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent individual appearances, which are arranged according to these one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct. In its conceptual purity this construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. (1949: 90, translation altered; original emphasis)

While inductive procedures from empirical observations are first followed, deductive procedures then guide the logical ordering of the identified patterns of action into a unified and clear construct. Nonetheless, the anchoring of ideal types empirically precludes their comprehension as “abstract” or “reified” concepts (see 1949: 92–107). Above all, according to Weber, ideal types serve to assist empirical, causeoriented inquiry rather than to “replicate” the external world (an impossible task, owing to the unending flow of events as well as the infinite diversity and complexity of even a particular social phenomenon) or to articulate an ideal, or hoped-for development. Thus, the “Puritan” portrays accurately the subjective meaning of neither a particular Puritan nor all Puritans (1968: 19–22). The same holds for ideal types of, for example, bureaucracies, prophets, intellectuals, or charismatic leaders. As Weber notes: “Concepts are primarily analytical instruments for the intellectual mastery of the empirically given and can be only that” (1949: 106, translation altered).

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Once formed as clear concepts that capture the regular action-orientations of persons in groups, ideal types ground Weber’s causal sociology in a fundamental fashion: they enable the precise definition of empirical patterned action. As a logical construct that “documents” regular social action, the ideal type establishes points of reference – or guidelines – against which patterns of subjective meaning in a particular case can be compared and identified precisely. Hence, the uniqueness of cases can be defined clearly through an assessment of approximation to or deviation from the theoretically constructed type. “Ideal types … are of great value for research and of high systematic value for expository purposes when they are used as conceptual instruments for comparison and the measurement of reality. They are indispensable for this purpose” (1949: 97; see also 1949: 43, 90–3; 1946b: 323–4).16

The goal of Weber’s sociology Commentaries upon Weber’s works have frequently failed to note that he orients his research to discrete problems and the causal analysis of specific cases and developments. He proposes that the causal explanation of this “historical individual” should serve as sociology’s primary aim: “We wish to understand the reality that surrounds our lives, in which we are placed, in its characteristic uniqueness. We wish to understand on the one hand its context (Zusammenhang) and the cultural significance of its particular manifestations in their contemporary form, and on the other the causes of it becoming historically so and not otherwise” (1949: 72, translation altered, original emphasis; see also 1949: 69; 1968:10). Hence, Weber strongly opposed the numerous positivist schools of thought in his day that sought, following the method offered by the natural sciences, to define a set of general laws of history and then to explain all specific developments by deduction. He forcefully rejected the position that the social sciences should aim “to construct a closed system of concepts which can encompass and classify reality in some definitive manner and from which it can be deduced again” (1949: 84), and expressed his clear opposition to the view that laws themselves comprise causal explanations. Because concrete realities, individual cases and developments, and subjective meaning cannot be deduced from them, laws are incapable of providing the knowledge of reality that would offer causal explanations, Weber maintains. Particular cases and developments can be explained causally only by “other equally individual configurations” (1949: 75–6; see Kalberg 1994b: 81–4).17 These pivotal components of Weber’s methodology will be better understood after a consideration of his major sociological investigations: PE, EEWR, and E&S.

The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism Weber wrote the latter half of PE after returning from his three-month sojourn in the United States (1904). Its thesis regarding the important role played by values in the development of modern capitalism set off an intense debate that has, remarkably, continued to this day. A genuine classic, PE is both his best-known and most accessible work. Its methodology exemplifies a variety of foundational procedures utilized

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throughout his sociology even though Weber here comes prominently to the fore as a theorist who attends alone to values and ideas. Finally, this study constitutes Weber’s first attempt to isolate the uniqueness of the modern West and to define its causal origins.

The background A number of historians and economists in Weber’s time emphasized the importance for economic development of technological advances, the influx of precious metals, and population increases. Others were convinced that the greed, economic interests, and “desire for riches” of all – but especially of great “economic supermen” (the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts, for example) and the bourgeoisie in general – pushed economic development past the agrarian and feudal stages to mercantilism and modern capitalism. Disagreeing with all of these explanations, evolutionists argued that the expansion of production, trade, banking, and commerce could best be understood as the clear manifestation of a general, societal-wide unfolding of “progress.” Weber insisted that none of these forces offered an explanation for that which distinguished modern capitalism from capitalism as it had existed throughout the ages: relatively free market exchange, separation of the business from the household, sophisticated bookkeeping, formally free labor, and a specific “economic ethos.” This ethos stood behind the rigorous organization of work, the methodical approach to labor, and the systematic pursuit of profit typical of this form of capitalism. It was constituted from an “idea of the duty of the individual to increase his wealth, which is assumed to be a self-defined interest in itself” (2009: 71); the notion that “labor [must be] performed as if it were an absolute end in itself” (2009: 78); the idea that “the acquisition of money, and more and more money, takes place … simultaneously with the strictest avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of it” (2009: 72); the view that the “acquisition of money … is … the result and the expression of competence and proficiency in a calling” (2009: 73); and “the frame of mind … that strives systematically and rationally in a calling for legitimate profit” (2009: 80, original emphasis). Embodied in these ideas was a spirit of capitalism, and Weber argues vehemently that a full understanding of the origins of modern capitalism must, first, take cognizance of the causal push placed into motion by this “modern economic ethos” and, second, identify its sources (2009: 73, 97). Hence, an investigation of the specific ancestry of this “spirit,” rather than the sources in general of either modern capitalism or capitalism, was PE’s modest project (see 2009: 71, 73–4, 87–8, 96–7; 2001: 105–9). After citing numerous passages from the writings of Benjamin Franklin, whose values represent to Weber the “spirit” of capitalism in a pure form (see 2009: 70–1), he asserts that he has here discovered an ethos, “the violation of [which] is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty” (2009: 71, original emphasis).18 However, in seeking to unravel the causal origins of this new set of values and “organization of life” (Lebensführung), this “positive critique of historical materialism” rejects the view that capitalism’s dominant class gave birth to this spirit (see, for example: 2009: 70–88, 215–16; Kalberg 1996: 56). It opposes as well the argument that social structures stand at its origin (see 2009: 88, 103–39; 1946c: 292).

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Instead, Weber wished to explore, against strong opponents, the “idealist side” (see, for example, 2009: 158–9).

The argument19 After observing various ways in which Protestants seemed attracted to business-oriented occupations and organized their daily lives in an especially rigorous fashion, Weber began to explore Protestant doctrine. He discovered a “world-oriented ethos” in the Westminster Confession (1647) and the sermons of a seventeenth-century Puritan successor of John Calvin (1509–64), the activist minister Richard Baxter (1615–91) in England. For Weber, the revisions of Calvin’s teachings by Baxter and other leading members of the Reformed Church (“Puritan Divines”) sought above all to banish the bleak conclusions rationally implied by Calvin’s “Doctrine of Predestination”: if the question of salvation constituted the burning question to believers (see 2009: 110–11), if the “salvation status” of the faithful was predestined from the very beginning, and if God had selected only a tiny minority to be saved, among the devout massive fatalism, despair, loneliness, and anxiety logically followed (see 2009: 103–5, 108–18, 500 n.76). Recognizing that the harshness of this decree precluded its continued endorsement by most believers (see 2009: 110), Baxter undertook doctrinal alterations that, according to Weber, launched the Protestant ethic. Along with Calvin, Baxter acknowledged that the mortal and weak devout cannot know the reasons behind God’s decision-making; the motives of this majestic, distant, and all-mighty Deity of the Old Testament remain incomprehensible to lowly terrestrial inhabitants (2009: 106–8). However, Baxter emphasized that “the world exists to serve the glorification of God” (2009: 109) and that God wishes His kingdom to be one of wealth, equality, and prosperity – for abundance among “His children” would surely serve to praise His goodness and justice (see 2009: 109–10, 142–3, 532 n.39). Understood as a means toward the creation of God’s affluent community on earth, regular and dedicated labor – work in a “calling” – now acquired a religious significance among the devout. Believers comprehended their worldly economic activity as in service to a demanding God and thus sacrosanct, and they viewed themselves as noble instruments – or tools (2009: 120) – of His Commandments and His Divine Plan: “Work in the service of all impersonal social usefulness [promotes] the glory of God – and hence [is] to be recognized as desired by Him” (2009: 109; see 144–7, 155–6, 532 n.39, 547 n.122). Indeed, those believers capable of systematic work on behalf of God’s Plan could convince themselves that the enormous strength required to labor methodically must have emanated from the favoring Hand of their omnipotent and omniscient Deity – and, the faithful could further conclude, God would favor only those he had chosen to be among the predestined (see 2009: 151–2). Moreover, continuous and systematic work possesses an undeniable virtue for the good Christian, according to Baxter: it tames the creaturely and base side of human nature and thereby facilitates the important concentration of the mind upon God and the “uplifting” of the soul (2009: 143–4). Finally, “intense worldly activity” also effectively counteracts the penetrating doubt, anxiety, and sense of unworthiness induced by the Predestination doctrine and instills the self-confidence that allows believers to consider themselves among the chosen (see 2009: 111–12). In this

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manner, methodical work, and the “systematic rational formation of the believer’s ethical life” (2009: 121), became providential. Nonetheless, the singular power of the Protestant ethic to shatter the deeply rooted “traditional economic ethic” originated not simply in these ways, Weber argues. In addition, and if one wishes to understand fully its capacity to call forth among Puritan entrepreneurs an “uninterrupted self-control” and a “planned regulation of one’s own life” (2009: 121; see 122), a further adjustment undertaken by Baxter must be noted. According to the Predestination doctrine, believers could never know their salvation status; however, in light of God’s desire to see the creation of an earthly kingdom of abundance to serve His glory, they could logically conclude that the production of great wealth for a community by an individual could be viewed as a sign that God favored this individual. In effect, personal wealth itself became to the faithful evidence of their salvation. Omnipotent and omniscient, God surely would never allow one of the condemned to praise His Glory: “the acquisition of wealth, when it was the fruit of work in a vocational calling [was viewed] as God’s blessing” (2009: 151–2, original emphasis). In His universe, nothing happened by chance. Thus, although the devout could never be absolutely certain of their membership among the saved, more business-oriented believers could seek to produce the evidence – literally, wealth and profit (see 2009: 146) – that enabled them to convince themselves of their salvation. In view of the unbearable anxiety provoked by the central religious question – “am I among the saved?” – in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, a psychological certainty of a favorable salvation status was the crucial issue, Weber emphasizes. Baxter’s revisions allowed the faithful to comprehend their successful accumulation of wealth, and its reinvestment for the betterment of God’s Community, as tangible testimony to their membership among the predestined elect (see 2009: 154, 545–6 n.115). Uniquely, riches now acquired among believers a positive religious significance: because wealth constituted a sign that indicated one’s membership among the foreordained elect, it lost its traditionally suspect character and became endowed with a “psychological reward.” And the most adequate means toward great wealth – methodical work – was further intensified. In this manner, a set of labor-oriented values heretofore scorned (see 2009: 74–5, 85–6) became of utmost centrality in the lives of the devout. Not the desire for riches alone nor the efficient adaptation to technological innovations, but only work motivated “from within” by an “internally binding” set of religious values was empowered to introduce, Weber argues, a “systematization of life organized around ethical principles” (2009: 119) and a “planned regulation of one’s own life” on behalf of work and the pursuit of wealth (2009: 121; see also 120–3). Only this ethically20 ordered life anchored in values was endowed with the methodicalness and intensity requisite for an uprooting and banishing of the traditional economic ethic. PE’s last chapter outlines the distinct frame of mind and Puritan style of life at the foundation of this Protestant ethic.

The Puritan style of life People engaged in business and oriented to profit were now no longer scorned as calculating, greedy, and self-interested actors; rather, they became perceived as honest employers engaged in a task given by God. A good conscience was bestowed

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upon them, even those engaged in hard competition (2009: 146, 154–5). Similarly, the re-investment of profit and surplus income signified loyalty to God’s grand design and an acknowledgment that all riches emanated from the hand of this omnipotent Deity. Because believers viewed themselves as merely the earthly trustees of goods awarded by their divinity, all wealth had to be utilized on behalf of His purposes only – that is, in order to build the affluent kingdom that would praise His glory (2009: 150–3). Hence, the devout practiced frugality, restricted consumption (especially of luxury goods), and saved in large quantities (2009: 150–1). A preference to live modestly characterized the Puritan outlook, for to indulge desires would weaken the required focus upon God’s will, the faithful knew. Indeed, and although wealth was now created on a large scale, its enjoyment became “morally reprehensible.” The pursuit of an ostentatious mode of living became perceived as obstructing the goal of creating the righteous kingdom on earth in His honor. As self-idolatry, the search for riches as an end in itself, and all avarice and covetousness, became strictly prohibited (2009: 142, 151–2). Furthermore, these modest living habits must be accompanied by the appropriate demeanor: reserve, self-control, respectability, and dignity. All deep affectual ties to others, which would only compete with the more important allegiance to God, must be avoided. The emotions, after all, were of no relevance to the all-important certitudo salutis question, the Puritans knew. On the contrary, an alert and cerebral monitoring and directing of action proved indispensable. Continuous activity – not leisure and enjoyment – increased the majesty of God. And an unwillingness to work, or a lapse into begging, assumed now a providential meaning,21 as did the believer’s use of time – for “every hour not spent at work is an hour lost in service to God’s greater glory” (2009: 143). “Time is money” and it must not be “wasted.” The “responsible” person of “good moral character” now appeared (2009: 142–4, 150). Finally, owing to the Puritan perception of feudalism’s aristocracy as lacking an orientation to God and hence as decadent, the purchase of noble titles and all imitation of the manorial lifestyle, as commonly occurred among the nouveaux riches in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, could not appeal to these sincere believers. This “feudalization of wealth” precluded the reinvestment of profits in a business and further pulled the devout away from an orientation to God. Property, the Puritans knew, must be used alone for purposes of production and to increase wealth (2009: 146, 152–3; 1968: 1200). Taken together, these features constitute the Puritan life outlook and style of life of the seventeenth century.22 When combined with the methodical-rational organization of life rooted in this-worldly asceticism, this style of life comprised the Protestant ethic’s uniqueness, Weber maintained. A new “type of human being” now appeared forcefully on the stage of Western history. This “modern ethos” – a “Protestant ethic” – uprooted economic traditionalism, he contends, and stood at the source of the spirit of capitalism. Carried by ascetic sects and churches (mainly the Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Quakers), this ethic spread throughout several New England, Dutch, and English communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both the disciplined, hard labor in a calling and the wealth that followed from a steadfast adherence to its religious values marked a person as “chosen.” One century later, in

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Benjamin Franklin’s more secularized America, the Protestant ethic had spread beyond churches and sects and into entire communities. As it did so, however, its specifically religious component became weakened and “routinized” into a “utilitarian-colored ethos” (2009: 71–2, 153–5, 157), namely, a spirit of capitalism.23 Rather than believed to be among the “chosen elect,” adherents of this ethos, such as Franklin, were viewed simply as upright, respectable, community-oriented citizens of good moral character.

The Protestant sects and ethical action After returning from his three-month whirlwind tour of the United States in late November, 1904, Weber finished PE and wrote two short essays on the Protestant sects in America (see 2009: 185–204). His “Protestant ethic thesis” must be understood as constituted from both PE and these essays. The process of testifying to one’s salvation status assumed significant new contours in the course of the eighteenth century. It moved away from the English Puritan engaged in a lonely attempt to orient his activities to God and to create “evidence” of his salvation, Weber holds, and toward believers in America situated deeply within a social milieu – namely, in Protestant sects. Hence, he now expands his analysis beyond PE’s question of how the faithful prove their devoutness before God to an investigation of how the devout testify to their sincere belief in sects before men (2009: 198). Although believers drew upon an internal strength in order to lead “the moral life” and retain a focus upon God, the sect’s strict monitoring of behavior and unrelenting pressure to conform significantly influenced members’ ethical conduct. This cohesive group, Weber argues, confirmed the beliefs and psychological rewards enunciated by Puritan doctrine and conveyed them systematically to the faithful. The sect, in doing so, sustained the ethical action originally expected by the Puritan Divines and contributed mightily to the formation of a Protestant ethic. The sect’s strong grounding of ethical action and influence upon the unfolding of a methodically-organized life became manifest in several ways, Weber maintains. First, as a consequence of selective admission procedures, sect membership itself legitimized and guaranteed one’s good character. This “certificate of moral qualification,” combined with the believer’s focus upon God, clearly defined every transgression: a “fall from grace” had occurred rather than a random and forgivable lapse. This Protestant sect, however, having banished Catholicism’s mechanism – the Confession – to address sinfulness, lacked institutionalized means to relieve internal distress (2009: 198). A qualitative strengthening of the necessity for the faithful continuously to act in a righteous manner resulted, according to Weber. Second, the sect’s self-governing feature also enhanced its capacity to call forth ethical activity. The exercise of discipline and authority in this group was distinct from the exercise of discipline and authority in churches, Weber maintained: although less centralized and authoritarian because now in the hands of laymen, it became for this reason more thorough and encompassing (2009: 195–6). Any misstep would surely be revealed.24 Third, the definition of the American sect as an exclusive organization of pure and “certified” believers implied that expulsion would follow immediately upon any

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exposure of “poor character.” This harsh treatment involved an intolerable situation for the expelled, Weber emphasized: through its innumerable activities (church suppers, Sunday school, charitable activities, team sports, Bible study groups, etc.), the sect not only shaped members efficiently and hence provided a guarantee of appropriate socialization, but also monopolized the believer’s social life. Those excluded for “dishonorable conduct” immediately “[suffered] … a kind of social boycott” and a collapse of their entire social existence (Weber 2005: 287–8; see 196, 198; 1968: 1206). The necessity to “hold one’s own” under the watchful eyes of peers – to testify unceasingly through ethical conduct to one’s membership among the elect – now became intensified, as did the sect’s capacity to mold action: “The most powerful individual interest of social self-esteem [was put] in the service of this breeding of traits” (Weber 2009: 198–9).25 Fourth, Weber refers to a related social-psychological dynamic to explain further the unique capacity of the Protestant sects to cultivate and sustain ethical activity. The faithful, as a consequence of the sect’s selection of members on the basis of moral qualities, were viewed within their geographical regions as persons of great integrity and even trustworthiness. As the sect – largely for this reason – acquired social prestige, members became subject to enhanced conformity pressures to uphold “good moral character” standards. Thus, supervision and monitoring among the devout became further intensified, for the sect’s favorable reputation must be maintained. A shaping of an ethical posture took place also in this manner, Weber contends. Indeed, by engaging the entire person and bestowing both social honor and esteem,26 the sect had the effect, especially in contrast to the authoritarianism of churches, of disciplining believers on behalf of ethical action to a unique degree of intensity: “According to all experience there is no stronger means of breeding traits than through the necessity of holding one’s own in the circle of one’s associates” (2009: 198; see 195–7; 1968: 1206). Weber saw here a source of American initiative-taking and the American notion of self-respect. Fifth, and finally, the sect constituted a functional and “impersonal” (sachliche) group: it was oriented above all to tasks in service to God’s greater glory and to the construction of His kingdom. By promoting “the precise ordering of the individual into the instrumental task pursued by the group,” this “mechanism for the achievement of … material and ideal goals” circumscribed affect-laden and tradition-laden relationships among the faithful (Weber 2005: 286; see 2009: 492 n.34). Hence, an emotion-based mode of interaction never prevailed in the sect.27 In addition, a halo never encompassed the sect – one into which the faithful could merge amid a sacred glow: all residues of any “mystical total essence floating above [the believer] and enveloping him” were banished (2005: 286).28 Finally, a sentimental, warm, and comfortable mode of interaction rooted in familiar and longstanding conventions and customs was also excluded.29 Instead, an orientation by the devout to tasks in service to God and high standards of ethical conduct reigned. Stalwart believers, evaluated exclusively by reference to the “religious qualities evident in [their] conduct,” constantly attended to the necessity of holding their own (2005: 284–6). Despite the typically intense interaction among sect members, “association” and “sociability” (Vergesellschaftung) characterized interaction, Weber maintains (see Scaff 1998), rather than a cultivation of deep emotional ties or an immersion into the group.

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A “type of human being” now appears located in principle primarily outside the “universal organizations”: the family, clan, and tribe. Moreover, far from random or temporary, this new location is legitimized by religious beliefs at the core of this person. In sum, by juxtaposing an unceasing orientation to activities and tasks, intense conformity pressures, and a hold-your-own individualism, sects pulled the devout away from emotion-oriented relationships, tradition-oriented sentimentality, and all inclinations to attribute a sacred aura to groups. However, never abandoning believers either to the flux and flow of an interest-oriented utilitarianism and the “practical-rational” organization of life, or to an endless random and nihilistic drift, the sect immediately took firm hold of the faithful and bound them tightly within its own social-psychological dynamic – one that actively cultivated, sustained, and rejuvenated ethical action. The methodical-rational organization of life typically found among ascetic Protestants arose not only, Weber contends, from the individual’s lonely quest to create “evidence” of his salvation and the psychological rewards placed upon ethical action by the Puritan Divines, as charted in PE, but also from the Protestant sect’s efficient “implementation” of this organized life. Indeed, the requirement of this group – to insure that only the morally qualified participate in communion – can be understood as itself placing into motion a major thrust toward the congregation’s many social activities, for they enabled the indispensable monitoring of members’ conduct.30 Weber perceives this capacity of the sect as central for the development of ascetic Protestantism’s economic ethic: Unqualified integrity, evidenced by, for example, a system of fixed prices in retail trade, strong management of credit, avoidance of all “worldly” consumption and every kind of debauchery, in short, life-long sober diligence in one’s “calling,” appears as the specific, indeed, really the only form by which persons can demonstrate their qualification as a Christian and therewith their moral legitimation for membership in the sect. (1985: 8, emphasis in original)31

To Weber, “The sect and its derivations are one of [America’s] unwritten but vital constitutional elements, since they shape the individual more than any other influence” (Weber 1968: 1207). For all these reasons, high standards of conduct accompanied methodical work and the search for wealth and profit. Rewards were apparent – as were punishments. Sect members in search of bank loans and financial opportunities of various sorts were viewed as creditworthy,32 and the devout became perceived as honest merchants who could be trusted even with the customer’s money. A halo of respectability replaced the traditional view of the businessperson as an unethical and manipulative figure.33 And this aura must be maintained, for otherwise potential customers would abandon their preference to conduct business with sect members and a boycott would ensue (see Weber 1985: 9; 2009: 186–8, 193–4; 1968: 1204–6). Both a “social existence” and business reputations were at stake. Specifically American forms of “social trust” and “respectability” developed. In this manner the impact of the Protestant sect upon the Protestant ethic proved significant, Weber argues. The sect remained a functional and impersonal organization that subordinated believers to its overarching tasks and coordination of labor.

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Formal legal equality, abstract norms, and bureaucratization, as well as modern capitalism’s purposeful mode of utilizing persons and the “lifestyle in [its] … middle classes,” were all here foreshadowed: “this-worldly asceticism … and the specific discipline of the sects bred the capitalist frame of mind and the rational ‘professional’ (Berufsmensch) who was needed by capitalism” (Weber 1968: 1209–10; see 2005: 286; 2009: 492 n.34).34 Thus, the sects proved crucial in several ways to Weber’s argument. They conveyed an intense economic ethic into the worlds of labor and commerce far more efficiently than the admonitions of Baxter and the Puritan Divines. Moreover, albeit transformed, the sects formulated legacies that endured: manifest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in secular form, their economic ethic penetrated directly into arrays of associations, clubs, and societies. These new carrier groups cast the values of the direct successor of the Protestant ethic – the spirit of capitalism – through generations and even into the twentieth century. Only an acknowledgment of the complementary character of PE and the sect essays captures Weber’s full “Protestant ethic thesis.” He investigated the “causal origins” of the spirit of capitalism in these ways. The subjective meaning of devout believers, as captured through religious sources and values rather than by reference to social structural factors, rational choices, economic interests, domination and power, specific classes, or evolutionary progress, remains central throughout. The spirit of capitalism, Weber held, gave a decisive, although in the end unquantifiable, push to modern capitalism’s development. Nonetheless, when he turns briefly to the present era in PE’s last pages, he calls attention to an altogether different dynamic. Once the spirit of capitalism had assisted the growth of modern capitalism and as this type of economy becomes firmly entrenched amid massive industrialism, it sustains itself, he argues, on the basis of means-end rational action alone, carried out in reference to pragmatic necessities. If present at all, “the idea of an ‘obligation to search for and then accept a vocational calling’ now wanders around in our lives as the ghost of past religious beliefs.” The Puritan “wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be” (2009: 157–8, original emphasis). As a case study of the spirit of capitalism’s origins, PE stands as a powerful demonstration of the ways in which social action may be influenced by non-economic forces. Sociological analysis must not focus exclusively upon material interests, power, structural forces, and “economic forms” to the neglect of action-orientations toward religion and “economic ethics,” Weber insists. Yet sociologists must also reject a focus upon “ideas” alone. “Both sides” must be given their due and a “single formula” must always be avoided: … of course it can not be the intention here to set a one-sided spiritualistic analysis of the causes of culture and history in place of an equally one-sided “materialistic” analysis. Both are equally possible. Historical truth, however, is served equally little if either of these analyses claims to be the conclusion of an investigation rather than its preparatory stage. (2009: 159, original emphasis)

Hence, and although PE demonstrates the ways in which values influence the playing out of economic interests and provide the “content” for social structures,

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Weber recognized that a full understanding of the origins of modern capitalism requires a series of broad-ranging multicausal and comparative investigations. “Ideas” and “interests” must be scrutinized. Furthermore, if the spirit of capitalism is to have a viable impact upon the development of modern capitalism, he was convinced, constellations of political, economic, stratification, legal, and other factors must congeal to formulate a conducive context (see 2009: 159, 543–4 n.96; Marshall 1980). PE comprised simply the first step in Weber’s grand scheme to investigate the causal origins of modern capitalism. EEWR took up this theme35 and, indeed, extended it to encompass the question of the origins of “modern Western rationalism.” The other major work of his mature sociology, E&S – a systematic treatise that lays out the conceptual tools and research procedures for his wide-ranging comparative-historical sociology – provided the theoretical framework for the EEWR studies. This analytic opus must first be addressed. In both works, Weber renounced any search for a single, encompassing causal equation: “This sort of construction is better left to that type of dilettante who believes in the ‘unity’ of the ‘social psyche’ and its reducibility to one formula” (2009: 550 n.142, original emphasis).

Economy and Society Incomplete and published posthumously by Weber’s wife, E&S addresses, as does EEWR, the ways in which the West must be understood as unique. Frequently, by reference to configurations of both “ideal” and “material” patterns of action of persons in groups, it also explores the causal origins of the West’s specific developmental pathway. However, unlike EEWR and PE, E&S seeks mainly to provide a systematic grounding for the discipline of sociology as distinguished from the fields of history and economics. This three-volume work constitutes the analytic treatise for Weber’s comparative-historical, interpretive sociology. Written over a period of nine years (1909–18), E&S ranges across an astonishingly broad comparative palette. Weber examines, for example, status groups, the state, the nation, classes, ethnic groups, the family, the clan, and political groups on the one hand, and a vast array of types of economies, cities, magic-based and salvation religions, and rulership and legal groups on the other hand. He does so in sweeping comparative-historical perspective, rather than by reference to the twentieth century or a single society alone. His strokes, often broad, scrutinize developmental trends and patterns over centuries – even millennia – in a variety of civilizations, yet thorough empirical research anchors his analysis throughout. Perhaps herein lies its claim to be one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable contributions to the social sciences: while “a sociologist’s world history … [that] raises some of the big questions [regarding] the modern world” (Roth 1968: xxix), it also rigorously attends to details. Weber is engaged in a breathtaking project: a systematization of his vast knowledge of the ancient, medieval, and modern epochs in China, India, and the West, as well as of the ancient Middle Eastern civilizations, into a theoretical treatise that aims to guide the practice of a comparative-historical and interpretive sociology. His attention to detail, combined with the formulation of analytic generalizations, renders E&S a difficult, even tortuous work. Models heuristically useful to

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researchers are created again and again. Some are of more limited scope and pertain to a specific historical period, others range broadly; some are more static, others are more dynamic and include sets of hypotheses; still others are “developmental models” comprising many stages. All serve as conceptual yardsticks to assist the definition of empirical cases. While the shorter part I (written later) emphasizes model building, and indeed often appears as simply a compendium of concepts, the longer part II frequently examines, even painstakingly, historical cases. It offers brief causal analyses of particular developments before formulating models. The sheer dryness of the definitions in part I and the disjointed, back and forth movement between the historical evidence and the construction of ideal types in part II repeatedly tests the patience of even the most enamored reader. Unfortunately, Weber never provides a summary statement of his aims, themes, or procedures. Not surprisingly, interpreters of this treatise have generally discussed only those sections that have become classic statements and de rigueur reading for both theorists and sociologists engaged in specialized research: the sections on law, status, groups, prophets, charisma, rulership in general, the bureaucracy, and the city. Although deserving of careful scrutiny (see below), a focus upon these sections alone fails to reveal the true originality and enduring usefulness of this opus. An exploration of the five axes that dominate this labyrinthine treatise will articulate its underlying trajectories. In the process, the major modes of analysis and research procedures of Weber’s comparative-historical, interpretive sociology will be delineated. A brief perusal of each must suffice.

“Locating” social action: societal domains and ideal types Convinced that the crystallization of social action and its empirical appearance in patterns is not random, yet also not to be grasped by reference to a “social system,” “cultural order,” “social fact,” or “generalized other,” Weber aims throughout E&S to specify where such regularities are likely to arise. The foundation for his entire agenda has been laid to the extent that he succeeds in analytically locating meaningful action. Indeed, this task must be undertaken if his interpretive sociology – the understanding by the sociologist of the subjective meaning persons in diverse groups attribute to their action – is to constitute more than an empty, formalistic enterprise. Based on massive comparative-historical research, Weber argues in E&S that social action – largely though not exclusively – congeals in a number of “societal domains” (gesellschaftliche Ordnungen): the economy, rulership, religion, law, status groups, and universal organizations (family, clan, and traditional neighborhood) domains.36 To him, persons are “placed into various societal life-spheres, each of which is governed by different laws” (1946a: 123). E&S undertakes the huge task of delimiting the major realms within which social action significantly congeals. It then identifies the themes, dilemmas, or sets of questions indigenous to each domain. For example, explanations for suffering, misfortune, and misery distinguish the arena of religion, while the life-sphere of rulership is concerned with the reasons why persons attribute legitimacy to commands and their motives for rendering obedience. The status groups realm involves various notions of social

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honor and corresponding styles of life. In this manner, analytic boundaries for each domain become established. With a significant likelihood, action in these arenas becomes uprooted from its random, reactive flow, Weber argues. A good probability exists, given facilitating contextual dynamics, for this action to become social action, and most E&S chapters discuss the particular features of life-sphere-specific social action. For example, with respect to economic activity, action becomes social action “if it takes account of the behavior of someone else … [and] in so far as the actor assumes that others will respect his actual control over economic goods” (1968: 22; see also 341); and action oriented to status becomes social action wherever a specific mode of organizing life is acknowledged and restriction on social intercourse becomes effective (1968: 932). Here we find, with societal realms, a major heuristic tool for the research of the interpretive sociologist. In Weber’s terminology, each domain is a potential domain of subjective meaning (Sinnbereich) within which patterned social action and social groups will likely arise. Nonetheless, and however conceptually pivotal to his entire interpretive agenda, Weber concludes that arenas remain too global to ground his empirically-based sociology. With respect to this E&S task – locating social action – they constitute only a beginning. Patterned orientations of subjectively meaningful action can be far more rigorously conceptualized, he argues, by reference to ideal types. These models capture regular social action with great precision. As an analytic treatise, E&S takes the formulation of ideal types as one of its main tasks. When Weber forms an ideal type of, for example, the prophet, the functionary in a bureaucracy, the Puritan, the market or natural economy, the feudal aristocrat, the peasant, or the intellectual, he is in each case conceptualizing patterned orientations of social action. Thus, the “bureaucratic functionary” construct identifies regular orientations toward punctuality, reliability, specialized tasks, a hierarchical chain of command, and the disciplined organization of work; and the “charismatic leader” model implies orientations toward persons viewed as extraordinary and a willingness to follow them even if a violation of convention and custom is necessary. Each ideal type signifies an uprooting of action from its amorphous flow and a demarcation of constellations of social action, and a likelihood that similar meaningful action will appear empirically – even in the form of patterned orientations of action with a degree of endurance, firmness, and continuity. Hence, the social action delineated by ideal types indicates the possibility that an indigenous causal thrust may exist empirically. Indeed, each such model – the regular action-orientations it implies – retains the potential, depending upon the push and pull of the array of further action-orientations within which it is embedded, to assert an autonomous (eigengesetzliche) influence. Thus, each of the multiple and broadranging ideal types in E&S locates patterned social action in a far more specific manner than do its societal domains. In this manner, the location of meaningful action in this analytic treatise by reference to ideal types and societal domains fulfills the important task of assisting sociologists to identify empirical regularities of social action. However, it performs a further crucial service in Weber’s interpretive sociology. On an expansive, comparative-historical terrain, E&S helps sociologists to understand how a vast variety of action can become subjectively meaningful to persons. In other words, it facilitates the understanding of social action contextually – on its own terms, or “from within.”

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In doing so, this systematic opus accomplishes for Weber’s verstehende project another pivotal task: it opposes all tendencies for sociologists engaged in research to explore meaningful action solely from the vantage point of their own accustomed (and perhaps unexamined) presuppositions. Whenever this occurs, a greater likelihood exists that social scientists will, Weber is convinced, define “unusual action” as odd, “irrational,” and incomprehensible rather than as subjectively meaningful. In sum, in locating subjective meaning with the assistance of numerous ideal types and societal domains, E&S facilitates comprehension by researchers of how values, interests, emotions, and traditions in many empirical settings provide meaning to action, call forth patterned action, and hence formulate the foundation for social groups (see Kalberg 1994b: 30–46). By enabling an understanding of the putatively “irrational” actions of others as indeed meaningful, it expands the imaginations of sociologists. For example, the ideal type “missionary prophet” assists “we moderns” to comprehend the ways in which this charismatic figure, who views the cosmos as internally unified by God’s Commandments and intentions (1968: 450–1), attributes meaning to his actions – however “irrational” they may appear from the point of view of today’s scientific and secularized presuppositions. Moreover, as a consequence of arrays of patterned action, some action-orientations may “line up” in a concerted fashion and form the foundation for internally consistent and even methodically organized lives. Several of Weber’s ideal types – the mystic, the ascetic, and the prophet, for example – chart just such systematically directed action.37

Ideal types as “yardsticks” As noted, the ideal types of E&S, as conceptual tools, “document” patterned social action and demarcate its “location.” In addition, when utilized as yardsticks, or standards, against which the patterns of action under investigation can be compared and “measured,” they enable the clear definition of this empirical action. A vast diversity of ideal types of varying scope are formulated in this analytic treatise (for example, feudalism, patriarchalism, priests, the Oriental city, natural law, canon law, asceticism, and warriors). Perhaps most influential in sociology have been two of Weber’s ideal types: “types of rulership”38 and “status groups.” These models will be defined; their capacity to serve the researcher as yardsticks will illustrate their usefulness for empirical investigations.39 Rather than a “social fact,” an expression of natural laws, or an inevitable culmination of historical evolutionary forces, rulership implies for Weber nothing more than the probability that a definable group of persons (as a result of various motives) will empirically orient their social action to giving commands, that another definable group of persons will direct their social action to obedience (as a result of various motives), and that commands will in fact, to a sociologically relevant degree, be carried out.40 In his famous formulation, rulership refers “to the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons” (1968: 53). It may be ascribed to diverse persons, such as judges, civil servants, bankers, craftsmen, and tribal chiefs. All exercise rulership wherever obedience is claimed and in fact called forth (1968: 941, 948). Weber’s major concern focuses upon legitimate rulership, or the situation in which a degree of legitimacy is attributed to the rulership relationship. For this reason,

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obedience, importantly, acquires a voluntary element. Whether anchored in unreflective habit or custom, an emotional attachment to the ruler or fear of him, values or ideals, or purely material interests and a calculation of advantage, the necessary minimum of compliance, unlike sheer power (see below), always exists in the case of legitimate rulership (1968: 212). To Weber, the establishment of a rulership relationship’s legitimacy through material interests alone is likely to be relatively unstable. On the other hand, purely value-rational and affectual motives can be decisive only in “extraordinary” circumstances. A mixture of custom and a means-end rational calculation of material interests generally provides the “motive for compliance” in everyday situations (1968: 213–14, 943). Yet, in Weber’s analysis, these motives alone never form a reliable and enduring foundation for rulership. A further element – at least a minimum belief on the part of the ruled in the legitimacy of the rulership – is crucial: “In general, it should be kept clearly in mind that the basis of every rulership, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising rulership are lent prestige” (1968: 263).41 In essence, wherever persons believe that a particular rulership is justified, a willingness to obey arises that secures rulership more effectively than does force or power alone. The character of the typical belief, or claim to legitimacy, provides Weber with the criteria he utilizes to classify, as ideal-typical models, the major types of legitimate rulership (see 1968: 953). Why do people obey authority? From the vantage point of his extensive comparative and historical studies, Weber argues that all ruling powers, “profane or religious, political as well as unpolitical,” can be understood as appealing to rational-legal, traditional, or charismatic principles of legitimate rulership. What typical beliefs establish the “validity” of these three “pure types” of legitimate rulership? Weber notes three: 1. Rational grounds – resting on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to rulership under such rules to issue commands (legal rulership; see 1968: 215). 2. Traditional grounds – resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising rulership under them (traditional rulership; see 1968: 215). 3. Charismatic grounds – resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the orders revealed or ordained by him (charismatic rulership) (1968: 215). Under the motto, “it is written – but I say unto you,” this mission opposes all existing values, customs, laws, rules, and traditions (1968: 1115–17).42 These issues define the “rulership” domain and distinguish action oriented to it from action oriented to the other life-spheres. How does, for example, “rational-legal” rulership constitute in Weber’s sociology a model that sets standards empowered to guide research? This widely discussed type of rulership is manifest in the bureaucratic organization. In industrial societies, Weber argues, this type of rulership becomes all-pervasive. It is legitimated by a belief in properly enacted rules and “objective” modes of procedure rather than by a belief in persons or in the legitimacy of traditions established

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in the past. Thus, bureaucratic administration stands in radical opposition to both charismatic rulership and all types of traditional rulership (patriarchalism, patrimonialism, feudalism). The ordering of diverse social action in reference to stable prescriptions, regulations, rules, and specialized tasks accounts for its comparative technical superiority vis-à-vis the traditional and charismatic types of rulership. Moreover, rights and duties are defined that enable the issuing of commands and the expectation of obedience: “Orders are given in the name of an impersonal norm rather than in the name of a personal authority; and even the giving of a command constitutes obedience toward a norm rather than an arbitrary freedom, favor, or privilege” (1946c: 294–5; see also 1968: 229, 945, 1012). Furthermore, bureaucracies orient labor toward general rules and regulations in a systematic fashion. Work occurs in offices, on a full-time basis, and involves the formulation of written records and their preservation; employees are appointed and rewarded with a regular salary as well as the prospect for advancement. And labor procedures maximize calculation; through an assessment of single cases in reference to a set of abstract rules or a weighing of means and ends, decisions can be rendered in a predictable and expedient manner. Compared to the traditional forms of rulership, such decisions occur with less equivocation; arenas of jurisdiction, task specialization, competence, and responsibility for each employee are delimited on the one hand by administrative regulations and on the other by technical training. According to this model, this technical training can be most effectively utilized when realms of competence are defined and an unquestioned hierarchy of command reigns in which “each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one.” Rulership, including a superior’s access to coercive means, is distributed in a stable manner and articulated by regulations (1968: 223, 975). Weber’s construct emphasizes that a “formal rationality” reigns in bureaucracies. Problems are solved and decisions made by the systematic and continuous meansend rational orientation of action to abstract rules, which are enacted through discursively analyzable procedures and applied universally. Because decision-making and the giving of commands take place in direct reference to these rules, bureaucracies typically imply – compared to the traditional and charismatic types of rulership – a reduction of affectual and traditional action. Weber repeatedly calls attention to the extremely impersonal character of bureaucratic rulership. For example: “Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly the more it is ‘dehumanized,’ the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation” (1968: 975). This complex model, Weber argues, can be utilized as a standard against which the particular empirical case under investigation – the American, English, or German bureaucracy, for example, or a state bureaucracy vis-à-vis a bureaucracy in private industry – can be compared. Through an assessment of deviation from this heuristic tool, the main features of the particular case will then become defined and its distinctiveness precisely demarcated.43 Weber’s model “status group” will further illustrate the manner in which ideal types set guidelines and standards. He contends that status groups – and not only classes, as for Marx – constitute an independent foundation for social stratification. How is this ideal type defined and how does it serve as a conceptual yardstick that assists research? “Status situation” implies “every typical component of the life of men that is determined by a specific, positive or

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negative, social estimation of honor” (1968: 932). Thus, social esteem – claims to it and acknowledgment of it – orients social action in this domain. A person’s organizing of life, which in turn rests upon discrete socialization processes, family prestige, and occupational prestige, comes here to the fore (1968: 305–6; see also 1946c: 300). A status group (Stand) appears when persons share a style of life, consumption patterns, common conventions, specific notions of honor, and, conceivably, economic and particular status monopolies. For Weber, status situations, due to an implied evaluation of one’s own situation relative to that of others as well as a subjective awareness of common conventions, values, and styles of life, may often lead to the formation of groups. This remains the case even if such groups are at times somewhat amorphous (1968: 932). Status differences become apparent whenever social interaction is restricted or lacking. Stratification by status always implies the “monopolization of ideal and material goods or opportunities,” as well as social distance and exclusiveness (1968: 927, 935; 1946c: 300). Weber emphasizes that a subjective sense of social honor and esteem may have a significant impact. “Stratification by status” stands in opposition to and may restrict even action oriented to classes, material interests, the development of the free market, class conflicts, and hard bargaining. Guilds in the Middle Ages, for example, now and then struggled more fervently over questions of precedence in festival processions than over economic issues. Distinguished families throughout the world permit courtship of their daughters only by status peers, and members of “old families” have frequently cultivated a variety of techniques of exclusiveness, as have the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, Pocahontas, and the First Families of Virginia (1958: 34, 125; 1968: 933, 937). Court nobles and humanist literati greatly influenced the character of education in the seventeenth century, and various “carrier strata” have prominently influenced the formation of religious doctrines and ethical teachings (see below). This has occurred to such an extent that belief systems undergo profound alterations whenever they acquire a new carrier stratum (see 1946c: 279–85; 1968: 490–2, 1180–1; 2009: 238–41). A single status group might occasionally set its stamp upon the entire development of a civilization, as did intellectuals in China, the samurai warriors in Japan, and the Brahmin priests in India. As ideal types, each status group can be employed as a standard against which the particular case under investigation can be “measured.” Its uniqueness can be defined in this manner. Without these constructs to assist conceptualization, it is not possible, Weber argues, to conduct the comparative “mental experiments” (Gedankenbild) central for the rigorous isolation of significant causal patterns of action. These yardstick ideal types – status groups and types of rulership – from E&S, as well as many others that could be addressed, place Weber in direct opposition to Marx: material interests do not alone constitute the major “engine” of change or inequality. On the contrary, Weber’s sociology repeatedly contends that a variety of causal forces are effective in history and that social change occurs in a non-linear, complex fashion (see below).

Ideal types as hypothesis-forming models Many of E&S’s ideal types not only facilitate the clear conceptualization of specific cases or developments, but also delineate hypotheses that can be tested against specific cases and developments – indeed, in such a manner that significant causal

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regularities of social action can be isolated. Ideal types are employed in E&S as hypothesis-forming constructs in four major ways. Their dynamic character is the focus of Weber’s first type of model. Rather than being static, ideal types are constituted from arrays of regular action-orientations. Relationships – delimited, empirically testable hypotheses – among these actionorientations are implied. Second, contextual models that articulate hypotheses regarding the impact of specific social contexts upon patterned action are constructed in E&S. Third, when examined in reference to one another, ideal types may articulate logical interactions of patterned, meaningful action. Hypotheses regarding “elective affinity” and “antagonism” relationships across ideal types abound in E&S. Fourth, Weber utilizes ideal types to chart analytic developments. Each construct hypothesizes a course of regular action, or a “developmental path.” By erecting a demarcated theoretical framework, every model facilitates a conceptual grasp upon otherwise diffuse realities and formulates causal hypotheses regarding patterned action-orientations. In doing so, each construct assists attainment of the overall goal of Weber’s sociology: the causal explanation of cases and developments. A strongly theoretical dimension is also injected by each model into the very core of Weber’s comparative-historical sociology. Only a few of his elective affinity, antagonism, and developmental constructs can be noted here.44 Weber informs us explicitly that he is concerned in E&S with the ideal-typical relationships between the economy and “society” – that is, the interactions between the economy and “the general structural forms (Strukturformen) of human groups” (1968: 356)45 in the major societal domains. In great detail and on a vast scale, he charts out, through constellations of ideal types, the diverse ways in which the various stages in the development of the economy (the agricultural and industrial organization of work; the natural, money, planned, market, and capitalist types of economies; see Kalberg 1983) relate to – and influence – the various major stages in these arenas: for example, the traditional, natural, and logical-formal types of law; the paths to salvation in the religion domain (through a savior, an institution, ritual, good works, mysticism’s withdrawal from the world, and asceticism’s activity; see Kalberg 1990); the charismatic, patriarchal, feudal, patrimonial, and bureaucratic types of rulership; the family, clan, and traditional neighborhood; and an array of major status groups (such as intellectuals, civil servants, and feudal nobles). Nonetheless, this attention to the interactions between the economy and the other domains never implies its elevation to a position of causal dominance. On the contrary, in distinguishing a series of realms, Weber wishes to argue that questions of causality cannot be addressed by reference primarily to economic forces, material interests, or any single arena. As he notes: “The connections between the economy and the societal spheres are dealt with more fully than is usually the case. This is done deliberately so that the autonomy (Eigengesetzlichkeit) of these domains vis-avis the economy is made manifest” (1914: vii). Each realm, Weber contends, as manifest through its ideal types, implies the possibility of empirically significant patterns of action. Many passages in E&S are devoted to demonstrations of how this takes place in reference to the indigenous themes, dilemmas, or sets of questions specific to each domain. The elevation of a particular arena to a position of general causal priority, Weber insists, must not occur.

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Moreover, and despite an orientation to the economy sphere, E&S charts much more than the relationships between the various groups in this arena and the various groups in the other realms. This opus cannot accurately be depicted as addressing only the manner in which diverse groups influence – and are influenced by – the economy. Instead, Weber examines thoroughly the ideal-typical relationships, for example, between clans and religious groups, legal and rulership groups, groups in the spheres of religion and law, the family and rulership groups, and religious and rulership groups. More specifically, he scrutinizes the relation of logical-formal law to bureaucratic rulership, the family to various salvation paths, and the “ethics” of various status groups to the major salvation paths on the one hand and the types of law and rulership on the other hand. How, then, do the various domains relate analytically to one another? E&S proclaims that they do so in patterned ways. Two concepts in E&S capture cross-arena relationships: relations of “elective affinity” and “relations of antagonism.” While elective affinity relationships imply hypotheses regarding a compatible intermingling – a non-deterministic though typical and reciprocal interaction of regular social action – of two or more ideal types that share internal features, antagonistic relationships indicate hypotheses of “inadequacy” and a clash, a hindering, even an excluding of the patterned action-orientations implied by each ideal type. These “logical interactions” of regular action constitute, to Weber, hypothesisforming models. For example, the intensely personal character of relationships in the family and clan is viewed as antagonistic to the impersonal relationships characteristic of the marketplace (an orientation of meaningful action to the “laws of the market” over orientations to persons) and bureaucratic rulership (an orientation to statutes, regulations, and laws over persons). Similarly, the relationships of compassion and brotherhood typically cultivated by the great salvation religions are seen as opposing the formal rationality that appears in the later developmental stages of the economy (capitalism), rulership (bureaucracy), and law (logical-formal) domains. And charismatic rulership stands in a relationship of antagonism to all routine economic action: “From the point of view of rational economic activity, charismatic want satisfaction is a typical anti-economic force” (1968: 245; see Kalberg 1994b: 102–17). On the other hand, innumerable cross-sphere affinity relationships abound as well in E&S. For example, and despite wide diversity, Weber detected a series of elective affinities between the status ethic of intellectuals and certain salvation paths. Due to their typical tendency to ponder the world passively, to search for a comprehensive meaning to life, and to deplore the meaninglessness of empirical reality rather than to undertake “tasks” and act regularly in the world as “doers,” intellectuals are generally predisposed to formulate notions of salvation “more remote from life, more theoretical and more systematic than salvation from external need, the quest for which is characteristic of non-privileged strata” (1968: 506, translation altered). Weber also sees logical interactions of elective affinity as typically occurring between the universal organizations and both magic-based and salvation-based religions. Magical religions simply appropriated the general virtues practiced in the family, kin group, and traditional neighborhood, such as fraternity, truthfulness, loyalty to the sibling, respect for older generations, and reciprocal assistance, and

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salvation religions typically bestowed distinctly positive premiums upon the brotherhood ethic. In all cases, personal relations and person-oriented values predominated. Similarly Weber discovered elective affinity relations between traditional types of law and patriarchal rulership, as well as bureaucratic rulership and logical-formal law (see Kalberg 1994b: 108–16). In this manner, E&S articulates a wide array of cross-domain analytic relationships, all of which are formulated as hypotheses.46 Indeed, this opus constructs a broad-ranging analytic – one that can be utilized as a theoretical framework to facilitate the clear conceptualization of empirical relationships, as well as their analytical location.47 One further type of hypothesis-forming construct central in E&S must be examined: the developmental model. Weber’s E&S developmental models hypothesize a course of patterned action. In doing so, they (a) facilitate the clear conceptualization of the particular development under investigation, as well as its significant causal forces, and (b) postulate delineated, empirically-testable developmental courses of regular action. In effect, as “technical aids” constructed with a “rational consistency … rarely found in reality” (1946c: 323), each model charts paths that will be taken if certain “irrational” empirical disturbances do not intervene (1949: 101–3). “Even developments,” according to Weber, “can be constructed as ideal types, and these constructs may have quite considerable heuristic value” (1949: 101). Only one example can be offered here: the “routinization of charisma” model. Charismatic rulership is exercised by a person over disciples and followers who believe that he possesses extraordinary powers. This leader, who arises in emergency situations, may be, for example, a prophet, a war hero, a politician, a leader of the hunt, a demagogue, an oracle-giver, or a magician. In all cases, the rulership attributed to him derives from recognition of highly unusual qualities, ones not possessed by the average person. Once its genuineness is acknowledged, disciples and followers feel duty-bound to devote themselves completely to the charismatic leader, and he demands a strict obedience. They obey his commands as a result of an immense affection and the conviction that a genuinely personal relationship exists. Indeed, Weber sees an “emotional conviction” as central to the belief of disciples and followers in the charismatic leader’s authority, one that “internally” revolutionizes their entire personalities: “Charisma … manifests its revolutionary power from within, from a central metanoia [change] of its followers’ attitudes” (1968: 1117; see 241–4, 1112–17). The highly personal character of charismatic rule, as well as its lack of concern for everyday routine, leads it to reject all “external order.” The “objective” law received by the possessor of charisma as a gift from God bestows upon him a unique and new mission. For this reason, Weber sees charisma as standing in fundamental and revolutionary opposition to all means-end rational action as well as to all existing and stable forces of daily life (see 1968: 291, 1112–20). He also stresses, however, the fragility of charismatic rulership. As a consequence of its location strictly in the “supernatural qualities” of great leaders and the necessity for the “superhuman” personality repeatedly to demonstrate unusual powers and a “right to rule,” “charismatic authority is naturally unstable” (1968: 1112–14). Even the greatest intensity of personal devotion to the charismatic figure cannot guarantee the perpetuation of the extraordinary person’s teachings in their pure

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form. Instead, Weber’s “routinization” model proclaims, charisma follows a developmental path characterized by a weakening: it becomes repeatedly absorbed into the permanent institutions of everyday life. Such a transformation of charisma has always been sought by followers in the hope that, in the process, a permanent protection against sickness, disease, and natural catastrophe will be acquired (see, for example, 1968: 1131–3, 1146–9, 1156). The material and power interests of the charismatic community of followers and disciples constitute, in Weber’s routinization of charisma construct, an important driving force in institutionalizing the “transitory gift of grace … into a permanent possession of everyday life.”48 Preserved by followers in depersonalized (versachlichte) form, a weakened charisma becomes attached to the community of disciples and plays, his model hypothesizes, an indispensable role in attracting new followers, establishing the legitimacy of new status groups, forms of rulership, and religious doctrines, and facilitating ascent to positions of dominance in status, rulership, and religious hierarchies. Now as a part of everyday life and capable, often through ceremonies involving magic, of being transmitted to family members, offices, or institutions, “hereditary,” “institutionalized,” and “office” charisma serve to legitimize “acquired rights.” Altered into these impersonal and “routinized forms,” charisma, according to this developmental construct, is often upheld in all these stages not only by devout believers but also by persons with an economic interest in doing so, as well as by all those in possession of power and property who see their position of advantage as legitimated by its authority – for example, court officials, priests, monarchs, high dignitaries, and party leaders (1968: 251, 1122, 1139–41, 1146–8; 1946c: 297).49 Weber repeatedly notes, in formulating developmental models, their basically “unhistorical” character. As ideal-typical constructions, each captures the essence of an empirical development, presenting it in a manner more internally consistent and systematically unified than ever actually occurred. Hence, because the stages of his developmental models should never be viewed either as accurate renderings of the course of history or as themselves constituting “effective forces,” E&S diverges distinctly from all evolutionary schools of thought in search of either society’s “scientific laws” or history’s “invariable stages” – thereby placing Weber in opposition to social theorists as diverse as Comte, Marx, and Spencer. His developmental constructs serve a more modest task: they aim to provide the researcher with clear and practical “means of orientation” to a diffuse empirical landscape on the one hand, and an array of hypotheses regarding a pathway of development on the other hand. Whether the analytic course laid out by a particular model is followed always remains, Weber insists, an issue for detailed investigation by specialists (1949: 103). His developmental constructs again testify to the centrality of model-building and hypothesis-formation in his comparative-historical sociology. Weber’s yardstick, affinity, antagonism, and developmental constructs appear throughout E&S and contribute decisively to its rigor, analytic power, and uniqueness. As “constructed schemes,” all models “serve the purpose of offering an idealtypical means of orientation” (1946c: 323, original emphasis). With respect to antagonisms across domains, for example, “the theoretically constructed types of conflicting ‘societal domains’ are merely intended to show that at certain points such and such internal conflicts are possible and ‘adequate’” (1946c: 323, original

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emphasis). By performing this modest task, each model provides a purchase upon amorphous and ceaselessly flowing realities, thereby facilitating clear conceptualization of the particular patterned action under investigation. Each hypothesis regarding conflict can then be tested through an in-depth investigation. Because designed alone as conceptual tools that facilitate causal analysis, Weber fully expects these “logical constructs” to be “dislocated” once the empirical case or development has been rigorously investigated. Concrete circumstances and contexts will invariably “strengthen” or “weaken” particular analytic relationships. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that sociology, unlike history, must include a rigorous theoretical framing – through models – of the problem under investigation. He insists that the typical immersion of sociologists deeply in empirical realities requires such models if significant causal action-orientations are to be identified. This remains all the more the case owing to the fundamental character of empirical reality – for him, an unending cascade of diffuse events and happenings – and hence the continuous danger that causal inquiry will too easily become mired in an endless, description-based regression. By constructing arrays of models in E&S that conceptualize patterned, meaningful action, Weber aims to draw sociology away from a focus upon delineated social problems on the one hand and historical narrative on the other hand. Nonetheless, he steadfastly avoids the other side of the spectrum: his empirically grounded models never move to the level of broad, diffuse, and evolutionary generalizations. Rather, the E&S constructs offer delimited hypotheses that can be tested against specific cases and developments. To Weber, unique to the sociological enterprise is always a back and forth movement between conceptualization – the formation of models and domain-based theoretical frameworks – and the detailed investigation of empirical cases and developments. If the goal of offering causal explanations of the “historical individual” is to be realized, both the empirically particular and conceptual generalization are indispensable.

Driving forces: the multicausality of E&S and power Although E&S gives priority to the task of model-building over causal analysis, Weber’s unequivocal embrace of multicausal modes of procedure is apparent. Throughout this treatise, as noted, he focuses upon patterned social action within the status groups, universal organizations, religion, law, rulership, and economy domains. An array of ideal types in E&S is connected analytically to each arena and each indicates the empirical possibility of regular social action endowed with a degree of endurance. Thus, each ideal type implies an indigenous causal thrust and staying power or, to Weber, an autonomous aspect. Nonetheless, and even though the meaningful action of persons anchors his sociology, the question “within what carrier group action occurs” remains fundamental to him. Social action becomes sociologically-significant action only in demarcated groups. In every society, only certain traditional, affectual, value-rational, and means-end rational patterns of meaningful action acquire strong exponents and become important parts of the social fabric. For Weber, status groups, classes, and organizations serve as the most prominent bearers of action. Each “carries” a configuration of delineated action-orientations. He calls attention, for example, to the ideal-typical

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“status ethic” of functionaries in bureaucracies (duty, punctuality, the orderly performance of tasks, disciplined work habits, etc.; see 1968: 956–1003), the ethos of the neighborhood organization (mutual assistance and a “sombre economic ‘brotherhood’ practised in case of need”; see 1968: 363), and the class ethos of the bourgeoisie (opposition to privileges based upon birth and status, a favoring of formal legal equality; see 1968: 477–80; Kalberg 1985). Attention to such carriers characterizes Weber’s sociology. He connects this focus closely to an emphasis upon the autonomous causal thrust of demarcated groups. As he notes, “Unless the concept ‘autonomy’ is to lack all precision, its definition presupposes the existence of a bounded group of persons which, though membership may fluctuate, is determinable” (1968: 699, translation altered). These three themes – autonomy, multicausality, and carrier groups – surface in a number of crucial passages in E&S. In introducing his chapters on traditional and charismatic rulership in E&S, for example, Weber summarizes his aims as involving not only an evaluation of the extent to which the “developmental chances” of the major “structural principles” of each rulership type can be said to be subject to “economic, political or any other external determinants”; he seeks in addition to assess the degree to which the developmental chances of the types of rulership follow “an ‘autonomous’ logic inherent in their technical structure” (1968: 1002). Weber insists that this “logic” must be conceptualized as capable of exerting an independent effect even upon economic factors (1968: 578, 1002, 654–5), and discusses – whenever a “bounded group” crystallizes as its social carrier – many empirical cases when it does. He is especially aware of the extent to which the attribution of legitimacy to rulership sets an independent driving force into motion. Hence, even while remaining cognizant of the frequent centrality of economic factors, he emphasizes the necessity for multicausal approaches (see 1968: 341, 935). In arguing on behalf of the autonomous potential of social action in the economy, law, rulership, religion, status groups, and universal organizations domains, Weber aims in E&S to conceptualize economic action within a broadened theoretical framework and to emphasize the multidimensionality of all causal analysis (see Kalberg 1994b: 50–78). The “level of analysis” in E&S – the subjective meaning of persons in groups located in an array of societal arenas, constellations of domain-specific ideal types, and social carriers – itself further demonstrates Weber’s broad multicausality. It is clear as well from his frequent reference in E&S, EEWR, and General Economic History to the importance of a further variety of causal forces: historical events, technological innovations, and geographical forces. Moreover, conflict and competition, as well as interests generally and economic interests in particular, constitute to him effective causal forces – as does, not least, power. In his classical formulation, Weber defines power thus: “Within a social relationship, power means any chance (no matter whereon this chance is based) to carry through one’s (individual or collective) own will (even against resistance)” (1968: 53).50 New action-orientations frequently fade or become the victims of suppression by opposing patterns of action if power is lacking and alliances across groups fail to take place. Rulers are particularly adept, he insists repeatedly, at forming coalitions with the sole purpose of maintaining and aggrandizing power. They seek to balance

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classes, status groups, and organizations against one another as a matter of course. Power plays a central role in Weber’s multicausal analyses of how new patterns of social action arise, spread, and set historical developments into motion, as well as in his investigations of how action-orientations become circumscribed and rendered less influential. Finally, E&S also endows ideas with causal efficacy.51 Religious ideas, especially those that address the conundrum of frequent and seemingly random human suffering, might cast an influence across centuries and even millennia, Weber argues. Just the attempts to explain misery and injustice played a significant role in the development of religions from ones anchored in magic to ones rooted in notions of salvation, ethical action, and an “other-world.” Ideas regarding the stubborn persistence of misfortune, as articulated by prophets, priests, monks, and theologians, pushed this development, rather than economic and practical interests alone. Repeatedly, ideas were formulated that clarified the relationship of believers to the transcendent realm – and these ideas implied new meaningful action “pleasing to the gods.” Eventually, doctrines were formulated that offered broad-ranging views of the universe, explained suffering in a comprehensive sense, and defined action that promised to bring an end to suffering (see 1968: 349–50, 399–439, 577–9; 1946a: 122–3; 1946c: 269–76, 280–5).52 In sum, attention to a diversity of causal action-orientations characterizes E&S, as does Weber’s unwillingness to elevate particular groups to positions of general causal priority.53

The interweaving of past and present Weber’s attempts to define and explain the uniqueness of a particular present always acknowledge the many ways in which the past perpetually interweaves causally with the present. This remains the case despite the heroic capacity he sees in charismatic leaders: to sever, given constellations of facilitating conditions, abruptly past and present. Even drastic metamorphoses and the abrupt advent of “the new,” he holds, never fully rupture ties to the past (1968: 29, 577), and “that which has been handed down from the past becomes everywhere the immediate precursor of that taken in the present as valid” (1968: 29, translation altered). Even the monumental structural transformations called forth by industrialization failed to sweep away the past. Viable legacies live on. Weber’s orientation in E&S to societal domains and ideal types stands at the foundation not only of this treatise’s multicausality, but also of its capacity to analyze the multiple and subtle ways in which the past interlocks with the present. As noted, to him, the various societal spheres are endowed with a potentially independent, or autonomous, capacity rooted in indigenous questions and problems; they develop at times in a non-parallel manner and at their own pace. And each ideal type, in “documenting” patterns of meaningful action, implies the possibility of an autonomous sustaining element. Moreover, Weber endows further forces – historical events, geographical constellations, power, social carriers, conflict, competition, and technology – with an unequivocal causal capacity. The patterned social action of persons in groups is conceptualized as having many and diverse origins.

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Thus, E&S offers a “view of society” as constituted from an array of moving, even dynamically interacting, “parts.” All “general axiom” schools of sociological analysis that depart from encompassing dichotomies (Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, tradition/modernity, particularism/universalism), broad themes (the question of social order), or assumptions regarding the “organic unity” and “lawfulness of society” stand radically in opposition to Weber’s “open” theoretical framework rooted in arrays of ideal types and societal domains. These fundamental features of E&S allow conceptualization of societies as ranging across a wide spectrum of empirical cases characterized on the one hand more by flux, competition, conflict, tension, and disintegration and, on the other hand, more by internal unity and harmony. The influence of the past upon the present varies accordingly. Even the dichotomy frequently interpreted by commentators as capturing Weber’s “view of history” – his contrast of the stable and routine character of tradition to the revolutionary character of charisma (see Mommsen 1970) – fails to render the complex relationship in his sociology between past and present. The vast variety of causal forces articulated in E&S, their “open” interaction, and their variable degree of closure enable Weber forcefully to demonstrate that the past and present intimately interweave in many ways. Regularities of social action in some groups can be recognized as becoming firm and acquiring powerful carriers, even to the extent of developing in terms of their indigenous problematics and penetrating deeply into subsequent epochs; others fail to do so and prove fleeting; still others cast their imprint vigorously and then fade away. The “view of society” that flows out of this systematic opus – as constructed from numerous causally-effective, competing, and reciprocally interacting patterns of social action captured by ideal types and societal domains – easily takes cognizance of the “survival” of some regularities of action from the past and their significant influence, as legacies, upon patterns of action in the present. Weber often charts legacies, for example, from the religion domain. In the United States, central values in Protestant asceticism – disciplined and routine work in a profession, the regular giving to charity organizations, the perpetual formation by persons of goals, the orientation to the future and the attempt to “master” the world’s challenges (Weltbeherrschung), an optimism regarding the capacity to shape personal destinies, and a strong intolerance of “evil” – remain integral in American life today despite the fact that most who act in reference to these values have no awareness of them as linked intimately to a religious heritage (1968: 1187).54 Moreover, the “direct democratic administration” by the congregation, as it took place in the Protestant sects in the United States, left a legacy crucial for the establishment of democratic forms of government, as did the unwillingness of sect members to bestow a halo of reverence upon secular authority. The Quakers in particular, in advocating freedom of conscience for others as well as for themselves, paved the way for political tolerance (see 1968: 1204–10; 2005: 277–90; Kalberg 1997). The interweaving of past and present constitutes a major organizational axis throughout E&S. All present-oriented, functionalist modes of analysis stand in strict opposition to Weber’s sociology. To him, the past always penetrates deeply into the present, even molding its core contours. He is especially convinced that an identification of the modern West’s uniqueness and its possible course of further development requires investigations of its historical development.55

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These five axes remain central throughout E&S, the analytic treatise for Weber’s comparative-historical, interpretive sociology. In this opus, as well as in his methodological writings, his modes of analysis and research strategies are demarcated, albeit in a poorly organized fashion. Owing to its explicit attention to “both sides of the causal equation” – ideas and interests – the Economic Ethics of the World Religions series offers a better example of these modes of analysis and research strategies than PE. This massive study can be discussed only briefly.

The Economic Ethics of the World Religions: toward Weber’s sociology of civilizations Weber’s broad-ranging studies on China (1951), India (1958), and ancient Israel (1952) expand upon a theme first explored in PE in 1904/5: whether religions possess an “economic ethic” and, if so, is it capable of giving birth to a “spirit of capitalism.”56 Through a series of rigorous comparisons to these civilizations, Weber sought after 1910 in EEWR to define the uniqueness of modern capitalism and the modern West more generally. He further sought to offer a causal explanation for the West’s particular path of development. Moreover, whereas PE, in tracing the origins of a spirit of capitalism in the West back to ascetic Protestantism, examined only “one side” of the causal equation (see 2009: 159), the EEWR volumes forcefully articulate a multicausal methodology. In exploring the question of why modern capitalism failed to develop before the twentieth century in non-Western civilizations, they investigate “ideas and interests.” In a central passage in the EEWR introduction, Weber notes the complex ways in which “both sides” are intertwined: Every … attempt at explanation, recognizing the fundamental significance of economic factors, must above all take account of these factors. However, the opposite line of causation should not be neglected if only because the origin of economic rationalism depends not only on an advanced development of technology and law but also on the capacity and disposition of persons to organize their lives in a practical-rational manner. Wherever magical and religious forces have inhibited the unfolding of this organized life, the development of an organized life oriented systematically toward economic activity has confronted broad-ranging internal resistance. Magical and religious powers, and the belief in them anchored in ethical notions of duty, have been in the past among the most important influences upon the way life has been organized. (2009: 216, original emphasis; see also 1968: 341)

In this pivotal statement, Weber calls attention to a number of causal forces important to him. He emphatically rejects, for example, both greed and a material interest in becoming wealthy: these forces have been universal, yet modern capitalism developed only in a few specific regions and during a particular historical epoch. The putative “general evolutionary sweep of history” is omitted, for Weber insists on focusing upon empirical factors. Although acknowledging the importance of the economy and classes, he rejects all explanations that view belief systems alone as the “superstructure” of economic interests. Similarly, a class of formally trained jurists should not be understood as developing out of the economic interests of a dominant

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business class, for then the question arises of why such interests did not lead to the same development in China or India (2009: 215). Furthermore, organizations – and even extremely tightly knit sects – do not, he contends, as social structures, uniformly lead to the same values: “Structurally identical religious sects … existed in Hinduism as well as in Christianity, yet their sacred values pointed [the social action of believers] in radically different directions” (1946c: 292). Weber’s complex multicausality also leads him away from the conclusion that modern capitalism failed to develop first in Asia owing to an absence of this-worldly asceticism. Although his concern, when he examines Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and ancient Judaism, remains focused upon whether devoutness in these religions bestowed “psychological rewards” upon methodical economic activity, he insists that single factors never determine historical development. Rather, constellations of patterned action by persons in groups are always central, as well as the manner in which the groups interact conjuncturally in delineated contexts of further groups and thereby formulate unique configurations.57 By “applying” the domains-based, multicausal theoretical framework developed in E&S, Weber identifies vastly different arrays of action-orientations related to rulership, religion, the economy, social honor, the family, and the law in each civilization. The many clusters of social action conducive to the unfolding of modern capitalism in China and India, he found, were in the end outweighed by a series of opposing patterns of action.58 For example, he notes a variety of non-religious obstacles to economic development in China, such as extremely strong sibling ties and an absence of “a formally guaranteed law and a rational administration and judiciary” (1951: 85; see also 91, 99–100), and in India, such as constraints placed upon migration, the recruitment of labor, and credit by the caste system (1958: 111–17, 52–3, 102–6). He discovers as well, however, an entire host of conducive patterns of action that nonetheless failed to bring about modern bourgeois capitalism – such as, in China, freedom of trade, an increase in precious metals, population growth, occupational mobility, and the presence of a money economy (1951: 12, 54–5, 99–100, 243). Weber was quite convinced that modern capitalism could be adopted by – and would flourish in – a number of Eastern civilizations. Indeed, he identified the many patterns of action that would allow this to occur (on Japan, see 1958: 275). Yet adoption, he insisted, involved different processes than his concern: the origin in a specific region of a new economic ethos and a new type of economy. However, the EEWR volumes provide not only a complex causal explanation for modern capitalism’s appearance first in the West; Weber also attempts here to demarcate the uniqueness of each of the EEWR civilizations. Indeed, these volumes reorient Weber’s sociology onto a larger plane. He defines at the outset “Chinese rationalism,” “Indian rationalism,” and the “rationalism of ancient Israel,” and then seeks, first, to offer comparisons and contrasts to “Western rationalism” and, second, to provide multicausal explanations for the particular routes of development followed by each great civilization. In doing so, his investigations demarcate a number of further ways in which the West proved unique: it called forth a systematic science based upon the experimental method and carried out by trained and specialized personnel; a more wide-ranging societal significance was assumed by organized and trained civil servants than elsewhere; and a state arose based upon a “rationally

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enacted ‘constitution’ and rationally enacted laws, and administered by civil servants possessing specialized arenas of competence and oriented to rules and ‘laws’” (2009: 208; see 205–8).59 Through his EEWR studies Weber acquired essential insight, clarity, and knowledge regarding the specific “tracks” within which a number of major civilizations had developed (see 2009: 241–2). These tracks in the West, formulated in antiquity and the Middle Ages, called forth in the twentieth century, he argued, the dominance of “formal rationality” in the domains of law, rulership, and the economy, and “theoretical rationality” in the domain of science (see below). Great ramifications followed, he insisted repeatedly, regarding the type of human being who could live under “modern Western rationalism.” What were its specific features, Weber queried, vis-à-vis China, India, the Western ancient and medieval worlds, and the civilizations of the Middle East? The EEWR volumes also assisted him to address three further burning questions, all of which originated from his skepticism regarding Western civilization’s “progress.” First, given its distinct features, what is the nature of the social change that can take place in the modern West? Second, how do persons in different social contexts – and in different civilizations – formulate meaning in their lives? Finally, what patterned orientations of social action – means-end rational, value-rational, and traditional – have become meaningful in pivotal groups in each of the major civilizations? How did this occur? Because he viewed compassion, ethical action, and the autonomous individual as endangered in the modern West, answers to these queries became especially urgent. Indeed, these questions and themes, it must be noted, constitute the boundaries of a project only rarely attempted in the entire history of the social sciences: Weber is here engaged in the construction of a rigorous and Verstehen-based sociology of civilizations. Casting their focus on PE and on specific chapters in E&S, many interpreters of Weber have failed to note this ambitious project and its centrality throughout his comparative-historical writings. Moreover, large groups of scholars concerned, as Weber, with economic modernization have neglected to this day the civilizational component at the very foundation of long-term economic transformations. Here Weber’s sociology stands nearly alone. It emphasizes, for example, that any examination of the particularity of the West’s historical trajectory must also acknowledge the unique extent of its “structural heterogeneity.” Compared to China, India, the Middle East, and the ancient West, a higher degree of pluralistic tension between spheres developing relatively independently of each other (the economy, religion, law, and rulership realms) distinguished the Western pathway. The resulting conflicts called forth a comparative openness – and hence a societal flexibility that facilitated further cross-sphere conflict and competition. Indeed, competing spheres introduced a degree of civilizational dynamism that Weber sees as both specific to the West and conducive to modern capitalism’s unfolding (see 1968: 1192–3). Throughout his sweeping analysis, Weber never lost sight of his large-scale questions. Repeatedly, whenever the “civilizational rationalisms” indigenous to China, India, and the West appeared to acquire cohesion, he reformulated a central query: how do persons in different social contexts, whether small in scale or encompassing entire civilizations, create meaning in their lives? In his terminology, what patterns of regular action as found in groups became meaningful in Asian, Middle

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Eastern, and Western civilizations? And in the ancient, medieval, and modern eras? Would values continue to orient action? Although innumerable scholars over the last decades have examined in depth Weber’s intense political activities, his volcanic personality, the intellectual origins of his ideas, and his relationships with his many colleagues, we read Weber today owing to the rigor and expanse of his sociological works. Yet PE, E&S, EEWR, and the methodological writings are complex and often extremely difficult to comprehend. Each interpreter of Weber seems to discover a different “Weber” (see Kalberg 1998: 208–12). Perhaps this problem is to some extent inevitable in light of the immense scope and complexity of Weber’s project. He sought to investigate a variety of civilizations through interpretive, empirical, multicausal, and context-sensitive procedures, to trace out the unique developmental paths each followed to the present, and to understand the ways in which persons living in diverse epochs and circumstances create meaning in their lives. However, he attempted to fulfill a further daunting task: he wished to define the heuristic tools, modes of analysis, and research procedures for a comparative-historical, interpretive sociology. Indeed, he sought to offer concepts and strategies that could be utilized alike by verstehende sociologists engaged in inter-civilizational research and others investigating more specialized topics. As already apparent, Weber’s ambitious sociology arose in reference to a specific historical background. A turn now to a sketch of the social context in which he lived and wrote will further assist a comprehension of its purposes, procedures, and boundaries.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT Very rapid industrialization was occurring in Max Weber’s Germany. Moreover, compared to the United States, England, and Holland, industrialization began late, and hence was accompanied by a sense of urgency. Yet Germans were convinced that, if the powers of the state were harnessed comprehensively, their nation would soon surpass its competitors. However, this “industrialization from above” tended to place in motion a number of forces that curtailed the unfolding of a democratic political culture on German soil. It implied above all that Germany’s business elites would be more closely aligned with the state than was the case in most other industrializing nations. A strong and independent class capable of standing against state power – as a countervailing force seeking to open a public arena of participation and the free exchange of views – failed to arise. Economic development occurred more under the hegemony of a caste of government functionaries than was the case elsewhere. Three further features of German society characterized this “German model.” Although it was largely a secularized country by the middle of the nineteenth century, legacies of Luther’s political ideas, now manifest as commonly accepted conventions and values rather than religious belief, endured. They took the form of a deep respect for authority in general and for the state in particular, even to such a degree that in many regions the state, its laws, and its functionaries acquired a “halo” of trust and legitimacy. In addition, the particular character of feudalism in much of

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Germany – innumerable small principalities and kingdoms – had rendered the authoritarian rulership of the feudal master so direct and immediate that notions of self-rule, individual rights, and representative government never found fertile ground. Finally, and as a result of all these forces, the German working class remained politically weak. Unlike the French, the Germans failed in their attempt to introduce modern forms of egalitarianism and democratic self-governance. Prussian troops crushed the Revolution of 1848. All these features of its political culture erected significant obstacles to the monumental tasks Germany confronted at the turn of the century. Whereas a stable democracy existed in the United States before industrialization, Germany faced the burdensome task of cultivating and extending region-based democratic traditions in the midst of industrialization. In many important ways, these two nations were located at opposite ends of the “modernization” spectrum (see Kalberg 1987). Although Chancellor Bismarck had molded a variety of small German principalities and feudal kingdoms into a unified nation in 1871, a “modernizing ideology” – an embrace of democracy and political rights – never accompanied his nation-building on a wide scale. Furthermore, Bismarck’s authoritarian rulership precluded an assertive and independent role for the German parliament, as well as for the population as a whole. In the face of an overwhelming centralization of power, an active, participatory citizenry could scarcely arise. Politics was dominated by the Chancellor, his functionaries, and an antiquated class of agrarian aristocrats motivated exclusively by narrow class interests. While successful at calling forth rapid industrialization, as well as a notion of social trust grounded in respect for the state and its laws on the one hand and hierarchical, quasi-feudal social conventions on the other, the German model stood against all developments in the direction of a democratic political culture. Civic sphere ideals that could be nourished failed to appear on a widespread basis. By the turn of the century, massive segments of the population had either turned to introspective endeavors (scholarship, education, art, music, philosophy)60 or simply withdrawn into private sphere relationships. Others condemned unequivocally the modern, “impersonal and harsh” Gesellschaft and sought a return to the putatively stable and compassionate Gemeinschaft of the pre-industrial epoch. Varieties of romanticist movements oriented to the past arose. Still others found refuge in fulfillment of the old Lutheran notion of “vocation”: the reliable and dutiful performance of one’s workday obligations provided dignity and self-worth. Industrialization rapidly occurred, rooted in part in just this diligent Lutheran work ethic. It took place, however, devoid of an internal dynamism or an optimism regarding the future. Despite traditions of parliamentary government and local citizen activism in a number of regions, a severely restricted civic sphere in Germany prevented the widespread development of social egalitarianism and representative democracy. Not surprisingly, “cultural pessimism” became widespread in the 1890s. Despair, doubt, and a sense of crisis extended throughout much of German society (see Mosse 1964; Ringer 1969). Many asked repeatedly: What public sphere standards can guide persons in the industrial society? How do we live in this new era? Who will live in the modern world? How can ethical and compassionate action survive? “Where are to be found,” Dilthey queried, “the instruments for surmounting the spiritual chaos

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which threatens to engulf us?” (see Salomon 1934: 164). These questions were also Weber’s questions. However, unlike many intellectuals of the time, he refused to withdraw from political activism; nor did he become a resigned cultural pessimist.61 A peripatetic actor and lifelong player on the stage of German politics, Weber proved an indefatigable critic – marshalling his relentless and piercing ammunition in innumerable speeches and newspaper articles, directing it alike against nearly all major classes and groups. He condemned Bismarck for crushing all independent leadership; the German monarchy for blatant incompetence and dilettantism; the bourgeoisie for its weak class consciousness and unwillingness to struggle for political power against the state bureaucracy; the agrarian aristocrats in Prussia for their militarism, authoritarianism, attempts to deny citizenship rights to the working class, and inability to place the nation’s interests above their own concerns for material gain; and the German civil servants for their slavish conformity, obsessive adherence to rules and regulations, meekness, and general unwillingness to take responsibility for their decisions. Weber seemed to admire only the German workers, yet he criticized them as well: while appreciating their competence and notion of duty, he lamented their general passivity in the face of authority (especially compared to their counterparts in France). Major components of Weber’s political and social commentary on modernity can only be understood as a complex, even convoluted, attempt to address glaring internal weaknesses in the German political culture and to offer realistic mechanisms to overcome them. He wished to retain high standards of living and efficient modes of organizing work and producing goods – and capitalism, he was convinced, offered the best opportunity for realization of these aims. However, the many de-humanizing components of this economic system were apparent to him. Weber’s thoroughly sociological analysis of his epoch, and the ways in which he responded to its dilemmas with strategies for action, must be examined briefly.

Weber’s analysis Formal rationality appeared in a nearly omnipresent manner, Weber argued, in the multiple bureaucracies of the industrial society. In several of its major domains – law, the economy, and the state – decision-making occurs “without regard to persons” and by reference to sets of universally applied rules, laws, statutes, and regulations. Favoritism is precluded as well in respect to hiring, promotion, and certification; an adherence to the dictates of abstract procedures holds sway over all concern for distinction in respect to status, personality, or beauty. The “logical-formal” law of our day is implemented by trained jurists who insure that “only unambiguous general characteristics of the case are taken into account in terms of purely processual and legal factors” (1968: 656–7), and formal rationality increases in the economy arena to the degree that all technically possible calculations within the “laws of the market” are carried out. Those who would seek to acquire a mortgage are treated by a bank’s specialists in reference alone to impersonal criteria: credit reports, savings, monthly income, etc. (see 1968: 346, 585, 600, 1186; 1946b: 331).62 Weber sees a different type of rationality as dominant in daily life in the industrial epoch: practical rationality. The individual’s egoistic interests and merely adaptive capacities are here apparent, and pragmatic, calculating strategies are typically

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employed in order to deal with the common obstacles of everyday life in the most expedient manner. As a consequence of their normal activities, all business-oriented strata in particular exhibit a strong tendency to order their ways of life in a practicalrational manner (2009: 241; 1946c: 279, 284). Finally, Weber understands modern societies as pervaded by theoretical rationality; in fact, their new “world view” – science – cultivates this type of rationality. An abstract confrontation with reality is prevalent here, and rigorous experiments, precise concepts, and logical deduction and induction become the tools to address and master reality. Whereas theologians and priests in an earlier age adjusted and refined inconsistencies in religious doctrines through theoretical rationalization processes, the same systematic, cognitive search for explanations takes place today – yet now alone in reference to an empirical reality. In both cases, reality is mastered through systematic thought and conceptual schemes. Because requiring a step beyond that which can be observed – “a leap of faith” – religion becomes, to the same degree that a scientific world view ascends to a dominating position, defined as “irrational” (2005: 337–41).63 Formal, practical, and theoretical rationality invariably play central roles in industrial societies, Weber argues, forcefully pushing aside arrays of values as well as traditions from the past. However, none is capable of calling forth and giving sustenance to new sets of noble values, he contends. The modern-day functionary in bureaucracies orients his action alone to duty, caution, security, conformity, order, reliability, and punctuality. Laws and regulations must be implemented according to procedures of formal correctness and precedent rather than by reference to higher substantive issues: justice, freedom, and equality. Calculations of interests and advantage dominate the practical rationality of daily life. And the scientist of today is engaged in an enterprise that stresses, as the locus of “truth,” empirical observation, description, and abstract synthesizing. Knowledge, insight, clarity, and the “tools and the training for thought” result from satisfactory scientific work rather than values (see 2005: 333–6). What domains of modern secular life “carry” and cultivate compassion, a brotherhood ethic, and charity? Weber searches, but finds none. On the contrary, now unconstrained by constellations of values such as those found in the doctrines of the great salvation religions, formal, practical, and theoretical rationality develop more and more freely and unhindered. To Weber, cold, impersonal, and non-binding relationships unceasingly rise to the forefront in this “cosmos.” While once firmly anchored and given direction by a “devotion to a cause” – a “calling” – rooted ultimately in coherent and meaningful configurations of values, social relationships are now largely adrift, blowing back and forth according to momentary interests, strategic calculations, cognitive processes, power and rulership orientations, and interpretations of statutes and laws. An uninterrupted flow of activity more and more holds sway, and the life methodically directed toward a set of ideals becomes less and less possible. Whereas the motivation to join an ascetic Protestant church or sect could once be explained by reference to sincere belief, the external benefits of membership – acquisition of an entire community’s trust and hence its business – often now become central (2005: 186–8). In this historically unique epoch in which “material goods [have] acquired an increasing and, in the end, inescapable power over people as never before in history”

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(2009: 158), the “interests of daily life” are becoming empowered even to such an extent that they consistently manipulate and exploit values. A clear disjunction is lessening between firm values and ideals held dear on the one hand and the raw flow of life on the other hand, Weber holds. Without such standards, the “pragmatic approach to life” more and more reigns, not only pushing aside ethical ideals and all notions of responsibility, but also the autonomous and integrated – or “unified” – personality “directed from within” on the basis of beliefs and values (1949: 18; 1946b). Massive conformity will result and individual autonomy will disappear. Ideals, ethical action, and noble values must not become, Weber insists, simply dead legacies from the past, for in the end means-end rational calculations will neither offer dignity to persons as unique individuals nor prevent the rule of force.64 Who will live in this “steel-hard casing” of “mechanized ossification?” Will only “narrow specialists without minds” and “pleasure-seekers without heart” inhabit the new cosmos (2009: 158)? As Albert Salomon, in his classic interpretation of Weber, asks: “Can man – … conceived as molded by the passions and tensions of a lofty human soul – still find a place for himself in the modern world[?]” (1934: 153). In what ways did Weber’s sociology offer a response to this “crisis of Western Civilization?” What strategies of action remained available to confront these fundamental dangers and dilemmas?

Weber’s response Weber wished to see a constellation of noble values and ideals in place that would effectively orient social action and offer dignity to individuals. As a self-conscious defender of Western traditions, these were the values of individual autonomy, responsibility, the unified personality, ethical action, brotherhood, compassion, charity, and a sense of honor. His comparative studies, however, had convinced him that values die out whenever denied their means of sustenance: strong social carriers and vigorous competition with other values. Values become viable when chosen and then defended against other values. They increasingly then guide meaningful action and enable the formulation, on their foundation, of dignity and honor. They also provide a firm grounding for initiative-taking and leadership. However, only particular societies cultivate values to the point where they become binding upon persons, even at times despite opposing material interests: namely, dynamic and open societies that nourish a sustained struggle of pluralistic values (Wertkampf ). In these societies, persons become “responsible” in reference to a set of values and increasingly able to undertake ethical conduct. Owing to ubiquitous bureaucratization in industrial societies and the rise of formal, practical, and theoretical types of rationality, Weber feared that the contending arenas indispensable for a flourishing of competing values and a realm of freedom were losing their distinct boundaries and collapsing. As this occurred, society would become closed and leaders – defending values – would fade from the social landscape. Societal ossification, driven by a managerial orientation to technical efficiency and not unlike the extreme stagnation that had afflicted classical Egypt and China, more and more appeared to be the fate of industrial societies.

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Indeed, Weber saw an ominous “passion for bureaucratization” that would lead only to “a parcelling out of the soul” (1909: 414) and a society-wide passivity in which people are “led like sheep” (1978: 282). How would it be possible “to save any remnants of ‘individual’ freedom of movement” (1968: 1403, original emphasis)? “We ‘individualists’ and partisans of ‘democratic’ institutions,” he proclaimed, “are swimming ‘against the tide’ of materialist forces” (1978: 282, translation altered), and “everywhere the house of bondage is already in place” (1978: 281, translation altered, original emphasis; see also 281–2; 1968: 1402–3). Only an outline of the elaborate and complex strategies he proposed can be offered here.65

Strong parliaments Weber maintained vehemently that modern societies need institutions capable of cultivating leadership qualities on a regular basis. This could occur in parliaments, for here the aggressive articulation of political positions and the hard competition of political parties are institutionalized and viewed as the normal course of affairs. In the process of open debate and conflict over values and interests, yet also negotiation and compromise, leaders in possession of the “three pre-eminent qualities” for politicians – passion, responsibility, and a sense of proportion – would emerge. Perhaps even leaders endowed with “inner charismatic qualities” would appear, though also leaders with the sense of detachment that allows judgment (see 1946a: 113, 115–16). Thus, parliaments cultivate leadership characterized by an “ethic of responsibility” and a “passionate devotion to a cause.” In addition, they prepare leaders to undertake an indispensable task: on the basis of their values and policies, they are empowered to stand against the formal rationality of functionaries, managers, and technocrats. In doing so, parliaments contribute to the expansion of a civic sphere within which citizens can debate, make responsible decisions, exercise political rights, and defend values. However, for parliaments to serve as viable “training grounds” for leaders, this institution must stand strong against other branches of government. Weak parliaments, dominated on the one hand by the state’s civil servants and on the other hand by authoritarian politicians, such as Bismarck, will not attract, Weber maintains, persons capable of becoming leaders (1946a: 113; see 2005: 255–72).

The support for democracy Parliamentary democracies, Weber believed, far more than other forms of governance, are capable of giving birth to and sustaining the societal dynamism indispensable for the creation of a viable civic sphere. And here decisions can be rendered in reference to values. Moreover, like strong parliaments, strong democracies would assist the development of strong leaders, as would democracy’s ideals: freedom of speech, individual rights, the rule of law, and the right of assembly. “It is a gross self-deception,” Weber argued, “to believe that without the achievements of the age of the Rights of Man any one of us, including the most conservative, can go on living” (1968: 1403). The contesting of power and rulership monopolies of all sorts, he is convinced, occurs more effectively in democracies (2005: 253–72, 277–90).66

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Ambivalence characterizes Weber’s attitude toward capitalism. On the one hand he laments repeatedly the ways in which the “laws of the open market” introduce a merciless struggle, formal rationality, and merely functional relationships that cannot realistically be influenced by a brotherhood ethic or ideals of compassion and charity. The introduction of such humanitarian concerns into economic relationships taking place in competitive markets almost always leads to economic inefficiencies and economic ruin – “and this would not be helpful in any way” (see 2009: 426–30). On the other hand, capitalism’s open competition and private enterprise call forth energetic entrepreneurs and vigorous risk-takers; these heroic actors, as well as the sheer irregularity and unpredictability of market forces, introduce societal dynamism (1968: 1403–4). Socialism not only fails to do so, but also implies a further large step in the direction of a closed and stagnating society. It introduces, to manage the economy, yet another “caste” of functionaries and administrators (2005: 130–4).

The necessary constriction of science If defined as an endeavor empowered to prescribe values, science posed a threat to the individual’s autonomy and, ultimately, to ethical action, Weber believed. Wherever understood as offering “objectively valid” conclusions and wherever a “caste of experts” become perceived, in the name of science, as legitimately erecting norms for conduct, science becomes capable of elevating decision-making out of that domain where it rightfully belongs: the individual’s conscience, values, and “demons.” Science cannot – and must not – inform us how we should live (1949: 54; 2005: 328–36). Notions of ethical responsibility, honor, dignity, and devotion to a cause can be developed, Weber argues, only when persons are starkly aware of their own values – and this takes place only when individuals are repeatedly confronted with the necessity of making decisions for themselves. Moreover, if a science – understood as prescribed norms – becomes broadly institutionalized, decision-making by “specialists” poses a threat to a society’s dynamism and capacity for pluralistic conflict. Hence, the domain of science must be circumscribed by firm boundaries. Its tasks must remain limited to “methods of thinking, the tools and the training for thought,” and clarity: assessment of the suitability of the means to reach the given end (including an ethical ideal) and the unintended consequences of action in reference to particular ideals (2005: 332–6). By fulfilling even these delimited tasks, science can promote self-awareness and enhance a sense of responsibility with respect to a set of values: If you take such and such a stand, then, according to scientific experience, you have to use such and such a means in order to carry out your conviction practically…. Does the end “justify” the means?… Figuratively speaking, you serve this god and you offend the other god when you decide to adhere to [a particular] position…. Thus, if we [as social scientists] are competent in our pursuit … we can force the individual, or at least we can help him, to give himself an account of the ultimate meaning of his own conduct….

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I am tempted to say of a teacher who succeeds in this: he stands in the service of “moral” forces; he fulfils the duty of bringing about self-clarification and a sense of responsibility. (2005: 333–4, original emphasis)

Accordingly, Weber insists that professors in university classrooms must not offer value judgments, personal views, and political opinions. “So long as [they wish] to remain teacher[s] and not to become demagogue[s],” they must refrain from discussing the conclusions of their research as “truth.”67 Owing to their high prestige vis-àvis students, doing so presents a great danger: an excessive influence upon them might occur and hence a constriction of their autonomous decision-making powers. In turn, students should not expect leadership and guidance from their professors. Unlike politics, science excludes the activity – the clash of values – on the basis of which leaders arise (see 2005: 332–6).

The support for a strong national state Weber is well-known as a proponent of a strong nation. Some interpreters view him as an unreconstructed nationalist who favored the power of the German state for its own sake. This interpretation evidences little understanding of Weber’s sociology, his appreciation of the underlying dilemmas confronted by industrial societies, and his own ultimate ideals and values.68 As noted, Weber perceived Western values as threatened by a specter of societal stagnation and ossification. However, he was convinced that neither the smaller states of Europe, nor England or the United States, were capable of defending them. He saw a crass materialism and an exploitative commercialism in these nations as having whittled away Western values, particularly the notion of an autonomous individual. These nations, he argued, remained incapable of mobilizing internally to resist threatening forces effectively. In addition, Weber saw the West as contested by the East. Russian authoritarianism, civil servant rulership, and economic underdevelopment, however, had failed to give rise on a widespread basis either to the values of the Enlightenment on the one hand – Reason and Rationality – or to those of the “Rights of Man” of the French and American revolutions on the other. In this crisis situation, Weber and the vast majority of his colleagues perceived the German state as a bulwark against the loss of the Western tradition’s noble values. A strong state would be best equipped to make a stand in defense of action on behalf of these values: individual autonomy, self-responsibility, the unified personality, ethical action, brotherhood, compassion, charity, and a sense of honor. Furthermore, according to him, the German state would not, if it acted alone on behalf of German nationalism, fulfill its “responsibility before history.” Rather, Germany now must undertake a far more monumental task: to defend Western values for all Western countries. The advance of formal, practical, and theoretical rationality, as well as the functionary’s caution, conformity, and striving for security, he argued, was occurring in all industrializing countries, even in the United States.69 Weber hoped that strong parliaments, a dynamic democracy, a vigorous capitalism, a modern science lacking a legitimacy to pronounce “correct” values for persons, and a strong German state would forestall the advance of bureaucratization on the one hand and formal, practical, and theoretical types of rationality on the other.

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To the extent that this occurred, a series of forces would crystallize to oppose societal ossification and to construct the dynamic civic arena so woefully lacking in Germany. As this took place, the fundamental precondition for the nourishing of values would appear: a societal openness and dynamism that allowed – even fostered – perpetual conflicts of moderate intensity over values. All those aspects of the West Weber held dear would be defended, he was convinced, where noble values became empowered to orient action. The random push and pull of daily life interests and mundane concerns, and the mere “sterile excitation” they give rise to, would then be counterbalanced. Life would become directed on behalf of ethical ideals and a passion for “causes” would be awakened: “For nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion” (2005: 140). Individuals would then practice an “ethic of responsibility” and become accountable for their own actions. Of pivotal significance to Weber, the ethical ideal itself placed a thrust toward community into motion: “The ethical norm and its ‘universal validity’ create a community, or at least in so far as an individual might reject the act of another on moral grounds and yet still face it and participate in the common life. Knowing his own creaturely weakness, the individual places himself under the common norm” (1946b: 342). Nonetheless, and despite his hopes and many proposals, Weber’s pessimism regarding the West’s future was also apparent: “No one any longer knows who will live in this [steel-hard] casing [of the future] and whether entirely new prophets or a mighty rebirth of ancient ideas and ideals will stand at the end of this monumental development. Or, however, if neither, whether a mechanized ossification, embellished with a sort of rigidly compelled sense of self-importance, will arise” (2009: 158, original emphasis).70 These overarching concerns drove Weber’s scholarly research far and wide. Only comparative investigations could assist his quest to define clearly the ways in which the economies, laws, rulership forms, and religions of the West were unique, to assess possibilities regarding social change, and to understand better the constellations that assisted an anchoring of meaningful action in values and ethical ideals.

WEBER’S IMPACT Weber has been acclaimed universally as a sociologist of sweeping range, insight, and conceptual powers, and his works have had a broad impact upon sociology.71 Remarkably, his influence has resulted more from several of his pivotal essays than from a wide-ranging acceptance of his sociology (see Kalberg 1996, 1998: 209–14). Although best known as an “idealist,” or an advocate of the power in history of ideas and values, Weber firmly rejected this label. This odd turn resulted in part from the search by American critics of Karl Marx in the 1940s and 1950s for a strong advocate for their cause, in part from the misleading interpretation by Weber’s earliest American proponent, Talcott Parsons, and in part from the early translation of PE (1930) and the late translation of E&S (1968). Weber’s “idealism” could be seen throughout the 1940s and 1950s in the works of innumerable “modernization” theorists, all of whom took cognizance of his emphasis upon the

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importance of a set of values for the rise of the spirit of capitalism. These theorists also argued on behalf of the central significance of values for the unfolding of modern democracies and economies.72 Weber’s impact expanded far beyond the modernization theorists, however. As early as the 1930s PE had begun to influence empirical research in the sociology of religion, especially with regard to comparisons between Protestants and Catholics. In the 1940s and 1950s his essay on the bureaucracy became hotly debated by students of modern organizations,73 and in the 1950s and 1960s “Class, Status, Party” (2005: 151–62) became widely viewed as offering a necessary correction to Marxian stratification theory. During this same period his writings on the sociology of law and urban sociology became recognized as core contributions to these sub-disciplines (see 1968: 641–900, 1212–372). As a consequence of his emphasis upon power and rulership, Weber became understood in the 1960s and 1970s as a major contributor to conflict theory and to political sociology. In the 1970s his attention to the ways in which the state may develop autonomously played a role in the rise of “state-centered theory,” and his essay on charismatic leadership and its routinization stimulated research in the area of social movements. In the 1970s and 1980s E&S indirectly influenced the new field of comparative-historical sociology. Weber’s notion that the social sciences must practice an ethos of value-neutrality, although articulated by many others as well, gained full acceptance in the 1950s and has remained to this day a central cornerstone in American sociology. The impact of his work has been a sustained one and a variety of sub-disciplines have claimed him as their founder. Nonetheless, a coherent school of disciples has failed to crystallize in the AngloSaxon world – a fact explained only partly by the unavailability, until relatively recently, of major segments of Weber’s works in English or by the great complexity and breadth of his writings. Rather, foundational tenets of his sociology stand in opposition to the predominantly Durkheimian orientation of macrosociology in the United States and powerful barriers resist a Weberian sociology: the central place of organic holism, social structure, institutions, “society,” and functional explanations conflicts with his attention to subjective meaning, ideal types, societal domains, power, conflict, an intimate interlocking of past and present, and a radical multicausality that stresses both “ideas and interests.” These central components of Weber’s sociology also oppose the orientation of many sociologists in the USA to social networks. Weber’s cognizance of paradox, historical accident, unforeseen consequences, the routinization of charisma, the contextual embeddedness of action, and the ubiquitous penetration of the past into the present all stand in a relationship of tension with major tenets of American sociology. The present can be comprehended only by reference to an array of historical backdrop forces, Weber contends, yet the forward-looking orientation of American sociology downplays just such influences. In the United States, sociology has only rarely formulated theories capable of conceptualizing the many ways in which cultural forces, for example, stand behind and influence the contours of interest- and power-based struggles and, conversely, power and interests stand behind valuebased conflicts – indeed, to such a degree that a dynamism rooted in the tensions between these contending forces frequently characterizes social life. Moreover,

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Weber’s forceful acknowledgment of the significance, for causal explanations, of the manner in which configurations of patterned action-orientations crystallize in unique ways places his sociology firmly in opposition to all diffusion theories and all analyses rooted in historical analogies (see Kalberg 1994a, 1994b: 168–92; 1999, 2001, 2008). These major tenets of his sociology lead Weber frequently to a “perspectival” mode of procedure in which related ideal types are compared and contrasted in respect to the subjective meaning each implies (such as asceticism–mysticism, Confucianism–Puritanism, feudalism–patrimonialism). However, his mode of analysis rooted in ideal types places his sociology strictly against all schools that utilize global dichotomies (such as tradition–modernity and particularism–universalism), as well as all evolutionary, Social Darwinist, and “universal stage” theories. Thus, it is not surprising that major recent currents in American sociology have opposed Weber: largely rooted in survey research methods, comparative sociology today lacks a notion of subjective meaning and a recognition of the importance of the past for the development of the present; state-centered theory and world systems theory both downplay cultural forces, as well as subjective meaning; neofunctionalism opposes Weber’s insistence upon the omnipresence of power, rulership, and conflict; and rational choice theory utilizes only one of Weber’s four “types of social action” and abjures all situating of individual action within contexts of traditions and values (see Kalberg 1996: 57–64).

AN ASSESSMENT Large questions about the modern world drove Weber’s sociology. What is the fate of ethical action, the unique individual, the personality unified by a constellation of noble values, and compassion in the industrial society? What does the rise of modern capitalism imply for the “type of human being” who will live within this “new cosmos”? What defines the particularity of the West? How have we arrived at our present situation? How do persons in different social contexts formulate subjective meaning in their lives? What sets of patterned action lead persons to attach meaning to specific activities? How can we understand the subjectively meaningful action of persons in other civilizations and epochs on their own terms rather than by reference to a hierarchy of Western values? What are the parameters for social change in the West?

Weber’s strengths Sociologists today only rarely ask questions of this magnitude. Very delimited themes guide research and broad queries are confined to the misty, non-scientific realms of social philosophy. As Weber himself noted, the social sciences require specialized skills and involve specialized research questions. Moreover, if he had not “translated” these wide-ranging questions in his own investigations into rigorous concepts, research strategies, modes of analysis, and methodological axioms, his writings would be understood today as exclusively a set of commentaries upon the rapidly

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changing era in which he lived – and only intellectual historians would study them. A Weberian sociology would not exist. Weber created a rigorous and distinct approach that combined empirical description with theoretical generalization. Distinguished by its staggering comparative and historical breadth, his sociology investigates the patterned social action of persons in groups by reference to values, traditions, interests, and emotions. It seeks to offer causal analyses of unique cases and proceeds by reference to ideal types, societal domains, social contexts, and the exploration of subjective meaning. His studies further emphasize that the past is ineluctably intertwined with the present and assert that the orientation of social action to religion, the economy, social honor, rulership, the law, and the family and clan must be acknowledged as causally significant; geographical forces, power, social carriers, historical events, competition, conflict, and technology must also be recognized as viable causes of meaningful action. While Weber remains fully cognizant that some societies may become, in certain epochs and as a result of multiple identifiable action-orientations, more closed or even ossified, he scorns organic holism and takes omnipresent conflict and power for granted. However, he also sees that regularities of action – continuities and patterns – arise ubiquitously on the basis of values, traditions, interests, and even emotions. Moreover, Weber is convinced that persons repeatedly view rulership as legitimate and render obedience; yet they also from time to time overthrow established ruling groups – only then to erect further authorities. Social change is inevitable even though it never follows an evolutionary or lawful pathway. However, it cannot be comprehended by reference to “material” or “ideal” factors alone, and least of all by reference to transcendent forces, mysterious causes, or “ultimate” determinants. And while material interests possess a strong grip upon everyday activities, persons are also capable of orienting their meaningful action to values, conventions, customs, habits, social honor, and emotions – even when doing so flies in the face of their economic well-being or eudaemonistic considerations. Meaning is formulated in a vast variety of ways, though internally consistent sets of values that address ultimate questions – “world views” – have congealed in the major civilizations to help set the “tracks” within which social action becomes defined. In studying relationships, groups, epochs, and civilizations of interest to them, Weberian sociologists take as their task the interpretive understanding of how persons formulate meaning and orient their action accordingly. However, they also seek to comprehend the social dynamics that give birth to patterns of social action and sustain them, and the further constellations of patterned action that lead to their alteration.

Weber’s weaknesses Although impressive in many ways, Weber’s ambitious approach is not without weaknesses. Its sheer complexity and frequent lack of clarity have often led to the charge of inconsistency. For example, while subjective meaning stands at the center of his sociology, the language Weber utilizes in his comparative-historical works frequently leaves the impression that structural forces constitute his concern.

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The translations have constituted a longstanding problem in just this respect, and readers of Weber in English have frequently accused him of becoming a structural sociologist in violation of his own methodological premises.74 Many interpreters have found the concept at the foundation of Weber’s approach – the ideal type – troublesome. Guidelines for its formation and application, it is argued, have remained imprecise and insufficient. These same opponents have generally rejected Weber’s view that sociological generalization is appropriately limited to the conceptual level only. Further common criticisms have cut to the core of Weber’s sociology. Many have faulted his orientation to subjective meaning as such, questioning the viability of an approach that takes motives as pivotal. A number of more recent sociologists insist that interaction, creativity, identity formation, and narrative accounts must constitute the fundamental level of analysis. Moreover, while subjective meaning rooted in means-end rational action may be identifiable, critics contend further that valuebased subjective meaning will always remain amorphous and problematic. Indeed, some have questioned whether an analytic armament that includes traditions and values is at all necessary for sociologists: persons act by reference to pragmatic interests on the one hand, and external constraints and power on the other hand, they argue. Organic holists have attacked Weber’s elevation of ideal types and subjective meaning to the center of his methodology, and lamented both the absence of their major explanatory concepts – “society” and “institutions” – as well as Weber’s indifference to “the problem of social order.” Many of these same commentators have viewed his definition of sociology’s aim – to offer causal explanations of unique cases – as exceedingly modest. In rejecting Weber’s view of theory as an endeavor in the service of heuristic ends only and hence as always provisional, and his value-relevance axiom, they seek to establish a sociology empowered to articulate the general “laws of social life,” to offer predictions about the future, and, in the name of science, to assist policy makers and confront injustice. Remarkably, Marxists and neo-Marxists have on these points agreed with the organic holism tradition: the principled incapacity of Weber’s methodology to formulate clear-cut mechanisms for social change, let alone avenues of emancipation from modern capitalism, renders his works in the end too beholden to the status quo, they contend. Weber’s critics from the left also argue that this “bourgeois” character of his sociology is apparent in its putative idealism, its failure to elevate material interests to the level of a pre-eminent causal force, and its unwillingness to recognize the “laws of history.” The strengths and weaknesses of Weber’s rich sociology will undoubtedly be debated for many years to come. Even as an array of his essays continues to be widely discussed, the opposition by many schools to the core features of his approach will endure. Nonetheless, as the microchip and globalization revolutions reach deep into the twenty-first century and continue to bring distant peoples into direct contact, a place remains for a comparative-historical sociology oriented to the investigation and understanding – on its own terms – of the subjective meaning of persons near and far.

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Reader’s Guide to Max Weber The beginning reader will require assistance in working through Weber’s diffuse writings. The classic introduction by Reinhard Bendix remains the best overview (1962), and the collection of essays by Bendix and Guenther Roth (1971) provides an ideal companion. An older volume assembles a fine cross-section of Weber’s writings: see Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (1946). A recent volume, Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity (2005), compiles selections on America and a variety of contemporary themes: inequality, the workplace, race and ethnicity, the nation and the state, ethical action, and the value of modern science. Any study of Weber’s voluminous writings on the influence of religion on economic development must begin with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and his essays on the American sects (2011). Two edited volumes on “the Protestant ethic thesis” – by Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (1993) and William Swatos and Lutz Kaelber (2005) – are indispensable, as are the in-depth discussions offered by Gordon Marshall (1980, 1982). The most exciting discussions in Weber’s Economic Ethics of the World Religions series are found in his “Confucianism and Puritanism” (see 1951: 226–49) and “The General Characteristics of Asian Religions” (see 1958: 329–43), and “Social Psychology” (1946c). Weber’s major methodological reflections can be found in The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949) and in the introductory chapter to Economy and Society (1968). However, these writings should be attempted only with the guidance of Thomas Burger (1976), Martin Albrow (1990), and Fritz Ringer (1997). Commentary on Weber in recent years has moved distinctly away from a focus upon the array of concepts he bequeathed to the discipline (for example, charisma, status groups, bureaucracy, power, and domination) and toward his overarching themes. Central in this discussion have been, on the one hand, his comparative-historical methodology (see Kalberg 1994b) and, on the other hand, his exploration of the West’s uniqueness and the multiple causal forces behind its particular historical trajectory. Wolfgang Schluchter’s volumes (1989, 1996) have here played a central role (see also Kalberg forthcoming). Weber’s major writings on the development of “modern Western rationalism” have been recently collected (Weber 2009). The journal Max Weber Studies is devoted exclusively to his works and their impact.

Notes 1 A number of studies examine Weber’s life. See Gerth and Mills (1946: 3–44), Loewenstein (1966: 91–104), Honigsheim (1968), Coser (1971: 234–43), Radkau (2008), Roth (1993, 1997, 2001, 2005), Marianne Weber (1975). 2 That these major currents of thought remained otherwise so difficult to render into a unity laid the foundation for tensions that run throughout Weber’s sociology, as will become apparent. 3 His rejection of these positions led him to adopt the ideal type as his major research tool. This construct cut through the middle of the Methodenstreit and addressed many of its seemingly irreconcilable conflicts: for example, although “general” and “synthetic,” it constitutes only a heuristic tool rather than a historical law. 4 The frequent translation of Weber’s term Entwicklung (development) as “evolution” has caused a great deal of confusion.

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Although nowhere discussed, Weber surely saw Durkheim’s elevation of “social facts” to the core of his sociology in the same manner: as a manifestation of a mode of thought still penetrated by the secularized legacies of Western religions. 6 It is also inconceivable that Weber’s sociology would have acquired one of its major strengths without having taken this epistemological turn away from a Eurocentric social science, as well as from all quasi-religious and organicist schools: its relentless “perspectivalism,” or its capacity to “rotate” factors. This procedure holds a single ideal type (e.g., asceticism) “up to the light” from the perspective of a radically varying ideal type (e.g., mysticism), and then systematically examines the differences with respect to the influence of each upon social action. The “angle of vision” (Gesichtspunkt) remains central; “actual reality” – all absolutism – is omitted. Weber is especially fond of noting that a particular phenomenon (for example, the mystic’s withdrawal from the world) is fully “irrational” from the point of view of a second phenomenon (e.g., the “inner-worldly” ascetic’s orientation to worldly activity). See 1946b: 326. 7 “It is … a fundamental fact of all history that the ultimate result of political activity often –– no, actually regularly – stands in a completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning” (1946a: 117). 8 Domains, arenas, life-spheres, and realms are used synonymously. 9 Following Weber, I will be using the terms “meaningful action” and “social action” synonymously. Despite his emphasis upon the capacity of the human species to bestow subjective meaning upon action, Weber nonetheless argues that this often does not occur: “In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness of its ‘subjective meaning.’ Actors are more likely to ‘feel’ this meaning in a vague sense than to ‘know’ it or explicitly to ‘make themselves’ aware of it. In most cases action is governed by impulse or habit; the subjective meaning of the action (whether rational or irrational) is only occasionally elevated into consciousness. This occurs in the uniform action of large numbers only in the case of a few individuals. Meaningful action that is actually effective – that is, when the meaning is fully conscious and apparent – is in empirical reality a marginal case. Every sociological or historical investigation that analyzes empirical reality must acknowledge this situation. However, sociology should not, for this reason, hesitate to construct its concepts through a classification of possible ‘subjective meanings’; in other words, as if action consciously oriented to meaning actually occurs” (Weber 1968: 21–2, translation altered, original emphasis). For this reason, as well as his stress upon four types of action (see below), Weber cannot be understood simply as a “rationalist” thinker, as many critics have asserted. 10 Weber points out that his classification does not seek to exhaust all possibilities, “but only to formulate in conceptually pure form certain sociologically important types to which actual action is more or less closely approximated” (1968: 26). He does not expect to discover empirical cases in which social action is oriented only to one of these types of action. See the section below on ideal types. 11 Motives for Weber are causes of action and must be understood by reference to subjective meaning: “A motive is a complex of subjective meaning which seems to the actor himself or to the observer an adequate ground for the conduct in question” (1968: 11). 12 Of the four types of social action, Weber found means-end rational action to be the most easily understandable by the sociologist (see 1968: 5). In all cases, the interpretation of

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subjective meaning by the researcher must be based upon empirical evidence and rigorous procedures. Nonetheless, it may be quite difficult, Weber acknowledges, for the social scientist to understand certain action as subjectively meaningful. He notes that values “often cannot be understood completely” (1968: 5). Yet this problem does not prevent him from formulating an ideal toward which researchers should strive. And, again, in-depth exploration of the contexts within which action occurs will, he argues, prove indispensable for understanding. Finally, Weber notes: “The more we ourselves are capable of such emotional reactions as anxiety, anger, ambition, envy, jealousy, love, enthusiasm, pride, vengefulness, loyalty, devotion, and appetites of all sorts, and of the ‘irrational’ reactions which grow out of them, the more readily can we empathize with them. Even when such emotions are found in a degree of intensity of which the observer himself is completely incapable, he can still have a significant degree of emotional understanding of their meaning and can interpret intellectually their influence on the direction of action and the selection of means” (1968: 6). Hindu and Calvinist sects, for example, did not vary in respect to external form, yet the devout endowed radically different action with meaning (see 1946c: 292). “For the subjective interpretation of action in sociological work these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action” (1968: 13). This distinguishes the “empirical sciences of action,” according to Weber, from jurisprudence, logic, ethics, and aesthetics, all of which aim to ascertain “true” and “valid” meanings (1968: 4; 1949). Weber makes this general point further in the chapter on rulership in Part I of E&S: “Hence, the kind of terminology and classification set forth … has in no sense the aim – indeed, it could not have it – to be exhaustive or to confine the whole of historical reality in a rigid scheme. Its usefulness is derived from the fact that in a given case it is possible to distinguish what aspects of a given organized group can legitimately be identified as falling under or approximating one or another of these categories” (1968: 263–4). “The existence of a connection between two historical occurrences cannot be captured abstractly, but only by presenting an internally consistent view of the way in which it was concretely formed” (Weber 1891: 2). Weber makes this point even more vividly in a later essay: “The origin of economic rationalism [of the type which, since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has come to dominate the West] depends not only on an advanced development of technology and law, but also on the capacity and disposition of persons to organize their lives in a practical-rational manner” (2009: 216; see 1946c: 293). Only an abbreviated version can be offered here (see Kalberg 1996; 2009: 3–58). Weber defines an “ethical” standard as “a specific type of value-rational belief among individuals which, as a consequence of this belief, imposes a normative element upon human action that claims the quality of the ‘morally good’ in the same way that action which claims the status of the ‘beautiful’ is measured against aesthetic standards” (1968: 36, translation altered, original emphasis). Social action, Weber contends, can be influenced by an ethical standard even if “external” support for it is lacking and even, at times, despite opposing “external” forces. The devout could understand an “unwillingness to work [as] a sign that one is not among the saved” (2009: 106). Those living in poverty could not possibly be among the saved

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(2009: 109, 258 n.114). Being poor now indicated not only laziness, but also a poor moral character. “Rejected are all vain glorification of the self and of all other things of the flesh, feudal pride, the spontaneous enjoyment of art and life, ‘levity,’ all waste of money and time, eroticism, or any other activity that detracts from the rational work in one’s private vocation and within the God-willed social order. The curtailment of all feudal ostentation and of all irrational consumption facilitates capital accumulation and the ever-renewed utilization of property for productive purpose …” (1968: 1200). Rather than a “determinative” relationship, Weber sees an “elective affinity” (Wahlverwandtschaft) between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. (The earlier translation by Parsons of Wahlverwandtschaft as “correlation” is inadequate.) This “weak causal” manner of stating the relationship results in part from Weber’s position that the sources of the spirit of capitalism are many and that religious sources constitute only one – however significant and not to be neglected – possible source (see 1927: 352–67): “It should here be ascertained only whether, and to what extent, religious influences co-participated in the qualitative formation and quantitative expansion of [the spirit of capitalism] across the globe” (2009: 97, original emphasis). He notes: “Our analysis should have demonstrated that one of the constitutive components of the modern capitalist spirit and, moreover, generally of modern civilization, was the rational organization of life on the basis of the idea of the calling. It was born out of the spirit of Christian asceticism” (2009: 157, original emphasis). This feature of the sect in particular, Weber contends, lends to it a monitoring capacity that rivals that of the monastic order (see 2009: 195–8). “Hold one’s own” is the usual translation of sich behaupten. It implies, within the sect, a maintenance and defense of an individual’s social – and ethical – standing vis-à-vis peers. “Prove your mettle” conveys the same idea today, as does the notion that persons should “measure up” to the task at hand. While within the sect, members do not “lose themselves” to, or “dissolve” into, the group; rather, and despite interaction of a degree of intensity that otherwise would insure an orientation exclusively to others, a focus upon an ethical standard remains. While an unequivocally positive connotation is bestowed today upon “holding your own” in the United States, persons from cultures uninfluenced by a tradition of this-worldly asceticism may well view this degree of individualism with skepticism – namely, as dangerously close to egocentrism. Those who conducted themselves in an exemplary fashion according to the expectations of peer sect members received from them a clear message: you are honorable and accepted. This unequivocal and unmediated bestowal of social esteem must have served to elevate the devout psychologically and to counterbalance any fatalism residuals from the doctrine of Predestination. The religious context here determined that approval from one’s fellows implied a symbolic dimension: “you are saved.” However, cohesive groups in the secularized twentieth century could bestow only the caput mortuum, or routinized, form of approval: “you are well liked.” This tension between the person in search of approval (and hence conforming to group norms) and the person holding his own in the group by upholding ethical standards endures in American society to the present. In this regard Weber notes Puritanism’s condemnation of idolatry, or the orientation to personal wants and desires (Kreaturvergoetterung). Their satisfaction competes with the believer’s loyalty to God. Hence, this prohibition denies legitimacy to a focus upon the person and all privatized concerns. See 2009: 493 n.39.

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28 Weber has here in mind both Catholicism and Lutheranism. Because enveloped by a mystical aura, members of these churches are absolved of an urgent necessity to hold their own. He is critical of this mode of group formation, which he found to be widespread in the Germany of his times (see Mommsen 1974: 80–1). 29 Tönnies’ famous Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy was well known to Weber. In noting Gesellschaft features of the seventeenth-century Protestant sect, he is here demarcating an antagonistic position (see 2005: 284–6). 30 This point, unmentioned in Weber’s texts, has been inferred. 31 Weber lists, for example, the business practices Methodists held to be forbidden. See 2009: 194. 32 This aspect of membership in a sect – the moral legitimation of members – did not obstruct geographical mobility if only because entry into a new community could be gained easily; namely, by a letter from the pastor of one’s home church. Such a “letter of introduction” immediately overcame the normal suspicion of newcomers and, moreover, established their honesty, respectability, and creditworthiness. See Weber 1968: 1206. (Weber would argue that consideration of such religious legacies must not be excluded from attempts today to explain high rates of geographical and occupational mobility in the United States.) 33 “Business ethics” in the United States finds here its point of origin. This phrase today is viewed widely elsewhere as an oxymoron. 34 On the pathway from this impersonal utilization of the individual in the Protestant sect to the Enlightenment, see 1968: 1209. 35 This theme is also prominent in a massive, more historical work by Weber; see General Economic History (1927); Collins (1981). 36 For this reason, E&S is organized around these domains. The unfortunate title of this treatise, which stems from Weber’s wife, leaves the impression that his sociology is organized around a notion of “society.” The title Weber gave to E&S’s Part II – “The Economy and the Societal Domains and Powers” – points to the centrality of societal domains. 37 Weber saw a particular methodical-rational organization of life as having a significant impact upon the development of the modern West: the ascetic Protestant. 38 Herrschaft is normally translated as either “authority” or “domination.” Neither of these terms captures Herrschaft’s combination of both authority and domination. I am using Benjamin Nelson’s translation: “rulership.” 39 On this usage of the ideal type, see generally Kalberg (1994b: 87–91). 40 Weber explicitly emphasizes the character of rulership as nothing more than meaningful action-orientations: “Rulership does not mean that a superior elementary force asserts itself in one way or another; it refers to a meaningful interrelationship between those giving orders and those obeying, to the effect that the expectations toward which action is oriented on both sides can be reckoned upon” (1968: 1378). 41 And: “Experience shows that in no instance does rulership voluntarily limit itself to the appeal to material or affectual or ideal motives as a basis for its continuance. In addition, every such system attempts to establish and to cultivate the belief in its legitimacy” (1968: 213). 42 For Weber’s earlier formulations in part II, see 1968: 954; more generally, see 1968: 262–3, 953–4, 947. In empirical reality, of course, rulership always appears in some mixture of these pure types. These three models do not represent an attempt by Weber to capture an “evolutionary” drift of history up to the contemporary era (see below).

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43 Charismatic rulership is examined below. With regard to traditional rulership, Weber emphasizes: “The validity of a social order by virtue of the sacredness of tradition is the oldest and most universal type of legitimacy” (1968: 37). On traditional rulership generally, see 1946c: 296; 1968: 216, 226–7, 958, 1006–7, 1041. 44 On Weber’s dynamic and contextual models, see Kalberg (1994b: 95–8, 39–46, 98–102). 45 As opposed to “culture” (literature, art, science, etc.). 46 For further examples, see Kalberg (1994b: 108–16). 47 These pages also include a discussion of intra-domain relationships of antagonism (for example, the antagonism of charismatic rulership to traditional and bureaucratic rulership). For a discussion of these models, see Kalberg (1994b: 106–8). 48 To Weber, the purity of charisma can be preserved against everyday interests only by the “common danger of military life or a love ethos of an unworldly discipleship” (1968: 1120). 49 Weber’s attention in this model to the role played by pragmatic interests reveals the “sober realism” side of his sociology neglected in the reception of his works influenced by Parsons. Weber also formulates developmental models that chart the closure of social relationships and the monopolization of resources in the economy, rulership, and religion domains (see Kalberg 1994b: 120–4). Further developmental models outline the rise of formal rationality in regard to the free market and the state, and a “theoretical” rationalization process in the domain of religion (see Kalberg 1994b: 128–40; 2001). Qualitatively different “rationalization processes” – in the sense of an increasing systematization of social action – are charted, as developmental models, in the rulership, law, religion, and economy societal realms. In investigating the economy in relation to the rulership, religion, and law domains, as well as these spheres of life in relationship to one another, E&S formulates a vast rationalization of action theoretical framework. These developmental models arrange ideal types along an analytic course of increasingly rationalized action (see Kalberg 1980, 1983, 1990, forthcoming). 50 This is the translation given by Walliman, Rosenbaum, Tatsis, and Zito (1980). 51 As do, of course, PE and EEWR (see below). 52 This paragraph telescopes to an extreme degree Weber’s complex analysis of the problem of theodicy and its “dynamic autonomy” role in the development of Western religions from ancient Judaism to Puritanism. For a detailed reconstruction, see Kalberg (1990, 2001, 2004). 53 For a further discussion of Weber’s multicausality, as well as of his contextual and “conjunctural” mode of establishing causality, see Kalberg (1994b: 32–5, 50–77, 143–92). 54 See also 1927: 368–9; 2009: 84, 157–9, 547 n.122; see also Kalberg (1996: 52–4, 62; 2004: 310–14). 55 On the exceedingly complex relationship between past and present in Weber’s sociology, see further Kalberg (1994b: 158–67; 1996: 57–64; 1998: 233–5; 2008). 56 EEWR also includes two synoptic essays (1946b, 1946c). The major themes in EEWR can only be hinted at here. Weber’s analyses, for example, of the origins of salvation religions (see Kalberg 1990, 2001) and the location of ideas and values in social contexts (see Kalberg 1994b: 39–46, 98–102), as well as his analyses of the rise of monotheism (see Kalberg 1994a), the caste system (see Kalberg 1994b), and Confucianism (see Kalberg 1999), must be fully omitted.

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57 Even great charismatic figures, such as prophets, are not viewed by Weber a-contextually. Their influence requires a pre-existing “certain minimum of intellectual discourse” (see 1968: 486–7). 58 Hence, the common understanding of EEWR as a study that utilizes experimental design procedures to isolate the centrality of a particular economic ethic for the development of modern capitalism in the West does not correspond to the methodology Weber actually utilizes in these volumes. On his context-based mode of establishing causality, see Kalberg (1994b: 98–102, 143–92). 59 On Weber’s sociology of civilizations, see generally Weber (2009: 183–4, 223–430); Kalberg (forthcoming). 60 Although many engaged in these endeavors viewed their activities as ultimately “political” in a broader sense; they sought to prepare Germans to become citizens (see Jenkins 1996). 61 Many commentators have attended to the famous phrases that conclude some of his books and then painted Weber as a bleak and despairing cultural pessimist. These interpreters have focused upon Weber’s most prominent image of the future: as an “iron cage” and “house of bondage.” Indeed, he remains pessimistic in a famous passage at the end of “Politics as a Vocation”: “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now” (2005: 271). While Weber surely was not an optimistic believer in the unending progress of civilization, as were many American and English social thinkers of his generation, he also cannot be characterized as a dour pessimist. Nor was he a seeker after an idealized past, as his frequently used phrase – “disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world” – has implied to many; his sociological analyses convinced him that this route remained closed. If truly a cultural pessimist or romantic, Weber would have withdrawn into fatalism and passivity, and perhaps even into one of Germany’s many “cults of irrationality.” Instead, he scorned such groups, mocked the romantics as delusional, and remained an endlessly combative political commentator and actor (see Loewenstein 1966; Coser 1971; Beetham 1974). 62 Weber is here formulating ideal types. He is well aware of the many ways in which rulebound efficiency can be diminished by both “red tape” and favoritism. 63 For greater detail on these “types of rationality,” see Kalberg (1980). 64 The centrality of individualism (however differently understood) in three schools of thought – the French Enlightenment, German romanticism, and ascetic Protestantism – again becomes clear in Weber’s analysis. 65 Weber’s response was elaborate and complex. The focus here will be upon his sociological thinking rather than, as is often the case, his political activity. He was, in this regard, a vigorous defender of individual rights (see Coser 1971: 242–3, 254–6; Beetham 1974; Honigsheim 1968). 66 Several commentators have argued that Weber’s commitment to democracy was not a commitment in principle, but was rooted in his view that modern industrial societies confronted a great danger of societal ossification. It is apparent that Weber, in distrusting the citizenship skills of the Germans, did not break from the tenor of his times in Germany (see Jenkins 1996). Owing in part to the authoritarian rule of Bismarck, which left the nation far behind its western European neighbors in respect to the development of these skills, a long period of tutelage in the practices of democracy would be necessary, he believed. See Loewenstein (1966); Beetham (1974).

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67 Weber continues: “Whether, under such conditions, science is a worthwhile ‘vocation’ for somebody, and whether science itself has an objectively valuable ‘vocation’ are again value judgments about which nothing can be said in the lecture-room” (2005: 334). 68 The extreme cosmopolitanism of his own family (see Roth 1993, 1997, 2001) also speaks against the interpretation that sees Weber as a nationalist. See also Loewenstein (1966: 101), Beetham (1974: 119–50). 69 Albeit, in light of an array of forces, at a slower pace than in the European societies (1946a: 106–14). 70 Weber nearly always, in his sociological writings, qualifies his statements regarding the future by the use of terms such as “might,” “perhaps,” and “potentially.” 71 This section discusses Weber’s impact upon American sociology only. For an examination of his influence upon sociology in Britain, Japan, Italy, Poland, and Bulgaria, see Weiß (1989). 72 Many proponents of this school misunderstood Weber. In asserting that modernization took place only if certain “functional prerequisites” were fulfilled, Parsons, for example, sought to formulate “laws” and a “general theory of society” – thereby violating Weber’s axiom of value-relevance. Other modernization theorists, arguing that economic development would occur only in those countries where a “functional equivalent” of the Protestant ethic existed, viewed their research as under the direct influence of Weber – all the while neglecting the fundamental multicausal, contextual, and case study orientation of his sociology. 73 However, rather than as an ideal type useful as a “standard” against which empirical cases could be compared, Weber’s bureaucracy was understood as a depiction of the actual workings of this type of organization – and then criticized as inaccurate (mainly for omitting the influence of informal groupings). 74 For example, on behalf of clarity, Weber should use phrases such as “action oriented to feudalism” or “action oriented to Calvinist doctrine.” Abjuring such awkward phraseology, he generally prefers simply “feudalism” and “Calvinism.” It should be noted, however, that some major terms in the German original – for example, Handlungsorientierungen (action-orientations) and Regelmäßigkeiten des Handelns (regularities of action, patterns of action) – only rarely appear in the English translations.

Bibliography Writings of Max Weber 1891. Die Römische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und Privatrecht [The Significance of Roman Agrarian History for Civil and Private Law]. Amsterdam: Verlag P. Schippers (1966 reprint). 1909. “Debattenreden auf der Tagung des Vereins für Sozialpolitik.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik. Ed. Marianne Weber. Tübingen: Mohr, pp. 412–23. 1914. “Vorwort.” In Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, 1. Abt. Wirtschaft und Wirtschaftswissenschaft. Ed. K. Buecher, J. Schumpeter, and Fr. Freiherr von Wieser. Tübingen: Mohr, pp. vii–ix. 1927. General Economic History. Trans. Frank H. Knight. New York: Free Press.

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1946a. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 77–128. 1946b. “Religious Rejections of the World.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 323–59. 1946c. “The Social Psychology of the World Religions.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 267–301. 1949. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Ed. and trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. New York: Free Press. 1951. The Religion of China. Ed. and trans. Hans H. Gerth. New York: Free Press. 1952. Ancient Judaism. Ed. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. New York: Free Press. 1958. The Religion of India. Ed. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. New York: Free Press. 1968. Economy and Society. Ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press. 1978. “The Prospects for Liberal Democracy in Tsarist Russia.” In Weber: Selections in Translation. Ed. W. G. Runciman. Trans. Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 269–84. 1985. “‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North America: An Ecclesiastical Socio-Political Sketch.” Trans. Colin Loader. Sociological Theory 3(1): 7–13. 2001. The Protestant Ethic Debate: Max Weber’s Replies to his Critics, 1907–1910. Ed. David J. Chalcraft and Austin Harrington. Trans. Harrington and Mary Shields. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2005. Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity. Ed. Stephen Kalberg. Oxford: Blackwell. 2009. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings on the Rise of the West. Trans. and introduced by Stephen Kalberg. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Stephen Kalberg. New York: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading Albrow, Martin (1989) “Die Rezeption Max Webers in der britischen Soziologie.” In Max Weber Heute. Ed. Johannes Weiß. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 165–86. Albrow, Martin (1990) Max Weber’s Construction of Social Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Beetham, David (1974) Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics. London: George Allen & Unwin. Bendix, Reinhard (1962) Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bendix, Reinhard and Guenther Roth (1971) Scholarship and Partisanship. Berkeley: University of California Press. Burger, Thomas (1976) Max Weber’s Theory of Construct Formation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Randall (1981) “Weber’s Last Theory of Capitalism: A Systematization.” American Sociological Review 45(6): 925–42.

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Coser, Lewis A (1971) Masters of Sociological Thought. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Eisenstadt, S. N. (ed.) (1968) The Protestant Ethic and Modernization. New York: Basic Books. Gerth, Hans H. and C. Wright Mills (1946) “Introduction.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–74. Honigsheim, Paul (1968) On Max Weber. New York: Free Press. Jenkins, Jennifer (1996) “The Kitsch Collections and The Spirit of the Furniture: Cultural Reform and National Culture in Germany.” Social History 21: 123–41. Kalberg, Stephen (1980) “Max Weber’s Types of Rationality: Cornerstones for the Analysis of Rationalization Processes in History.” American Journal of Sociology 85(3): 1145–79. Kalberg, Stephen (1983) “Max Weber’s Universal-Historical Architectonic of EconomicallyOriented Action: A Preliminary Reconstruction.” In Current Perspectives in Social Theory. Ed. Scott G. Mc-Nall. Greenwood, CT: JAI Press, pp. 253–88. Kalberg, Stephen (1985) “The Role of Ideal Interests in Max Weber’s Comparative Historical Sociology.” In A Weber–Marx Dialogue. Ed. Robert J. Antonio and Ronald M. Glassman. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, pp. 46–67. Kalberg, Stephen (1987) “The Origins and Expansion of Kulturpessimismus: the Relationship Between Public and Private Spheres in Early Twentieth Century Germany.” Sociological Theory 5 (Fall): 150–64. Kalberg, Stephen (1990) “The Rationalization of Action in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion.” Sociological Theory 8 (Spring): 58–84. Kalberg, Stephen (1994a) “Max Weber’s Analysis of the Rise of Monotheism: A Reconstruction.” British Journal of Sociology 45 (December): 563–83. Kalberg, Stephen (1994b) Max Weber’s Comparative-Historical Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kalberg, Stephen (1996) “On the Neglect of Weber’s Protestant Ethic as a Theoretical Treatise: Demarcating the Parameters of Post-War American Sociological Theory.” Sociological Theory 14 (March): 49–70. Kalberg, Stephen (1997) “Tocqueville and Weber on the Sociological Origins of Citizenship: The Political Culture of American Democracy.” Citizenship Studies 1 (July): 199–222. Kalberg, Stephen (1998) “Max Weber’s Sociology: Research Strategies and Modes of Analysis.” In Reclaiming the Argument of the Founders. Ed. Charles Camic. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 208–41. Kalberg, Stephen (1999) “Max Weber’s Critique of Recent Comparative-Historical Sociology and a Reconstruction of His Analysis of the Rise of Confucianism in China.” In Current Perspectives in Social Theory. Ed. J. M. Lehmann. Stamford, CT: JAI Press, pp. 207–46. Kalberg, Stephen (2001) “Should the ‘Dynamic Autonomy’ of Ideas Matter to Sociologists? Max Weber on the Origin of Other-Worldly Salvation Religions and the Constitution of Groups in American Society Today.” Journal of Classical Sociology 1 (December): 291–327. Kalberg, Stephen (2004) “The Past and Present Influence of World Views: Max Weber on a Neglected Sociological Concept.” Journal of Classical Sociology 4 (July): 139–64. Kalberg, Stephen (2008) “The Perpetual and Tight Interweaving of Past and Present in Max Weber’s Sociology.” In Max Weber Matters: Interweaving Past and Present. Ed. David

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Chalcraft, Fanon Howell, Marisol Lopez Menendez, and Hector Vera. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers, pp. 273–88. Kalberg, Stephen (2011) “Introduction to The Protestant Ethic.” In Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Stephen Kalberg. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 7–59. Kalberg, Stephen (forthcoming) Max Weber’s Sociology of Civilizations. Lehmann, Hartmut and Guenther Roth (eds.) (1993) Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts. New York: Cambridge University Press. Loewenstein, Karl (1966) Max Weber’s Political Ideas in the Perspective of Our Time. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Löwith, Karl (1970) “Weber’s Interpretation of the Bourgeois-Capitalistic World in Terms of the Guiding Principle of ‘Rationalization.’” In Max Weber. Ed. Dennis Wrong. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 101–23. Marshall, Gordon (1980) Presbyteries and Profits: Calvinism and the Development of Capitalism in Scotland, 1560–1707. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marshall, Gordon (1982) In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Hutchinson. Mommsen, Wolfgang (1970) “Max Weber’s Political Sociology and His Philosophy of World History.” In Max Weber. Ed. Dennis Wrong. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 101–23. Mommsen, Wolfgang (1974) Max Weber: Gesellschaft, Politik und Geschichte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Mosse, George (1964) The Crisis of German Ideology. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Radkau, Joachim (2008) Max Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ringer, Fritz (1969) The Decline of the German Mandarins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ringer, Fritz (1997) Max Weber’s Methodology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roth, Guenther (1968) “Introduction.” In Max Weber, Economy and Society. Ed. and trans. Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press, pp. xxvii–ciii. Roth, Guenther (1993) “Weber the Would-Be Englishman: Anglophilia and Family History.” In Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts. Ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Roth. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 83–122. Roth, Guenther (1997) “The Young Max Weber: Anglo-American Religious Influences and Protestant Social Reform in Germany.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 10: 659–71. Roth, Guenther (2001) Max Webers deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte 1800–1950. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Roth, Guenther (2005) “Transatlantic Connections: A Cosmopolitan Context for Max and Mariannne Weber’s New York Visit 1904.” Max Weber Studies 5 (January): 81–112. Salomon, Albert (1934) “Max Weber’s Methodology.” Social Research 1 (May): 147–68. Salomon, Albert (1935a) “Max Weber’s Sociology.” Social Research 2 (February): 60–73. Salomon, Albert (1935b) “Max Weber’s Political Ideas,” Social Research 2 (February): 369–84. Scaff, Lawrence (1998) “The ‘Cool Objectivity of Sociation’: Max Weber and Marianne Weber in America.” History of the Human Sciences 11(2): 61–82. Schluchter, Wolfgang (1989) Rationalism, Religion, and Domination. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schluchter, Wolfgang (1996) Paradoxes of Modernity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Swatos, William and Lutz Kaelber (eds.) (2005) The Protestant Ethic Turns 100. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Walliman, Isidor, Howard Rosenbaum, Nicholas Tatsis, and George Zito (1980) “Misreading Weber: The Concept of ‘Macht’.” Sociology 14(2): 261–75. Weber, Marianne (1975) Max Weber. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Wiley. Weiß, Johannes (ed.) (1989) Max Weber heute. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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12 George Herbert Mead DMITRI N. SHALIN

INTRODUCTION George Herbert Mead was trained as a philosopher, taught in a philosophy department, and published primarily in philosophy journals, but his lasting impact was in the field of sociology. The fact that the science of society was still young at the time helps explain this anomaly. The borderline separating the fledgling discipline from its academic neighbors was still unclear: sociologists did not have much academic turf to protect and felt free to borrow their insights from neighboring fields. The peculiar blend of romantic idealism and pragmatic activism accomplished by Mead also had something to do with his popularity among social scientists, who found in his life work a model for balancing scholarship and advocacy at a time when America was awash in reform. Finally, it was the bold manner in which Mead married philosophical and sociological idioms that inspired his successors. Mead labored hard to spell out the sociological significance of contemporary philosophical currents and, along with John Dewey, brought a radically sociological imagination to philosophical discourse. While his place in the history of social science is well recognized, Mead’s original contribution to philosophy has only recently begun to be fully appreciated and explored (Habermas 1984; Joas 1985; Aboulafia 1986; Gunter 1990; Aboulafia 1991; Rosenthal 1991; Joas 1997, 2001). This essay investigates the interfaces between Mead’s philosophical and sociological thought, his effort to combine academic pursuits with political engagement, and the impact his work has had on social theory and sociological research. The discussion draws on Mead’s publications, as well as his unpublished papers and correspondence gathered in the Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago (the Mead Papers gathered in this collection are abbreviated below as MP). In his lifetime, Mead published several dozen professional articles, which were partially The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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reprinted in 1964 under the title George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology (GHM), two anthologies, one edited by Andrew Reck and published in 1964, Selected Writings (SW), and the other put together in 1968 by John Petras, George Herbert Mead: Essays on His Social Philosophy. Most of Mead’s professional output appeared in print after his death. His lectures on social psychology were published by Charles Morris in 1934 as Mind, Self, and Society (MSS). More lectures based on student notes were edited by David Miller in 1982 under the heading The Individual and the Social Self. Mead’s unpublished philosophical writings and lecture materials were collected in the 1938 volume The Philosophy of the Act (PA), the 1936 book Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (MT), and the 1932 compilation Philosophy of the Present (PP) which was based on the lecture series Mead delivered at Berkeley one year before his death. Two more recent additions to Mead’s published corpus should be singled out: Essays in Social Psychology, a collection of Mead’s early writings, and a study of Mead’s macrosociology that reprints his newspaper articles and unpublished manuscripts on the issues of war and democracy (Deegan 2008). Mead’s life and work have been the subject of several studies which variously inform the present discussion (Pfuetze 1954; Natanson 1956; Barry 1968; Kon & Shalin 1969; Miller 1973; Shalin 1984; Joas 1985; Baldwin 1986; Shalin 1988a; Rosenthal 1991; Cook 1993; Feffer 1993). Without attempting to do full justice to his multi-stranded genius, this survey sketches Mead’s social theory, places it in historical context, and reviews the reception of his ideas in the sociological community. The chapter starts with Mead’s biography and intellectual sources, moves on to his social and political theory, then reviews the reception of Mead’s ideas. The chapter concludes with reflections on Mead’s pragmatist sociology and its relevance to contemporary social thought.

THE BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT Mead was born in 1863, in South Hadley, Massachusetts, into a family distinguished by its long roots in New England Puritanism and passionate commitment to Christian values. His father, Hiram Mead, served as a pastor at various South Hadley congregations. In 1869, he moved to Oberlin College where he was offered a chair in Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology at the newly established theological seminary. When he died in 1881, at the age of 54, the obituary noted “the quiet, aggressive energy of our brother,” his “positiveness of conviction and of self-reliance … modified by delicacy of feeling and gentleness of manner” (The Oberlin Review, May 28, 1881, pp. 212–13). Many poor students, the obituary went on, would have had a hard time completing their college work were it not for Hiram Mead’s generous help. Mead’s mother, Elizabeth Storrs Billings, a woman noted for her learning and piety, also taught at Oberlin College, and before that, served as a top administrator at Mount Holyoke College. She personally saw to it that the young George would go through his daily regimen of prayer, study, and good works. It was her desire to see her son follow in his father’s footsteps that stirred Mead toward the Christian ministry. Even after Mead began to waver in his faith, he continued to push himself along this path for his mother’s sake. “My mother lives in me,” Mead wrote to

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Henry Castle, his college buddy and soul mate, on March 30, 1885 (MP, box 1, folder 1). “Her happiness is bound up in me. I sometimes wonder if it is not my duty to profess Christianity just for the infinite satisfaction it would give her.” Shy, studious, and deferential to his parents, Mead seemed perfectly suited to continue the tradition that featured several generations of clergymen on both sides of the family. This must have been his main option when he enrolled at Oberlin College, where he took up the classics, rhetoric, and moral philosophy, interlaced with mandatory prayer meetings. But the Christianity Mead imbibed in his formative years was now undergoing rapid changes, struggling to meet the challenges of the late nineteenth century. German historical criticism that made its way into the USA midway through the century raised doubts about the historical veracity of the Bible. These doubts were reinforced by Darwinism which offered a radically different perspective on the origins of humankind. The downturn in the economic cycle further undermined the appeal of mainstream Protestantism. With rising unemployment and labor unrest, it was harder to sustain its individualistic tenets that predicated personal success on the individual’s moral fiber. The mounting economic woes opened the door to socialist doctrine. Throughout the rest of the century, socialism steadily won recruits on US campuses, pushing evangelical Christianity to the left. While mainstream Evangelicals blamed socio-economic problems on assorted personal vices, the Social Gospel movement placed moral issues into a social context and scolded society for its failure to furnish conditions under which every one of its members could thrive. Shaping the human being in the image of God, according to the new evangelicals, meant more than cleansing his soul by prayer; it also required changing the social and economic conditions that corrupted his spirit. “Christian socialists should teach by fact and not by sentiments,” explained Rev. W. D. P. Bliss (quoted in Shalin 1988a: 915), “by fact about city gas works, not mere talk about city brotherhood.” The new spirit planted seeds of doubt in Mead’s mind about ministry as a vocation. He began to drift away from church teachings, though the process was slow and painful. As late as 1884, Mead confessed to Henry Castle, I believe Christianity is the only power capable of grappling with evil as it exists now. There can be no doubt of the efficacy of Christ as a remedial agent and so I can speak of him as such…. I cannot go out with the world and not work for men. The spirit of a minister is strong with me and I come fairly by it. (MP, April 23 and March 16, 1884, box 1, folder 1)

The decision to shun the priesthood was further complicated by his father’s untimely death. This tragic occasion exacerbated Mead’s family finances, forcing the young man to wait on tables in the campus dining hall and sell books door-to-door as a way to offset tuition costs. Thoughts about the heartache his decision to pursue a secular career might cause his mother depressed the young man. Still, Mead found traditional faith increasingly untenable on intellectual grounds and unappealing as a profession. Indeed, the latter offered less prestige than it once did, as well as fewer financial rewards. “[Should I choose ministry],” explained Mead to his friend (MP, letters to Henry Castle, March 16 and February 23, 1884, box 1, folder 1), “I shall have to let persons understand that I have some belief in Christianity and my praying

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be interpreted as a belief in God, whereas I have no doubt that now the most reasonable system of the universe can be formed to myself without a God.” The June 23, 1883 issue of The Oberlin Review contained a brief entry on George Mead who was about to leave Oberlin: “Mead, G. H., Oberlin. Phi Kappa. Essayist at oratorical contest. Has supported himself in part. After graduation will make money, then? Born Feb. 1863.” His acutely felt need to support his family led Mead to try his hand as a land surveyor for the Wisconsin Central Railroad Company. This was the first time Mead ventured far beyond the genteel environs of his Alma Mater and saw up close the people whom he hoped to teach Christianity. The experience proved unsettling. Mead liked the job, the opportunity to work outdoors, the chance to learn practical skills, but his contacts with the workers on his team left him confused. He was distressed by their callous ways and the little interest they showed in spiritual matters. “The engineer has been drunk off and on and mostly on for the last week,” complained Mead to Henry (MP, March 30, 1885, box 1, folder 1), and between his quarrels with his wife and quarrels with his [fore]man and quarrels with his boarders he has kept himself and the camp in an uproar and has so sickened me that I have about lost my interest in him and creatures of his species…. A drunken man howling right outside your tent would destroy the concentration of Socrates and hideousness of the scene seems to slowly close in upon your soul … and yet I ought to find my work and real life interest in working for such men.

Mead also tried to work as a tutor, but the rewards turned out to be equally meager. His charges did not care much for scholastic exercises, nor did their parents, who were more concerned with the kids helping on the farm than with their progress at school. Mead’s failure as a tutor deepened his sense of ill-being and renewed the doubts about his calling. I am discouraged Henry. I seem so far off from anything worth living for and I do not see that I gain strength at all by which I can reach anything. My life is spasmodical uneven without purpose…. Even Christianity looks dreary to me now. I have nothing to offer any woman that would give love an opportunity [to] invigorate my life. It is a sapless dying. (MP, February 8, 1885, box 1, folder 3)

Mead’s status anxieties and apparent inability to master practical circumstances left him seriously depressed. “Everything that I have ever seen desirable in life has vanished. I see no prospect of success or pleasure,” wrote Mead on April 14, 1887 (MP, box 1, folder 3). “I am discouraged, disappointed, disgusted with myself.” The word “suicide” crops up on several occasions in his letters from this period; the usage is rhetorical but indicative of the profound anxieties Mead faced as he struggled to meet high expectations of his family and friends about his future. The turning point came in 1887 when Mead abandoned his money-making schemes and returned to academic studies at Harvard, where he joined his friend Henry Castle. Since his early college years Mead relished philosophical speculations, but he did not see herein any realistic prospects for a career. For one thing, teaching metaphysics was not a common occupation at the time. Also, it appeared to be removed from the burning issues of the day, not a field for someone anxious to serve

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humanity. But as Mead discovered at Harvard, the academic field was changing fast, drawing its members into a politically-charged discourse and publicly-minded activism. He could see this in Josiah Royce, perhaps the most influential teacher in Mead’s student career, as well as in William James, a highly visible Harvard psychologist and philosopher. The spirit of reform that permeated the country in the 1890s made it respectable for the professorate to engage in social advocacy. Quite a few academics found themselves involved in local and national politics; some toyed with socialism and supported radical reforms. Mead’s decision to pursue an academic career was reinforced by his experience in Germany where he went in 1888 after winning a prestigious Harvard scholarship that allowed him to pursue doctoral studies abroad. He received some help from William James, who took a keen interest in Mead’s career, corresponded with Mead’s mother, wrote reference letters on Mead’s behalf, and was so impressed with the earnest, studious lad that he asked Mead to tutor his children (that engagement had to be cut short, however, after Mead got romantically involved with the sister of his mentor’s wife). In Germany, Mead took classes with noted intellectuals of that era: Ebbinghaus, Paulsen, Schmoller, and Dilthey. The exact extent to which his teachers influenced Mead is hard to gauge, but he must have been particularly impressed by Dilthey’s class on ethics where the eminent scholar talked about the moral growth of children and the responsible being in the world. More than any intellectual current, Mead latched onto the active role that German professors played in public policy debates and the respectability socialism commanded in academic circles. His letters home are brimming with enthusiasm for reforms. He wonders how they could be transplanted to the United States, talks about “opening toward everything that is uplifting and satisfying in socialism,” urges his friend “to get a hold upon the socialistic literature – and the position of socialism here – in Europe,” and deplores in the most sweeping terms American politics: “American political life is horribly idealess…. Our government in ideas and methods belongs so to the past…. We had never had a national legislature in which corrupt motives in the most pecuniary form could be more shamelessly used than in the present” (MP, August 1890, October 21 and 19, 1890, box 1, folder 3). At one point, Mead had declared his readiness to jump into politics himself (Shalin 1988b). With his political imagination running wild, Mead was neglecting his academic studies. An ambitious thesis on the perception of space and time that he intended to write would never be completed. “I am ashamed to go back without the degree,” he confessed on the eve of his departure from Germany, “I want to make my thesis a worthy beginning” (MP, October 20, 1891, box 1, folder 3). The decision to return to the United States was influenced by an unexpected offer from the University of Michigan to become an instructor in philosophy and physiological psychology. Mead brought with him to Ann Arbor his newly-wedded wife, Helen Castle, the sister of his dear friend Henry Castle, and the future heiress to the Dole Pineapple fortune. The move to Michigan proved auspicious in one more respect, for there Mead met his lifelong colleague and friend, John Dewey. Already a well-established academic, Dewey shared with Mead a puritanical upbringing, a strong desire to do good (his mother used to ask John, “Are you right by Jesus?”), and a passion for social democracy and philosophical discourse. Dewey’s encounter with radical social democracy came about the same time as Mead’s. In 1888, Dewey (1969: 246)

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speculated about the “tendency of democracy toward socialism, if not communism,” and opined that “there is no need to beat about the bush in saying that democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial, as well as civil and political … a democracy of wealth is a necessity.” The foremost public intellectual of his generation, Dewey would become a role model for Mead, who was struggling to reconcile his secular career with his spiritual longings. That Mead’s thinking was still utopian and religiously colored at the time can be gleaned from a rambling letter he wrote in June of 1892 to his parents-in-law: [I] have been able to follow the connection that has gradually been established between abstract philosophy and daily life. I have learned to see that society advances – men get closer and closer to each other and the Kingdom of Heaven is established on the earth, so far as man becomes more and more organically connected with nature…. [I]t seems to me clearer every day that the telegraph and locomotive are the great spiritual [engines?] of society because they bind man and man so close together, that the interest of the individual must be more completely the interest of all day by day. And America is pushing this spiritualizing of nature [and] is doing more than all in bringing the day when every man will be my neighbor and all life shall be saturated with the divine life. (MP, box 1, folder 3)

Around the time this letter was penned, the University of Chicago invited John Dewey to chair its Philosophy Department. Dewey accepted the offer on the condition that he could bring along his junior colleague. This gave Mead an opportunity to join a premier university in a city famous for its social experimentation. From the fall of 1893 until his death in 1931, Mead remained active in city politics. He served as a treasurer for the University of Chicago settlement, helped arbitrate the labor– management dispute in the Chicago garment district strike, and headed the Chicago Educational Association and the Immigrants Protective League of Chicago. In 1918, he was elected president of the City Club, a reform-minded organization of professionals and business people, a high honor that confirmed Mead’s standing in the community and sealed his reputation as a public intellectual. Throughout his life, Mead remained committed to the ideals of social democracy. He hailed the February 1917 Revolution that overthrew the Tsarist regime in Russia and followed keenly the developments in this part of the world for the rest of his life, although he soured on Soviet Russia after the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and barred non-Marxist parties from politics in the aftermath of the coup they staged in October of 1917. As Mead distanced himself from the Bolsheviks’ nationalization schemes, his political stance diverged from that of Dewey, who remained enchanted with the Russian reforms for years to come. In a letter to Irene Tufts, Mead recounts Dewey’s reaction to Bolshevism. It was that of mitigated approval. The approval was [of] the psychological effect upon a world of a revolution against the capitalist order, which has been successful at least in so far as the suppression of capitalism in Russia is concerned. On the suggestion that the complete failure of the Marxist communists’ economic system to perform the necessary economic work … discredits the economic revolution, J.D. did not reply. (MP, September 25, 1925, box 1, folder 17)

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For all his Fabian sensibilities and admiration for Woodrow Wilson, Mead appears to have been a lifelong member of the Republican party, firmly rooted in its progressive wing. In 1919, Mead got into a testy exchange with Medill McCormick, a Republican senator from Illinois, who took Mead to task for supporting the proposal for the League of Nations. Mead answered McCormick’s objections point by point, stressing in his rebuttal that he addresses the senator as “an American citizen, who is one of your constituents and has been a member of the Republican party and wishes that party to express the sentiments and opinions of the American people” (Deegan 2008: 255). Mead grew less politically engaged in the 1920s, when he began to devote more time to articulating his novel ideas. On the academic front, Mead’s career was less spectacular. He never finished his dissertation, something he promised himself to do whatever the cost. Fortunately, a PhD was not a prerequisite for an academic appointment in those days, and Mead’s friendship with Dewey, coupled with a steady stream of academic publications, assured his eventual ascent to full professorship. Still, Mead did not publish enough to reach the top of the academic pecking order. The collection of essays he put together around 1910 reached the galley proof stage but for mysterious reasons did not make it into print. Several memoirists point out that Mead found academic writing a painful exercise, so much so that the struggle to commit his ideas to paper would sometimes leave him on the verge of tears. Although Mead generated enough scholarly materials to fill several volumes, he rarely felt satisfied with what he wrote, and kept reworking his ideas and putting off publication dates. The insights he was trying to communicate required a new theoretical framework, a language that was yet to be invented. “As I look back,” Dewey observed on Mead’s death (PP: xxxvii, xxxix–xl), I can see that a great deal of the seeming obscurity of Mr. Mead’s expression was due to the fact that he saw something as a problem which had not presented itself at all to other minds. There was no common language because there was no common object of reference…. He was talking about something that the rest of us did not see…. The loss which American philosophy has suffered by Mead’s untimely death is increased by the fact that there is every reason to think that he was beginning to get a command of his ideas which made communication to others easier and more effective.

Another trait explaining Mead’s relative obscurity in the academic world was the combination of great originality and unusual deference to others which marked his personality…. While he was an original thinker, he had no sense of being original. Or if he had such a feeling, he kept it under. Instead of bringing to the front as novelties the problems which were occupying his mind (which they were even as problems), he chose to link them to ideas and movements already current. (Dewey, in PP: xxxvi)

Indeed, Mead often credited others with insights that were largely his own. His writing habits, deceptively exegetic at times, made many colleagues miss the originality of his thoughts, which came across in Mead’s conversations more clearly than in his writing. It was during his lectures on ethics, logic, philosophy, and social psychology that Mead articulated his path-breaking ideas. Soft-spoken, somewhat

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aloof, but friendly in his demeanor, Mead evoked warm feelings in those who were privileged to know him personally. Mead’s impact as a teacher took time to gel, however. He tended to speak in a monotone, often repeated himself, and felt ill at ease with questions in the classroom. On May 20, 1898, President Harper communicated to Mead his students’ dissatisfaction: “I am wondering whether it would be possible for you to make your Tuesday lectures more interesting to students. A great many complaints have come that they are so thoroughly dry that nobody had any interest in them [this sentiment] being true on the part of good students as well as poor students” (quoted in Cook 1993: 201). It should be noted that Mead had not yet formulated his original ideas, which would establish his reputation and make students flock to his classes in years to come. The course on social psychology that Mead taught in the last 20 years of his life attracted particular attention, drawing students from different departments. At some point, students hired a stenographer to capture his continuously evolving thought. We owe them a debt of gratitude for preserving Mead’s ideas for posterity. The last year of Mead’s life was marred by a controversy. When John Dewey left the University of Chicago for Columbia in the early 1900s, he left a gap in the department course offerings and diminished its national standing. After James Tufts announced his plans to step down as the philosophy department chair and retire, President Robert Hutchins concocted a scheme of revamping the department by staffing it with new members whose views were antithetical to pragmatism. As a newly installed chair, Mead informed the president that his proposed additions did not meet with the faculty approval, and after his entreaties failed to sway the administration, he resigned from the university. Meanwhile, Mead made plans to join John Dewey at Columbia University, which had extended a job offer to him. These plans did not come to pass. With his health deteriorating rapidly, Mead died on April 26, 1931, a respected scholar and an esteemed colleague but hardly an academic star. It would take three decades before his work began to exert a formative influence on the field of sociology and his name achieved worldwide fame.

THE INTELLECTUAL SOURCES Even after Mead embarked on an academic career, he continued to wonder about his true calling and search for discursive props that could satisfy his longing for spiritually-meaningful existence. Several intellectual currents making the rounds in his day imprinted themselves on Mead’s mind. One was Darwinism, which placed human agency in a broad evolutionary context and demystified reason as a natural phenomenon that belongs to a wide behavioral continuum stretching from the lowest biological forms to the highest ones. John Watson, Mead’s colleague at the University of Chicago, radicalized Darwin’s premises, vowing to purge psychology of the remnants of spiritualism and turn it into an exact science of human behavior reducible in its entirety to environmental pressures. Early in the twentieth century, Albert Einstein formulated his relativist physics, which impressed Mead deeply and caused him to rethink his social theory. Important though these developments were in shaping his imagination, they came to Mead filtered through the dual prism of German idealism and American pragmatism – the two intellectual currents that

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aggressively tackled social issues and passionately advocated responsible being in the world. Transcendental – or as Mead calls it “Romantic” – idealism is a philosophy that sets itself against dualism and tries to bridge the gap between mind and matter, subject and object, freedom and responsibility. Reality is objective because there are subjects who turn it into an object of their activity – mental activity, that is, for idealists understood reason primarily as an affair of the mind. In and of itself, reality is meaningless, indeterminate; an a priori scheme must be imposed on it before it begins to make sense, an a priori scheme inherent in the mind. Thus, the subject plays a constitutive role in generating reality. And yet, it is only dimly aware of this role, of the fact that reason continuously constructs reality as an objective whole and a field of intelligent conduct. Romantic idealists sought to rectify this situation by illuminating the transcendental categories humans use to construct their universe, and, in the process, make humanity realize its responsibility for the world they inhabit. What Mead found so intriguing about this metaphysics is its sociological underpinnings. “In a very definite sense,” he wrote, “we can speak of this philosophy as one which is social in its character” (MT: 147). We can see this already in Kant ([1790] 1951: 137), who stipulated that every time the individual makes a generalization, “he disregards the subjective private conditions of his own judgment and reflects upon it from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by placing himself at the standpoint of others).” The rational individual raises a claim on behalf of the entire community whenever he judges something to be the fact. Reason is not idiosyncratic, nor is it compelled by things themselves; it is guided by the spirit of the community, whose logic reason imposes on the outside world. Notice the peculiarly interactionist locution Kant uses to explicate the public nature of reasoning – placing oneself at the standpoint of the other. It thematizes the self which, according to Kant, is the mark of human agency. What makes humans unique is that they can grasp themselves as objects without ceasing to be subjects, and they can do so by recourse to a priori categories, or, which is the same thing, by assuming the standpoint of the community, real or potential. The self as an objective phenomenon is socially constituted. A moral being is a self that places itself in the shoes of other people and follows the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would like others to do unto you.” Kant generalized this old biblical injunction into the theory of “categorical imperative” which bids us to do what stands to reason. Act in such a way that the principle underlying your conduct could serve as a law for the entire community, urged Kant, and the community in question would be rational and just. This precept is not only profoundly social, it is also radically democratic in its premise that every individual is a rational being entitled to speak on behalf of the whole community. To be sure, Kant’s thinking was sociological only in its implications. It is humans’ transcendental abilities that constitute society, Kant thought, and not the other way around. The a priori categories are universal, unalterable, and inherent in each individual mind; they represent not a particular group or society but the widest possible community – humanity as a whole. Still, the sociological dimension implicit in this philosophy was undeniable, and it came clearly to the fore in Kant’s successors, romantic idealists, who traced self-consciousness to practical externalization and embedded subjectivity in the collective conditions of human existence. Mead drove home this point with great ingenuity in his lectures on the history of philosophy,

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published under the title Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, where he laid bare the sociological underpinnings of romantic idealism: This process, according to Fichte, is what is continually taking place. The self throws up the world as a field within which action must take place; and, in setting up the world as a field of action, it realizes itself …. Now what the philosophical imagination of Fichte did was to go beyond this conception which united man with society, and to conceive of the man as an integral part of the universal Self, that Self which created the universe. We are all of us, as St. Paul says, parts of one another. That is true. We all of us have content which belongs to us only in so far as we share the selfhood of others. We see ourselves as others see us. The society that we belong to gives us our peculiar selves…. Now, what Fichte did was to conceive of an Absolute Self which is just such an organization of all selves; an infinite Self which is an organization of all finite selves. The universe as such is, then, the creation of this absolute self in the same sense as cultivated areas and great metropolitan areas are created by the society that lives in them. (MT: 90, 101)

The sentiment embedded in this passage informs Mead’s mature writings where he reinterprets in naturalistic terms the idealist musings about the conscious selves simultaneously feeding off and reconstituting society. His philosophical agenda is akin to the one articulated in the “Theses on Feuerbach” where Marx faulted classical materialism for its propensity to grasp reality “only in the form of the object or contemplation; but not as sensuous human activity, as practice” (Marx 1947: 197). The point here is to reclaim the idealist insight into the constitutive power of human agency without endorsing transcendentalist introspection and spiritualism, to recast humans as participant observers discovering themselves in the product of their labor without yielding to the romantic belief in the omnipotence of rational self. The dissertation that Mead planned to write in Germany under the guidance of Dilthey was inspired by Kant’s notion of time and space as by-products of transcendental intuition; years later, Mead would return to this project and reframe Kant’s insight in pragmatist terms, positing the human agent as an embodied being that physically manipulates material things and, in the process, imposes on the world a particular reference frame which transforms an indeterminate situation into the determinate, action-bound, continuously tested environment. What is crucial in this line of reasoning is that the agent is engaged with the world not just as an individual but as a member of society, that the physical world qua environment is transformed by collective activity, that reality is social before it is physical, impersonal, individual. We see this principle articulated in Marx, and before him, in Hegel. The latter accepted Kant’s notion that reality is constructed, that things themselves are grasped objectively when they become objects for the mind. But the mind in question, Hegel realized, is not individual; nor are its a priori categories eternal. The flesh and blood person is the mind’s immediate locus, but its a priori categories are historically emergent and socially derived. This is evident in the case of self, which cannot grasp itself through immediate introspection and presupposes a community as its backdrop: “The self perceives itself at the same time that it is perceived by others,” contended Hegel (1967: 661, 229). “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself … by the very fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized’.” As seen from this romantic vantage point, human

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history is an ongoing process that gradually brings humanity to self-consciousness, compels it to take stock of its taken-for-granted beliefs, and allows reason to reshape the objective world according to its own consciously chosen rationales. Romantic idealists made an important discovery: something at the very core of consciousness must remain unconscious if consciousness is to do its job of apprehending objective reality. This unconscious transcendental hideaway is socially and historically emergent. For as long as individuals remain oblivious to the constitutive nature of their prejudices – prejudgments – the objective world they generate persists in its unyielding thingness. When they stop taking for granted their a priori categories and subject them to self-conscious critique, they are bound to disrupt the old structures and, to the extent that new preconceptions take hold of their minds, bring about a new reality. The task entrusted to hermeneutics, as Friedrich Schleiermacher conceived this crucial philosophical discipline, was to recover the socio-historical a priori nourishing human understanding, subject to rational critique the world’s unconscious moorings, and lay out the groundwork for systematic social reconstruction. The romantic ideas would reverberate throughout the human sciences, engendering new strategies for conceptualizing bio-psycho-social processes. These strategies aimed at overcoming the dualism and bringing the macro-world directly in touch with the micro-world. The key metaphor of this era was the microcosm recapitulating the macrocosm. It is evident in the psychologists’ concern for the unconscious, the biologists’ discovery of the genetical code, the linguists’ preoccupation with the universal grammar, anthropologists’ interest in cultural values – everywhere the search was on for an equivalent of the transcendental a priori enciphering the larger whole. Romantic idealism left its mark on sociology as well. Feuerbach, Marx, Stirner, Coleridge, Emerson, and other late romantic thinkers would appropriate its message through concepts like “species being,” “social being,” “the self,” and kindred concepts undermining the dichotomy of personality and society and reestablishing humans as masters over their fate. In Europe, the transcendentalist strategy crystallized into interpretive sociology, with its constructionist agenda and signature attempt to telescope macrostructural phenomena into meaning-laden action. “[S]uch concepts as ‘state,’ ‘association,’ ‘feudalism,’ and the like,” maintained Weber ([1926] 1946: 55), “designate certain categories of human interaction. Hence it is the task of sociology to reduce those concepts to ‘understandable’ action, that is, without exception to the actions of participating individual men.” Simmel followed the same strategy when he linked his famous question “How is society possible?” to the Kantian one, “How is nature possible?” A similar strategy was at work in the United Sates, where Josiah Royce, James Baldwin, Charles Cooley, George Mead, and other minds laboring at the turn of the century sought to appropriate the romantic legacy. They tackled the problem from a different angle, however. Whereas European sociologists focused on the culturally given a priori beliefs that motivate conduct and bind together individuals into a social whole, American philosophers and social scientists centered on selfconsciousness as a locus of social control and societal change. As Mead (MT: 125) put it, “The Romantic philosophy pointed out that the self, while it arises in the human experience, also carries with it the very unity that makes society possible.” The Identitätsphilosophie (yet another name for transcendental idealism) was interpreted here to mean that reality has to be processed through self-consciousness to

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emerge as an objective and meaningful whole. Whatever can be said about nature, the famous idealist principle “no object without a subject” sounds almost like a truism when applied to society: the self must identify with a social role before the latter comes to be an objective fact. There would be neither slaves nor masters without individuals acting the part, no capitalists to preside over the economic scene without wage earners showing up to do the job. The structure of social roles found in any given group is inseparable from the structure of selves discernible in its members. The romantic intertwining of self and society had an added appeal to reform-minded Americans because it implied that human agency matters, that the self critically reflecting on its own taken-for-granted beliefs can bring about a more rational society. This activist creed, originally formulated in the aftermath of the French Revolution, fitted well with the progressive spirit of the time: When the Revolution came, many institutions which long seemed to be things in themselves, showed that they were nothing but phenomena. And when new constitutions and social orders had to be planned, the spirit of the age emphasized the fact that, at least in the social world, it is the office of human intelligence to impose its own forms upon the phenomena, and to accept no authority but that of the rational self. (Royce 1919: 277)

The last statement belongs to Josiah Royce, the Harvard professor who, in a series of articles published in the 1890s, laid out an agenda that had much to do with Mead’s research program. Two of these articles are especially noteworthy as precursors of Meadian thought, one titled “The External World and the Social Consciousness” (Royce 1894) and the other “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature” (Royce 1985). What Royce (1894: 531) proposed here was that “neither vividness, nor intrusive resistance to our will, nor peculiarly insistent relation to our muscular experience, nor regular recurrence, suffice to define the notes of externality as we now define them. It is social community that is the true differentia of our external world.” As an object in our experience, Royce argued, the self submits to this principle as well, for it is social in its origin and substance. Royce credited romantic idealists in general and Hegel in particular for articulating this insight: Self-consciousness, as Hegel loved to point out, is, in fact, a mutual affair…. I am dependent on my fellows, not only physically, but to the very core of my conscious selfhood, not only for what, physically speaking, I am, but for what I take myself to be. Take away the conscious Alter, and the conscious Ego, so far as in this world we know it, languishes, and languishing dies. (Royce 1894: 532; 1895: 468)

Along with James Baldwin (1897), Royce speculated about role-playing among children as a mechanism for appropriating self-identity, the relationship between selfconsciousness and mental illness, the self’s responsibility for its community, and suchlike subjects that pointed to a fruitful line of inquiry. Mead adopted this discursive strategy and pushed his teacher’s research program further along than any other scholar of his generation. Much as he was indebted to this idealist tradition, Mead transcended it in at least one crucial way: unlike Royce, Mead looked at the dynamics of mind, self, and society not from the idealist but from the pragmatist standpoint. Along with Peirce, James, and Dewey, Mead fastened his intellectual enterprise to

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the assumption of the pragmatist that the individual only thinks in order that he may continue an uninterrupted action, that the criterion of the correctness of his thinking is found in his ability to carry on, and that the significant goal of his thinking or research is found not in the ordered presentation of the subject matter but in the uses to which it may be put. (PA: 97)

That pragmatism and transcendental idealism are kindred currents goes without saying. The continuity between the two was acknowledged by all principal players in the American pragmatist movement – Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Mead. In the words of James (1970: 133), pragmatism represents “a new Identitätsphilosophie in pluralistic form.” Both pragmatists and romantics stressed agency, responsibility, and the constructed nature of reality, often making it hard to say where romanticism ends and pragmatism begins. There is one crucial difference, though, and it has to do with the way each philosophy conceives of human agency. Romantic idealists equate agency with discursive reason continuously perfecting itself throughout the spiritual evolution; pragmatists define reason in post-Darwinian terms as an embodied conduct evolving through bio-social evolution. For romantic idealists, the transcendental a priori is the domain of abstract thought and values; pragmatists transform it into an emotionallycharged, biologically-grounded, socially-informed a priori that stands for habit or routine action in which humans are implicated before they can grasp it conceptually. Pragmatists endeavored to reclaim “the universe of nonreflectional experience of our doings, sufferings, enjoyments of the world and of one another” (Dewey 1916: 9). They keep reminding us that “mental processes imply not only mind but that somebody is minding” (PA: 69). “The mother minds her baby; she cares for it with affection. Mind is care in the sense of solicitude, anxiety, as well as of active looking after things that need to be tended” (Dewey [1934] 1958: 263). Once the cognitive abilities were reconnected to the body, reason lost some of its luster. “Reason, anyway, is a faculty of secondary rank,” observed Peirce (1976: xxi). “Cognition is but the superficial film of the soul, while sentiment penetrates its substance.” This momentous shift in perspective marked a turning point in the evolution of pragmatism. First articulated by Peirce, pragmatism found a new life in James’s Principles of Psychology (1890), a widely-read treatise that tied mental processes to action and brought into wide circulation the concept of social self. Mead and Dewey worked out their own version of pragmatism in the 1890s, through intense discussions about the nature of the psychical that went back to their Michigan years. Like many of their colleagues at the time, Dewey and Mead sought to find answers to intractable metaphysical problems with the help of psychology, a fledgling discipline that broke away from philosophical discourse while retaining some of its concerns. It was during his preparation for the college course on physiological psychology that Mead realized that “the body and soul are but two sides of the same thing,” that “our psychical life can all be read in the functions of our bodies,” that “it is not the brain that thinks but our organs insofar as they act together in the processes of life” (MP, letter to the Castle family, June 1892, box 1, folder 3). Dewey came to see mind as minding via his critique of the stimulus–response schema. Of particular interest in this respect is his influential article “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”

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(Dewey 1972, vol. 5: 100, 106), in which he demolished the notion that stimulus precedes conduct: In any case, what precedes the “stimulus” is the whole act, a sensori-motor co-ordination. What is more to the point, the “stimulus” emerges out of this co-ordination…. Now the response is not only uncertain, but the stimulus is equally uncertain; one is uncertain only in so far as the other is. The real problem may be equally well stated as either to discover the right stimulus, to constitute the stimulus, or to discover, to constitute, the response.

We can gather from this statement that pragmatists were fighting their battle on two fronts: they sought to break with the idealist propensity to intellectualize human agency and, at the same time, tried to avoid the reductionist tendency inherent in behaviorism and positivism. The label “physiological psychology” under which pragmatists packaged their discoveries should not mislead us, for this was a nonreductionist, philosophically sophisticated, and, above all, social psychology that anticipated the future advances in social neurology and brain research. Pragmatists were aided in their efforts to steer away from reductionism by the insight into the intimate relationship between reason and community. “The unit of existence is an act,” postulated Mead (PA: 65), “the act stretches from the stimulus to response,” but the act in question, Mead would hasten to add, is itself a part of a larger social undertaking: What I have attempted to do is to bring rationality back to a certain type of conduct, the type of conduct in which the individual puts himself in the attitude of the whole community to which he belongs. This implies that the whole group is involved in some organized activity and that in this organized activity the action of one calls for the action of the other organisms involved. What we term “reason” arises when one of the organisms takes into its own response the attitude of the other organisms involved…. When it does so, it is what we term “a rational being.” (MSS: 334)

Dewey took a similar sociological turn. “[M]an is essentially a social being,” he claimed at the outset of his intellectual career (1969, vol. 1: 232), “the nonsocial individual is an abstraction arrived at by imagining what man would be if all his human qualities were taken away.” To establish human agency as social to the core was important to pragmatists because this placed humans on the same level with society and accorded it a status befitting a truly democratic society. In such a society, individual actions count, each human being is a society in miniature, and the fate of the whole is intertwined with the fate of its individual parts waiting to be roused to action. Here, again, pragmatists revealed their debt to romanticism and its favorite metaphor of man-the-microcosm, which resonated with the progressive creed. As time wore on, Mead and Dewey would increasingly shun Protestant rhetoric and romantic shibboleth. In one of his last articles, titled “Royce, James, and Dewey in Their American Setting,” Mead distanced himself from his Harvard teachers whose lofty idealism, he charged, was alien to the pragmatic spirit of America (SW: 391). Alas, he overstated his case. Mead and his colleagues owed more to their romantic predecessors than they were willing to concede. Blended with Protestant yearnings and thoroughly Darwinized, romantic teaching foreshadowed a theory that sought to explain America to itself and guide the changes ravaging society on

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the eve of the twentieth century. Pragmatism was the name of this theory, and it found in George Mead “a seminal mind of the very first order” (Dewey, in PP: xl), and one of its most original interpreters.

THE THEORETICAL CORPUS Any attempt to reconstruct Mead’s theory faces hurdles. His publications, lecture notes, written fragments, and correspondence give us a good idea about the evolution of his thoughts, but they do not convey a full-fledged theoretical system. It is up to the interpreter to trace the missing links, to recover the systemic features binding together various strands in Mead’s complex, unfinished, lifelong project. We also need to bear in mind that Mead was not a professional sociologist. A philosopher by training, he dabbled in physiology, psychology, pedagogy, political theory, and theoretical sociology. His thinking transgressed interdisciplinary boundaries, and this became a handicap once the rationalization process in academia began to favor autonomous disciplines whose practitioners looked askance at their colleagues venturing too far into neighboring fields. If an interest in Mead is now growing, it is in part because the boundaries separating rival academic fields have grown porous and tolerance for alternative research styles is on the rise. Another problem in reading Mead is his propensity to mingle analytical perspectives. It is one thing to explicate self in the evolutionary perspective, that is, phylogenetically, where any reference to “other selves” is illegitimate, and another to explain how children acquire selves ontogenetically, with a developed human society already in place and other selves lending themselves as the backdrop for conceptualizing the socialization process. A still different approach is called for when behavior is explained in situ or sitogenetically, when the researcher confronts fully-minded individuals juggling their identities and transcending established norms. Mead often shifts gear, moving briskly between phylogeny, ontogeny, and sitogeny, and in the process, confuses his interpreters. One last difficulty to be mentioned is the unconventional nature of Mead’s theory, especially as it evolved in the last two decades of his life, when Mead endeavored to revamp his thoughts in line with the developments in nonclassical physics. This new tack brought Mead into an uncharted territory where he struggled to find language adequate to his insights and formulate a pragmatist cosmology built on the notion of pan-sociality. Reconstructing this phase of Mead’s thinking is all the more important, given the attention social theorists now pay to nonclassical perspectives in science and the humanities.

Evolution, relativity, and sociality Modern evolutionary theory has painted natural history as a process evolving in stages from inchoate blobs of matter to complex mechanical systems, to elementary biological forms, to higher primates, and then all the way to humans with their selfconscious conduct and rational organizational forms. Social scientists traditionally focus on the tail end of this evolutionary process and model their insights on those of natural science. Mead pretty much stood this approach on its head when he looked at naturalists’ discoveries through the social scientist’s eye. “The difficulty is

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found in the fact that the physical scientists present a situation out of which the human animal and his society arose,” observed Mead (PA: 606). It has indeed been the procedure of science to explain society in terms of things which are independent of social characters and to represent the social situation as one that has been fortuitous and utterly unessential to its existence of that out of which it has arisen. [Our] undertaking is to work back from the accepted organization of human perspectives in society to the organization of perspectives in the physical world.

What set Mead’s imagination off and led him into uncharted waters was the theory of relativity. Its author, Albert Einstein, displayed an uncommon curiosity about the way things appear when sampled from different perspectives. He used to imagine how passing objects would appear to people inside the train and to those gathered on the train station; or else, he would place himself on the edge of a light beam and try to figure out whether the observer stationed on the nearby planet would experience the passing event in the same fashion as the one riding the light beam. Such practice, Mead realized, is a kind of role-taking that marks an intelligent creature simultaneously inhabiting several reference frames: “[T]he relativist is able to hold on to two or more mutually exclusive systems within which the same object appears, by passing from one to the other … as a minded organism he can be in both” (PP: 81). This ability to be in several places at once engenders the possibility of different yet equally objective measurements for the same event. Whether light signals emanating from two distant objects were emitted simultaneously cannot be ascertained without the observer being positioned somewhere between the two sources of light. When observers change their positions, the objective reality as measured by the instrument would change as well. The moving body has as many objective readings for its mass, length, and momentum as there are inertial systems in which it is registered. Relativist phenomena point to the vaguely social manner in which physical things interact with each other. Physical relativity reveals “sociality in nature which has been generally confined to thought,” “the social” in its primordial form (PP: 63). Sociality signifies the simultaneous presence in more than one reference frame that alters the character of the event as measured from a particular perspective. “Relativity reveals a situation within which the object must be contemporaneously in different systems to be what it is in either…. It is this which I have called the sociality of the present…. Sociality is the capacity to be several things at once” (PP: 63, 49). The fact that a body can have one mass in one inertial system and a different mass in another points to a proto-social situation in which an object enjoys multiple memberships in several systems exerting a cross-pressure on the thing. “I have referred to the increase in mass of a moving body as an extreme case of sociality,” wrote Mead (PP: 52–3). A quality that a moving body acquires as a result of its multiple memberships is called “emergent” and the process that brings it into existence “emergence,” which Mead defined as “the presence of things in two or more different systems, in such a fashion that its presence in a latter system changes its character in the earlier system or systems to which it belongs” (PP: 69). Mead understood that relativist physics appeared to have boosted idealism, but he declined to endorse its subjectivist implications. Neither emergence nor relativity imply subjectivity, he contended; both are natural phenomena presupposing no particular subject; reference frames belong to

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nature, not consciousness, which appears on the scene belatedly as a by-product of the increasingly complex relativist phenomena. The body traversing the mechanical universe does not “choose” among the possibilities it faces, though there is a measure of uncertainty as to where its trajectory will bring it in the end. Nor does it feel pleasure or pain while suffering through its permutations. It is not until the evolutionary process reaches the next stage that the physical body begins to feel its immediate surroundings. The ability to sense one’s way around turns the mechanical body into a biological organism, elevates mechanical motion to the level of purposeful conduct, and transforms physical matter into organized environment inhabited by sentient creatures. This crucial step in evolution signifies the beginning of life, which Mead (PP: 69) explicated as a process in which the individual by its action tends to maintain this process both in itself and in later generations, and one which extends beyond of what is going on in the organism out into the surrounding world and defines so much of the world as is found in the sweep of these activities as the environment of the individual.

Environment is always someone’s environment, whether it is a particular individual or the entire species, and when different species appear on the scene, they bring with them an altered environment. There is “a relativity of the organism and its environment, both as to form and content…. Emergent life changes the character of the world just as emergent velocities change the characters of masses” (PA: 178; PP: 65). As a food object, grass comes into being with certain kinds of animals, while the organism’s digestive tract adjusts to the changes in its environment. The important point that sets Mead’s approach to evolution apart from Spencer’s is that the organism does not simply adapt itself to external stimuli – it picks its stimuli through its sensitivity and purposeful action, such as food foraging, nest-building, mating behavior, and other practices, which evince a rudimentary intelligence. “Stimuli are means, but the tendency, the impulse, is essential for anything to be a stimulus. This tendency is what marks intelligence. We find it in all stages, perhaps even below life, in crystals…. Intelligence is the selection by the organism of stimuli that will set free and maintain life and aid in rebuilding the form” (TIS: 109). Life is relativity brought to a higher level; it signifies a more advanced form of sociality that imbues the universe with choice and allows selection between alternative reference frames. Sensitivity to the environment lends a temporal spread to the world, brings within the organism’s purview the competing time lines which span the duration of the ongoing act and enables the organism to foresee the outcome of its action. A sentient organism favors some reference frames over others, evading those threatening its existence and searching for the ones beneficial to its survival. “Each organism puts its frame of reference on the world” (TIS: 115), and in doing so, it maintains, expands, and transforms its environment. The natural selection process changes its character with the onset of life. Now it features a conflict between competing reference frames favored by species striving to maintain their habitat. A reference frame that an organism imposes on the world is called “perspective” – the term Mead borrowed from Whitehead to describe emergent characteristics that organisms confer on the world through their action and the adaptive changes that the organism undergoes in the process. “The perspective is the

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world in its relationship to the individual and the individual in his relationship to the world” (PA: 115). As species evolve, they bring into the world new perspectives, and as the range of their activity increases, so does their ability to control their environment. This control reaches a qualitatively new stage when the individual succeeds in “getting oneself into the field of one’s action,” when it emerges as an object within its own field of experience, when it becomes a “self” (TIS: 123). Before the self takes its rightful place as the latest evolutionary emergent alongside mechanism and organism, the living creature must catch its own reflection in other reference frames. Some of this proto-reflexive conduct is already apparent in lower biological forms endowed with senses, yet the animal is unable to switch perspectives or take up a different role at will, nor does it go about its self-casting in a systematic, rational fashion. The animal cannot be another to itself because its biological, physiological, and psychological limitations severely limit its ability to move in and out of its reference frame. “A perspective can be recognized as such only when lying in the field within which it is no longer a perspective” (PA: 607). The ability to leave one’s perspective at will and consciously take the role of the other transcends the biological organization of perspectives rooted in heredity. The perspectives must be organized socially for the human being to engage in interaction with oneself, to bring one’s action under symbolic control. This breakthrough signifies that the organism has brought within its purview the social process as a whole. Individuals mastering this feat are conscious and self-conscious at the same time. They now have what is commonly referred to as mental life – the ability to move freely and methodically from one reference frame to another: “It is here that mental life arises – with this continual passing from one system to another, with the occupation of both in passage and with the systematic structure that each involves. It is the realm of continual emergence” (PP: 85). This transition presupposes the sociological organization of perspectives, and it signifies the arrival on the evolutionary scene of “minded organisms.” In Mead’s vocabulary, the term “mind” designates the ability to place oneself in different perspectives in a systematic fashion, to survey oneself from the standpoint of other individuals, to direct one’s actions with reference to a larger social act, and ultimately, to criticize and reconstruct this social act as a whole. Mind is coterminous with a group. The emergence of mind signifies a new stage in the evolutionary process “when the process of evolution has passed under the control of social reason” (PA: 508). To sum up, Mead worked his way to a cosmology that took the category of the “social” as its fundamental principle. He recast evolution as a process that is accompanied by the growth in sociality, by the ability to occupy more than one reference frame or perspective at the same time. He envisioned physical relativity as a primordial form of sociality and conceived of self-consciousness as the highest known evolutionary form of relativity. In this pan-social reckoning, mind and matter are not juxtaposed to each other: the two are perennially evolving sides of the ongoing process of natural evolution: [M]ind as it appears in the mechanism of social conduct is the organization of perspectives in nature and at least a phase of the creative advance of nature. Nature in its relationship to the organism, and including the organism, is a perspective that is there.

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A state of mind of the organism is the establishment of simultaneity between the organism and a group of events. (SW: 316)

This theory suggests “a universe consisting of perspectives. In such a conception the reference of any perspective, as a perspective, is not to an absolute behind the scenes but from one perspective to another” (PA: 119). With this daring discursive turn, Mead raised a host of fresh issues and pointed to new ways of conceptualizing problems that traditionally occupied social scientists. The new social theory brought into one continuum mind, self, and society as three aspects of the same process which calls for a thoroughly sociological treatment and which must be examined in concrete situations.

Mind, self, and society Mechanism, organism, and the self are the key evolutionary emergents representing three stages in the development of relativity-cum-sociality. Each stage is ushered in by a set of agents who bring their own perspectives to bear on the world, turning it into an environment or a field of objects peculiar to themselves. A social organism – that is, a social group of individual organisms – constitutes objects not constituted before…. Wealth, beauty, prestige and various other objects appear in this environment because of its determination by the human social individual, and these are the springs of conduct. The same may, of course, be said of the environment of the biological form. Food, danger, sex, and parenthood are all springs of action and are such because these objects are determined as such by the susceptibilities of the animal forms. Finally, physical objects are at rest or are in motion because of their determination of the here and the there of the percipient event. (PA: 201; MSS: 130)

Notice how Mead works his way backward from the social to the physical world, scouting nature for signs of proto-sociality, straining to show how its seeds in the inanimate world sprout into the richer forms of social relativity found in the biosphere and the human world. Central among the objects peculiar to this world is the “self” – an emergent property of the human body transformed by social interactions to a point where it grows conscious of its multiple presences in different systems and uses this awareness to conduct itself intelligently. As a minded organism, the self simultaneously inhabits mechanical, biological, and symbolic worlds. While all three are relatively autonomous from each other, they are tied together through multiple feedbacks. Intelligent behavior feeds back into the biological organism: it reshapes its central nervous system, rewires neural connections in the brain, alters the structure of affect. Germs, earthquakes, and interstellar calamities, in turn, remind the minded agents who pride themselves on being the evolution’s pinnacle that they are very much a part of the physical and biological realms from which they sprang and to which they are inexorably tied. All evolutionary domains are linked together by the bonds of sociality. Strictly speaking, there is no reality that is a-social and no minded existence unburdened by the flesh. Such is the logic underlying Mead’s general enterprise. It has several implications for social theory, none more important than this: social theory has to integrate

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self-conscious humanity with biological corporeality and mechanical physicality in an ecologically sensitive framework that leaves ample room for qualitatively different evolutionary spheres. The pragmatist approach to society favors social theory that is dialectical, decentered, emergent, interactionist, and process-oriented. As all pragmatists, Mead avoids the dichotomies commonly found in social theory, such as nature and culture, behavior and institution, self and society. He adopts a dialectical strategy that places polar terms on equal footing and renders both contingent on each other. This essentially romantic strategy makes superfluous questions like “What comes first – self or society?” Each is an abstraction representing a measured linguistic take on the unfractured process: Human society as we know it could not exist without minds and selves, since all its most characteristic features presuppose the possession of minds and selves by its individual members; but its individual members would not possess minds and selves if these had not arisen within or emerged out of the human social process…. The organization and unification of a social group is identical with the organization and unification of any one of the selves arising within the social process in which that group is engaged. (MSS: 227, 144)

Mead follows a similar strategy when he talks about social institutions. He declines to elevate them into a separate realm of social facts, as Durkheim would have it. Dialectically understood, an institution is “nothing but an organization of attitudes which we all carry in us…. It makes no difference, over against a person who is stealing your property, whether it is Tom, Dick or Harry. There is an identical response on the part of the whole community under these conditions. We call that the formation of the institution” (MSS: 211, 167). The circle involved in this reasoning is called “hermeneutical.” Polar sociological terms are explicated in this circle as flip sides of an ongoing process in which the individual is reproduced as a self-conscious whole while society is generated as a concrete totality of individual perspectives. The dialectical strategy deployed by Mead yields a characteristically decentered view of consciousness, vaguely reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Whereas traditional theory locates subjectivity within the organism and juxtaposes to it objective reality on the outside, pragmatist theory disperses consciousness widely and treats mind as a property of social structure. The locus of mind is not in the individual. Mental processes are fragments of the complex conduct of the individual in and on his environment…. If mind is socially constituted, then the field or locus of any given individual mind must extend as far as the social activity or apparatus of social relations which constitutes it extends; and hence that field cannot be bounded by the skin of the individual organism to which it belongs. (PA: 372; MSS: 223)

Individual mind is not a mental event; it is practical minding in the course of which the embodied agent comes to terms with a larger social act. When the agent places itself in the group perspective and successfully completes a social act, it proves itself to be a mindful, conscious being. When individuals fail in their concerted effort

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to mesh their action with that of a social group, they open themselves to charges of being mindless or subjective: The subjectivity does not consist in the experience having the metaphysical nature of consciousness but in its failure to agree with a dominant common perspective which claims the individual…. The objectivity of the perspective of the individual lies in its being a phase of the larger act. It remains subjective in so far as it cannot fall into the larger social perspective. (PA: 610, 548)

This is not to suggest that disagreement with the dominant perspective automatically renders the act a-social and the individual involved mindless. The mind embodies group spirit, but if its growth is healthy, mind evolves into a critical, reflective, and reconstructive agency that makes personal experience available to others and compels the group to take a critical look at itself. The affairs of the mind, therefore, are not inherently subjective; mind transcends the individual, it can take up a new perspective – become other than itself – at any time. Self-conscious mind is society in its concrete historical manifestation, and this is precisely why the mind’s activity has such a pervasive impact on society. “[T]he whole nature of intelligence is social to the very core,” urges Mead (MSS, 141); its immediate locus may be individual, but it reaches as far as society ever extends. Mind’s raison d’être is to embrace what it is not, which is why it remains open to novelty and serendipity. A decentered mind changes the world by changing itself, by revamping the familiar structure of worn-out perspectives that stifle social change, that no longer allow the world to test its potentialities. Pragmatist social theory zeroes in onto the world’s emergent properties. Reality evolves, pragmatists contend, and it never ceases to do so, even at the rudimentary stages of physical evolution: “Things emerge, and emerge in the mechanical order of things, which could not be predicted from what has happened before” (MSS: 88). Unsuspected objects appear on the evolutionary scene whenever a new agent is powerful enough to impose on the world its own reference frame. While major evolutionary events are recorded in the annals of science as epoch-making breakthroughs, minor metamorphoses or emergent transformations abound in any given era. This is most notable in the environment populated by self-conscious creatures that are endowed with the extraordinary capacity to change their perspective at will. “The self by its reflexive form announces itself as a conscious organism which is what it is only in so far as it can pass from its own system into those of others, and can thus, in passing, occupy both its own system and that into which it is passing” (PP: 82–3). The self is always on the move, reaching beyond itself, turning into another. At any given moment it is poised to take a quantum leap from one perspective to another and thereby cause an instantaneous – emergent – evolution in its environment. Objective world is the world of objects brought into existence by self-conscious agents. “There is no self before there is a world, and no world before the self” (TIS: 156). This romantic locution is meant not to mystify but to assert that multiple realities are normal, that ours is the world in the making, that we dwell in what James called “the pluralistic universe” or the universe contingent on our ability to identify with many a universal. A social universal is real when enough individuals generalize their actions in its terms. The new terms bring about a new reality and a

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new present. “Reality exists in a present” (PP: 32), says Mead. An indefinite article in this statement reminds us that there is no absolute time frame to measure the simultaneity of events in nature. With each emergent transformation, a different time structure appears that binds together those involved by a shared sense of the past, with the past understood as “a working hypothesis that has validity in the present within which it works” (PA: 96). According to Mead, the past is as hypothetical as the future; it changes with the perspective, with each practical task at hand. “Now the past that is thus constituted is a perspective, and what will be seen in that perspective, and what will be relations between the elements, depends upon the point of reference. [T]here are an infinite number of possible perspectives, each of which will give a different definition to the parts and reveal different relations between them” (PA: 99). As the situation runs its course, so does its time structure. The pragmatist emphasis on emergent transformations should not be taken to mean that pragmatist social theory is indifferent to the world’s structural properties. Society is very much a structure, according to Mead, and so is the “self as a certain sort of structural process” (MSS: 165). Society is comprised of groups, organizations, institutions, and suchlike historical formations that constrain individual action. Each such historical configuration revolves around a bundle of privileged perspectives sustained by a power arrangement that fixes a privileged institutional past and extends the status quo into the future. Recalcitrant individuals unwilling or unable to abide by the existing structure of perspectives will be punished. Yet, all these social entities are interactional emergents rather than impenetrable castes. These are emergent universals that have to be brought into being anew with every situational encounter. Predictable and routine as the latter might be, they must be brought into being by conscious agents continuously joining their perspectives and reclaiming their habitual selves. Individuals are the ones who will ultimately choose a perspective and reproduce the order of things as they subsume themselves under the social universals institutionalized – privileged – in a given group or society. The self’s capacity to leap from one universal to another renders social universals fuzzy, makes them appear less as solid “bodies” and more like overlapping “fields.” The last term surfaces in Mead’s writings, as it does in James and Dewey, who talk about “fields of interaction,” speculate about “relatively closed fields,” and strain to conceptualize the changes a thing undergoes “according to the field it enters” (quoted in Shalin 1986a: 16–17). “Closed field” is indeed an apt metaphor for the interactionist outlook on social structure. It bids us to look at society as a vast sea of intermeshed fields populated by conscious selves ever ready to make a quantum leap from one social field to another, from the current symbolic reference frame to an alternative perspective. It is this incessant coming and going, entering and departing, identifying with and dumping the role, which is at the heart of social dynamics, as seen from the pragmatist viewpoint. Social structure makes itself felt as an ongoing process which ebbs and flows, as group members wander through perspectives and juggle their identities. Membership, correlatively, is more of an achievement than it is an ascription in this pragmatist universe, an on-again/off-again affair. The trick is to understand it as “an actual entity [that] is at once a process, and is atomic,” to see a solid social formation the way micro physicists apprehend a solid physical body: “The stone is a society of separate molecules in violent agitation” (Whitehead 1929: 121). While the social universe comprised of perspectives is real, it derives its objective

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reality from the particulars who must unlock these perspectives and situate themselves in their time horizons. A towering presence in every individual’s experience, society is but a structure of competing time lines and corresponding identities. All power in society is ultimately dependent on the power to universalize the particular and to particularize the universal.

Intelligence, conversation of gestures, and significant symbol Now we turn to evolutionary social psychology, an important part of Mead’s theoretical corpus in which he traces consciousness, language, and self-regarding conduct to their evolutionary precursors. We saw earlier how Mead tackled the problem philosophically by hitching consciousness to relativity: “If we accept those two concepts of emergence and relativity, all I want to point out is that they do answer to what we term ‘consciousness,’ namely, a certain environment that exists in its relationship to the organism, and in which new characters can arise by virtue of the organism” (MSS: 141, 330). This philosophical insight was fleshed out further, with the substantive input coming from physiology and psychology. One scientific current exerted an especially strong influence over Mead’s research agenda, known as “behaviorism,” a radical teaching championed by John Watson (1914) who called for replacing the traditional, introspection-based psychology with behavior-oriented inquiry. We should note that while Mead used the term “behaviorist” for the first time in his 1922 article “A Behavioristic Account of Significant Symbol,” he advocated studying the human psyche through conduct before Watson (who took a class with Mead) had a chance to articulate his program. It seems that Mead latched onto the term “behaviorism” as convenient shorthand for the action-oriented psychology that he championed in a series of articles published between 1909 and 1913. Mead accepted the notion that psychology must approach its subject from the standpoint of behavior, but he rejected the reductionist strictures prohibiting references to consciousness. In particular, Mead parted company with behaviorists on what qualifies as “stimulus.” For Watson, stimulus was an event existing prior to and independent from the response it elicits. Mead cast stimulus as a by-product of an ongoing action, as a phase in the larger act in which the actor selects among many possible perspectives those best answering its current agenda. What is or is not a stimulus cannot be decreed by an outside observer, but must be determined in situ and in actu, in light of the actor’s changing agenda and, in the case of humans, in the broader context of collective behavior. Our social psychology “is behavioristic,” explained Mead (MSS: 8), “but unlike Watsonian behaviorism it recognizes the parts of the act which do not come to external observation, and it emphasizes the act of the human individual in its natural social situation.” In keeping with the behaviorist agenda, however, Mead sought to trace consciousness to animal conduct in its advanced social forms. Several conditions must be met before instinctive behavior evolves into mindful conduct and the organism seizes itself as an object in its own experience. First of all, a highly sophisticated physiological apparatus has to be in place that enables the organism to delay its immediate response. Second, the cooperation between individual members of the species must reach a high degree of organization, with every member assigned a place in its group and compelled to carry out a part in the larger social act. Third, a prolonged period of infancy is required, during which youngsters

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practice role-taking, build their sense of self, and learn to measure their conduct by a collective yardstick. Fourth, self-consciousness calls for the forms of communication based on the language of significant symbols. And fifth, a new regime of managing perspectives has to emerge that separates the sociological principle of organization from the biological one. Already in graduate school Mead took a keen interest in the physiology of social conduct. He closely followed the developments in brain research and was fascinated with the workings of the central nervous system in which he saw a biological network uniquely suited for mapping social relations. Its sociological import, Mead surmised, is to be found in the progressively expanding neuron paths that enable the organism to anticipate the future course of action and control one’s conduct. “[I]t is the function of the central nervous system in the higher forms to connect every response potentially with every other response in the organism. … The central nervous system, in short, enables the individual to exercise conscious control over his behavior. It is the possibility of delayed response which principally differentiates reflective conduct from nonreflective conduct” (PP: 125; MSS: 117). Another biological factor favoring humans in their evolutionary ascent is the hand. The versatility that manipulation added to behavior gave humans an edge in the animal kingdom. Along with the hand came tool-making. “Man is essentially a tool-using animal,” stressed Mead; “man’s hand provides an intermediate contact that is vastly richer in content than that of the jaws or the animal paws…. Man’s implements are elaborations and extensions of his hands” (PA: 471; MSS: 363). As tool-makers, humans expand their ability to reshape their environment, and to the extent that they master the ultimate tool – symbolic language – they gain control over their own species and affect the direction of evolution itself. “The human hand, backed up, of course, by the indefinite number of actions which the central nervous system makes possible, is of critical importance in the development of human intelligence…. Man’s hands have served greatly to break up fixed instincts…. Speech and the hand go along together in the development of the social human being” (MSS: 249, 363, 237). This point needs to be elaborated further. Humans are not the only intelligent creatures in the universe. Intelligent behavior is widespread among animals. However, intelligence on the subhuman level differs from what Mead variously calls “social intelligence,” “rational intelligence,” or “reasoning conduct” found among tool-making animals. At the level of rational intelligence, action is differentiated into several increasingly autonomous phases: “impulse,” “perception,” “manipulation,” and “consummation.” Impulse begets image, manipulation tests the percept, purposeful conduct consummates action and satisfies the original drive. It is an impulse – hunger, danger, sexual arousal, or any other drive – that sets the act in motion and makes an object appear in experience. “The starting point of the act is the impulse and not the stimulus” (TIS: 114). Impulse converts random events into a definite “situation,” turns chaotic reality into “a world in which objects are plans of action” (SW: 276). A situation registers in the actor’s experience as an “image,” “percept,” or “perceptual object” that invites “manipulation” – testing of experienced objects via direct contact. Tactile experience either reaffirms the reality of a distant perception or calls it into question, suggesting new perceptual hypotheses. The action’s final phase is “consummation” – behavior

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that appropriates the thing and satisfies the organism’s original impulse. “We see what we can reach, what we can manipulate, and then deal with it as we come in contact with it. [The animal’s] act is quickly carried to its consummation. The human animal, however, has this implemental stage that comes between the actual consummation and the beginning of the act” (MSS: 248). What makes tool-aided behavior so important in the history of intelligence is that it enriches the range of perceptual objects in experience, adds ideas to our mental repertoire, expands time horizons open to the individual, and broadens the spatial properties of the environment within which humans can act: “Ideation extends spatially and temporally the field within which activity takes place” (PP: 88). Ideational processes free conduct from its blind reliance on biological drives. The organism that delays its impulsive response and methodically tests its percepts takes a giant step toward rational intelligence. The final step on the road to rational intelligence requires the introduction of symbolic tools into the behavioral repertoire, something that happens to primates involved in complex social interactions. Mead takes great pains to emphasize that this advance implies group behavior. Reason originates in collective behavior implicating the entire community where every member has a role to play, all roles are potentially interchangeable, and each bit player can, in principle, substitute for the other. On that definition, elaborate social organizations found in insect societies do not qualify as rational. Individual members in such communities are biologically programmed to do their parts – they are physiologically unable to exchange their roles. Mead calls this pole of social differentiation “individual or physiological” and contrasts it with the “personality” or “institutional pole,” which presupposes the basic physiological identity of individual members and the fundamental interchangeability of social roles (MSS: 227–34). The latter organizational principle can be traced to collective behavior “in which one organism, in a group of organisms, by its conduct stimulates another to carry out its part in a composite co-operative act … the individual act [i]s a part of the larger social whole to which it in fact belongs, and from which, in a definite sense, it gets its meaning” (PA: 189; MSS: 8). The various strands of individual conduct implicated in this communal act are, in Mead’s vocabulary, “social roles,” while the individuals who weave their actions into the tapestry of a group exercise are “personalities” or “social actors.” “A person is a personality because he belongs to a community, because he takes over the institutions of that community into his own conduct” (MSS: 162). Mindful conduct, then, consists in acting according to a collective script, with every player ready to step in and take the role of other actors in a group. What makes mind different from other brands of intelligence is that it is mediated by symbolic tools. These tools immensely expand time horizons, give symbol makers a grip on their selves, and turn language users into responsible moral creatures. No matter how smart animals might be, they do not have reason or rational intelligence, as Mead understands these terms, for only symbolically-mediated conduct can properly be called rational: Reason is the reference to the relations of things by means of symbols. When we are able to indicate these relations by means of these symbols, we get control of them and can isolate the universal characters of things, and the symbols become significant. No individual or form which has not come into the use of such symbols is rational. (PA: 518)

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Phylogenetically, symbolic communication grows from a nonsymbolic one, which Mead characterizes as “the non-significant conversation of gestures.” Each participant engaged in this conversation keeps a close watch on everyone else’s movement, posturing, facial expression, and other body language signs communicating behavioral attitudes. “Gesture” is the term Mead adopted from the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt to designate a behavioral act in its early stages – acts “which serve as the cues or stimuli for the appropriate responses of the other forms involved in the whole social act” (PA: 448). Whatever the gesture’s social significance, it is not initially available to the actor (the point on which Mead parted company with Wundt). It is only when gestures become transparent to actors themselves that they can be termed “conscious,” the conduct involved, “rational,” and the communication accomplished, “conscious conversation of gestures.” Mead calls gestures purposefully used to communicate and identical in meaning to all parties involved “significant symbols.” The totality of symbols mediating interactions in a society at any given historical stretch is “language.” Mead is quick to point out that from the evolutionary-behaviorist standpoint, meaning is not a subjective event but a social relationship between various components of group behavior: Meaning is thus a development of something objectively there as a relation between certain phases of the social act; it is not a psychical addition to that act and it is not an “idea” as traditionally conceived. A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are the relata in a triple or threefold relationship [that] constitutes the matrix within which the meaning arises, or which develops into the field of meaning…. Language is ultimately a form of behavior and calls for the rationally organized society in which it can properly function. (MSS: 76)

For all its naturalistic grounding, significant symbol is a qualitatively new stage in the evolution of intelligence which coincides with the emergence of thinking and which makes the social organization of perspectives possible. Symbols transformed intelligent behavior peculiar to animals into rational, self-conscious conduct, separating human beings from their most developed ancestors.

Play, game, and the generalized other Mead is perhaps best known for his theory of the self. His writings on its genesis, structure, and function shift analytical focus from the phylogenetic inquiry to the ontogenetic one. The latter no longer prohibits references to consciousness, language, and social institutions. Ontogeny deals with children growing up among adult members of their species. While most of what Mead has to say on the subject falls within this socio-psychological perspective, we should bear in mind how concepts like “role-taking” and “generalized other” fit into his pragmatist cosmology. The self is a special case of relativity designating an organism that is aware of its interpersonal co-presences and multiple relationships with things situated in the same pluralistic universe. The body that has reached this evolutionary stage dwells in its multiple perspectives consciously, chooses its affiliations at will, and knows beforehand the role it takes. From the cosmological standpoint, “generalized other

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[is] the object as expression of the whole complex of things that make up the environment…. The generalized attitude of the other is an assumption of a space that is absolute over against the relativity of individual organisms” (PA: 193, 310). The generalized other is a totality of perspectives constituting the situation in someone’s experience at any given moment, and role-taking is the mechanism that allows the individual to explore the otherness of the world by assuming emotionally-charged attitudes and becoming another to oneself. We can see this most vividly in children engaged in playacting. The child takes the role of a mother, of a dog, of a train, or it claims to be – scrambled eggs! No object is immune from being enacted by a human fledgling exploring the meaning of things in their relationship to the self and the self in its relationship to the world. In infancy and early childhood, all things appear alive in experience; it is only later that children learn to differentiate between physical and social objects and reserve role-playing for expressly social occasions: The physical object is an abstraction which we make from the social response to nature. We talk to nature; we address the clouds, the sea, the tree, and objects about us. We later abstract from that type of response because of what we come to know of such objects. [Nature] acts as it is expected to act. We are taking the attitude of the physical things about us, and when we change the situation nature responds in a different way. (MSS: 184)

The whole universe arising in experience is, thus, social through and through. It is in this world that the child “is gradually building up a definite self which becomes the most important object in his world” (MSS: 369). Unlike objects experienced by intelligent animals, the self belongs to the realm of signification and implies an elaborate group life in which the individual takes an active part. The following statement captures the thrust of Mead’s theory: The individual experiences himself as such, not directly, but only indirectly, from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group, or from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole to which he belongs. For he enters his own experience as a self or individual, not directly or immediately, not by becoming a subject to himself, but only in so far as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or in his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment or context of experience and behavior in which both he and they are involved. (MSS: 138)

Playacting is the form that self-growth takes in ontogenesis. Children engaged in role-taking accomplish several things. They explore the social structure, find their place in a group, master rule-bound conduct, face punishment for rule-breaking, learn to negotiate conflicting identities, and discover the meaning of creativity. Mead singles out two critical stages in this process: “play” and “game.” At the play stage, children act in the way resembling things and people immediately surrounding them. No partners are necessary for such an exercise, for all the parts are played by the same person. “The child becomes a generalized actor-manager, directing, applauding, and criticizing his own roles as well as those of others” (PA: 374). The youngsters

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commonly address themselves in the third person or invent “the invisible, imaginary companion which a good many children produce in their own experience” (MSS: 150). At this early stage, the child’s sense of self is quite rudimentary, reflecting more or less superficial characteristics of those who stimulate the child’s imagination the most. With time, this self begins to exhibit a greater coherence, as the child connects several disparate parts and navigates between them with confidence. The situation changes when imaginary companions are replaced with real partners whose interactions are guided by the rules of the game. The self corresponding to this stage is more coherent, internally differentiated, and it is increasingly generalized to reflect the social act as a whole. Playing at being someone does not require a clear-cut time perspective; the past and future are here ill-defined. The game, on the other hand, brings into experience a bigger chunk of environment and offers a far more elaborate time frame where the legitimate past and possible future outcomes are spelled out in vivid details. “The child is one thing at one time and another at another, and what he is at one moment does not determine what he is at another,” articulates Mead describing the transition from play to game. He is not organized into a whole. The child has no definite character, no definite personality…. But in a game where a number of individuals are involved, then the child taking one role must be ready to take the role of everyone else…. The nature of the game is such that every act in the game is determined and qualified by all the other acts. This is expressed by the rules of the game, and implies in each individual a generalized player that is present in every part that is taken. (MSS: 159, 151; PA: 374)

Game is no longer a childish matter; it is a serious learning exercise modeling responsible conduct in the adult world. The child engaged in game activity “is becoming an organic member of society. He is taking over the morale of that society and is becoming an essential member of it” (MSS: 159). Ultimately, society is but a series of games adults engage in, games governed by certain rules, offering tangible stakes, punishing the losers and promising benefits to the winners. To play these high-stake games, humans must learn how to speak the right language, sign themselves in proper terms: “The alley gang has its vocabulary, and so does the club” (TIS: 151). Participants in the game also need to know how to juggle identities competing for their attention, negotiate their membership in various interactional fields, integrate their disparate selves into a more or less coherent whole, and bring one’s action in line with the generalized perspective of the entire community. “Concrete other,” “specific other,” “organized other,” “generalized other” – these are the terms Mead uses to describe the range of individual and collective others whom we encounter on the road to a full-grown selfhood. The expression “significant other” widely used today was coined by Harry Stack Sullivan, but it goes back to Mead’s concept of a person on whom we model our conduct. The term “generalized other” designates a play team or community of indefinite size whose perspectives have been incorporated into the individual’s self. The self fashioned after the generalized other and guided by the group rules is an instrument of social control. By providing its members with selves and minds, society equips them with an ability to criticize their own conduct and to correct their actions accordingly. Self-regarding conduct is by its nature self-critical, the person

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possessing self-consciousness has a critical attitude built into one’s conduct. “Thus he becomes not only self-conscious but also self-critical; and thus, through self-criticism, social control over individual behavior or conduct operates by virtue of the social origin and basis of such criticism. That is to say, self-criticism is essentially social criticism, and behavior controlled by self-criticism is essentially behavior controlled socially” (MSS: 255). All this is not to suggest that selfhood turns humans into social robots forever chained to their predetermined identities. Those partaking in numerous symbolic fields are bound to experience a cross-pressure on their identities, which routinely bump against each other and force on the actor tough choices. The conflict is endemic to the social process, and this conflict is inscribed in the selves that emerge in its course. A highly developed and organized human society is one in which the individual members are interrelated in a multiplicity of different intricate and complicated ways whereby they all share a number of common social interests, [and] yet, on the other hand, are more or less in conflict relative to numerous other interests…. Thus, within such a society conflicts arise between different aspects or phases of the same individual self … as well as between different individual selves. (MSS: 307)

Which particular interest or affiliation wins in any given encounter is problematic; not even the self-conscious individual can be entirely sure how the situation will break out in the end. Self-regarding behavior is creative, either by serendipity or by design. It is also critical and reconstructive; to the extent that self-conscious actions jolt the situation from its original course, they serve not only as an instrument of social control but also as a springboard for social change: Human society, we have insisted, does not merely stamp the pattern of its organized social behavior upon any one of its individual members, so that this pattern becomes likewise the pattern of the individual’s self; it also at the same time, gives him a mind, [and] his mind enables him in turn to stamp the pattern of his further developing self (further developing through his mental activity) upon the structure or organization of human society, and thus in a degree to reconstruct or modify in terms of his self the general pattern of social or group behavior in terms of which his self was originally constituted. (MSS: 263)

Self, biological individual, and the “I–me” dialectics We saw earlier how human agency gradually emancipates itself from its physical limitations by substituting the social organization of perspectives for the biological one, rational action for impulsive reaction, non-significant conversation of gestures for significant communication, and time-conscious conduct for behavior with undifferentiated time structure. The term “supplementing” is, actually, more appropriate here than “substituting,” for the sociological organization of perspectives does not cancel the patterns of sociality found in phylogenetically more primitive forms. Although the evolutionary process gives humans the hitherto unknown measure of control over their destiny, it does not turn them into disembodied creatures subsisting in purely symbolic space. The human being is very much a body weighed down

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by its physical, biological, physiological, and psychological characteristics, all of which exert a continuous influence over self-propulsive conduct, life-affirming exploits, and critical reflexivity. “The line of demarcation between the self and the body is found, then, first of all in the social organization of the act within which the self arises, in its contrast with the physiological organism,” maintains Mead (PA: 446). Yet, he is quick to point out that “the self does not consist simply in the bare organization of social attitudes,” that it “is a social entity that must be related to the entire body,” that “[w]alking, writing, and talking are there as physiological processes as well as actions of the self,” and that, consequently, it “would be a mistake to assume that a man is a biologic individual plus a reason, if we mean by this definition that he leads two separable lives, one of impulse or instinct, and another of reason” (TIS: 148; MSS: 173, 347). Society blends mechanism, organism, and the self in a complex system of feedbacks that tie together the organizational principles governing perspectives peculiar to each evolutionary domain. The question that particularly interested Mead was how the body responds to its selfhood and how the self manages its body. The Freudian solution to the self–body problem gave primacy to unconscious instincts over self-consciousness. Mead, who was aware of this solution, rejected it on the ground that Freud underestimated the extent to which social forces transform our impulsive life. Reason is not just a cipher for immutable drives, a rationalization disguising primordial impulses, nor is society merely a censor reining in the recalcitrant soma. The societal influence goes far deeper. Society remodels the body’s circuits, reshapes the structure of affect, and supplies human agents with symbolic tools that help them mobilize bodily resources for the public good. At the same time, society never extinguishes our impulses or stamps out emotions from our conduct. The body or biological individual is a vital link in sociological dynamics. The biological individual, according to Mead, is the organized group of drives, impulses, and habits that we carry within ourselves and that are variously molded by our group life. Humans excelling in social etiquette have to master the complex machinery of the body to dramatize their social identities. The self abiding by social norms, however, “is very different from the passionate assertive biological individual, that loves and hates and embraces and strikes. He is never an object; his is a life of direct suffering and action” (MSS: 370). It is not that this passionate beast is closed to self-consciousness, although our impulses and gestures are usually more transparent to outside observers than to ourselves. The point is that impulses and habits are informed by social processes as much as they inform them. The fact that they are amenable to social control does not mean that they can be readily accessed, or let alone, altered by consciousness. The sets of habits which we have of this sort mean nothing to us; we do not hear the intonations of our speech that others hear unless we are paying particular attention to them. The habits of emotional expression which belong to our speech are of the same sort. We may know that we have expressed ourselves in a joyous fashion but the detailed process is one which does not come back to our conscious selves. There are whole bundles of such habits which do not enter into a conscious self, but which help to make up what is termed the unconscious self. (MSS: 163)

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The biological individual is a creature of impulses and habits, a body oblivious to itself. While the body can exist without a self, the self is fundamentally an embodied experience, an agency that situates itself in the world by mobilizing organism’s semiotic resources. As it signs itself in the flesh, the self gives the body its marching orders, molds it according to a script, and in the process, transforms an indeterminate situation onto an acting stage with distinct spatio-temporal characteristics. An embodied self has a past to claim and the future to strive for, though each is real only in the present where social actors situate themselves with respect to particular reference frames. Once the time structure binding disparate agents into a group has dissipated, the self recedes into the background, the body slips into unconsciousness, and the biological individual takes over. The biological individual lives in an undifferentiated now; the social reflective individual takes this up into a flow of experience within which stands a fixed past and a more or less uncertain future…. The subject is the biologic individual – never on the scene, and this self adjusted to its social environment, and through this to the world at large, is the object…. Thus the biological individual becomes essentially interrelated with the self, and the two go to make up the personality. (MSS: 351, 372–3)

It might seem odd that a theorist who cast the self as a rational process would talk about the “unconscious self.” To understand this conceptual twist, we need to remind ourselves that Mead sought to bridge the gap between various evolutionary forms of sociality, that he was a bio-social theorist who took a keen interest in Freud. Mead’s views on the subject should also be judged in light of his interest in romanticism and the subject–object dialectics. We find the direct counterpart to idealism in the theory of “I” and “me” that recast the idealist a priori in quasi-naturalistic terms. The transcendental ego, a mysterious realm of paradigmatic preconceptions informing our judgment, turns up in Mead as the unconscious self, biological individual, or “I” – the domain of habituated drives and semi-socialized impulses. What the romantics called phenomenal self appears in Mead’s theory as the conscious self or “me.” “The ‘I’ is the transcendental self of Kant,” Mead tells us. “The self-conscious, actual self in social intercourse is the objective ‘me’ or ‘me’s’ ” (SW: 141). The distinction between “I” and “me” serves several strategic functions in the Meadian discourse. It helps square off sociological theory with the notion of indeterminacy, with the fact that our calculated actions routinely produce unanticipated consequences: “However carefully we plan the future it always is different from that which we can previse. [The individual] is never sure about himself, and he astonishes himself by his conduct as much as he astonishes other people” (MSS: 203–4). This distinction biologizes the transcendental a priori, which Mead reinterprets as a domain of primitive impulses, embodied values-habits, and creative drives: “The possibilities of the ‘I’ belong to that which is actually going on, taking place, and it is in some sense the most fascinating part of our experience. It is there that novelty arises and it is there that our most important values are located” (MSS: 204). “Me,” by contrast, “is a conventional, habitual individual who is always there. It has to have those habits, those responses that everybody has” (MSS: 197). From the sociological standpoint, “me” is an actor obeying common rules. Our “me’s” are modeled after conventional roles and historical identities waiting to be claimed as our own. “We are

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individuals born into a certain nationality, located at a certain spot geographically, and such and such political relations. All of these represent a certain situation which constitutes ‘me’; but this necessarily involves a continued action of the organism toward the ‘me’ in the process within which that lies” (MSS: 182). While the “me” is socially scripted, the “I” is not; it represents an improvised response of the body to whatever the situation demands. The resultant self-framing does not always fall within a conventional perspective, though; it can break the established time frame and turn the situation into a stage with action props and time horizons all its own. Whether they stumble on new reference frames or consciously look for alternatives, agents do more than replicate old meanings in the course of interactions. Now, we can see how the “I–me” dialectics advances the Meadian enterprise as a whole. It does so by making room for the primitive forms of relativity in the world transformed by reason. There is the perennial tension between the biological and sociological imperatives, between the impulsive “I” and the rational “me.” For society to maintain its current structure, the “me” has to get a hold of the “I”: “The relation between the rational or primarily social side of the self and its impulsive or emotional or primarily anti-social and individual side is such that the latter is, for the most part, controlled with respect to its behavioristic expressions by the former” (MSS: 230). Social control works its magic by colonizing the body, compelling it to drape itself in familiar guises, transforming primeval urges into socially acceptable conduct. Self-consciousness is a process that situates the body within its environment by harnessing impulses and mobilizing emotions for public display. Looked at in this perspective, emotions are early warning signals that the body sends to itself as it symbolically traverses numerous reference frames, relates itself to others, and evaluates prospects for self-objectivation. Temporal spread is crucial to understanding human emotions. The more complex the spatiotemporal structure, the richer the organism’s emotional life. Intelligence is an emotionally charged agency assessing its spatio-temporal options in the pluralistic universe. The rational self does not always succeed in keeping its biological vessel in check. The self weaves its texture from an unyielding stuff, which makes the fit between the body and the self perennially problematic. Having failed to follow the script, the body finds itself in an unfamiliar self, surrounded by an unknown universe, generalizing the other in as yet uncertified fashion. Such experiences are at first accessible to the individual only, but they become part of the public agenda as individual experiences are isolated through symbolic media and incorporated into the communal reality: This common world is continually breaking down. Problems rise in it and demand solutions. They appear as the exceptions … in the experience of individuals and while they have the form of common experiences they run counter to the structure of the common world. The experience of the individuals is precious because it preserves these exceptions. But the individual preserves them in such form that others can experience them, that they may become common experiences. (SW: 341)

Democracy, progressivism, and social reconstruction Picture a game in which everyone takes part freely, all players follow the generalized other, and no one is barred from trying a particular role. Add to this a provision for revising the rules and inventing new games, and you will get the Meadian blueprint

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for a humane, democratic community permeated with team spirit and open to continuous improvement. Whatever part the individual plays is illuminated here by the sense of shared purpose and the enjoyment of common products, the sentiments equally prized in a fair game and a just society. It is this that gives joy to creation and belongs to the work of the artist, the research scientist, and the skilled artisan who can follow his article through to its completion. It belongs to co-ordinated efforts of many, when the role of the other in the production is aroused in each worker at the common task, when the sense of team play, esprit de corps, inspires interrelated activities. In these situations something of the delight of consummation can crown all intermediate processes. It is unfortunately absent from most labor in modern competitive industrial society. (PA: 457)

This statement captures the ambivalence Mead shared with many contemporaries whose belief in the perfectibility of human society was tempered by the keen awareness of its systemic failures. Mead’s pragmatist cosmology was tailor-made for the Progressive Era. It envisioned the pluralistic universe whose inhabitants incessantly multiply perspectives, reinvent their selves, and reconstruct their community for the common good. No society embodies this ideal better than democracy. At its core is a universal discourse or system of symbols binding individuals into a social whole and transparent to “every citizen of the universe of discourse” (PA: 375). Democratic society never stops restructuring its perspectives and broadening its horizons of universality – “ ‘universal’ discourse to be universal has to be continuously revised” (MSS: 269). Democracy makes its symbolic and material resources available to all its members – it is “responsible for the ordering of its process and structure so that what are common goods in their very nature should be accessible to common enjoyment” (SW: 407). Democratic society encourages its members to place themselves in each other’s shoes and size up the world from the perspective of less fortunate others. More than that, it gives everybody a practical chance to experiment with new roles and selves. When it lives up to its promise, democracy approximates what Mead calls “a universal society in which the interests of each would be the interests of all” (PA: 466). The above description should not be taken to mean that the pluralistic universe is devoid of tension, that everything in it hangs together. Local lingos and competing agendas find their place in a democratic society alongside overarching cultural symbols. If attitudes we carry in ourselves clash, it is because institutions of society operate at cross purposes: “Each social institution with the good that it subtends asserts and maintains itself but finds itself in this assertion in conflict with other institutions and their goods” (PA: 498). Far from being a threat to the democratic discourse, conflict is its lifeblood. Democratic society does not merely tolerate competing discourses – it encourages and protects them, extending constitutional guarantees to unpopular creeds. What makes the tension between perspectives vying for attention in a democratic society constructive is the fact that they are open to criticism. Democratic society teaches its members to use their mind critically, it makes its symbolic resources available to all its members, and it commits itself to lowering the barriers that separate classes and impede communication across group boundaries. By contrast, nondemocratic societies limit their members’ participation in common

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discourse and zealously police the selves they can rightfully call their own. Castes, estates, classes, clans, and cliques – human history abounds in exclusive interactional fields formed around privileged perspectives designed to keep nonmembers at bay. The most insidious in this respect are social configurations based on caste. Superficially, caste societies resemble insect communities whose members are stuck with their parts because they are physiologically outfitted to play them. Ideology that goes with such a society often blames biological differences for the fact that some of its members are “unfit” for particular roles and must be barred from certain stations in the social sphere. In reality, social conventions backed by power are primarily responsible for the rigid pattern of role-taking in closed societies. Like every game, democratic society calls for a division of labor, which poses no immediate threat to social intelligence. As long as every role is there for the taking and no one is shut out of the game, there is ample room for our universal nature to play itself out. Needless to say, American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fell short of this democratic ideal. Mead hammered away at the last point in his political writings. He decried the fact that symbolic means for self-realization were distributed unequally among American citizens. He urged to lower economic barriers hampering the disadvantaged and personally participated in the Chicago immigrants’ surveys, documenting their living conditions and educational needs. Immigrants who flooded the country at the turn of the century and supplied much of its labor power, Mead pointed out, were often shortchanged by a system that favored industrial education for future laborers and liberal arts education for well-to-do classes. Along with Jane Addams, John Dewey, and other progressives, Mead singled out the factory system for his criticism, charging that the assembly-line technology threatened to reduce universal beings to an appendage in a mechanical process whose overall purpose and ultimate products eluded a machine operator: “The man who tends one of these machines becomes a part of the machine, and when the machine is thrown away the man is thrown away, for he has fitted himself into the machine until he has become nothing but a cog” (quoted in Shalin 1988a: 928). Tearing down class barriers, eliminating artificial restrictions, revamping dehumanizing social technologies – such were the causes to which Mead dedicated himself in his political life. Progressivism meant for him a commitment to “the ‘democratic ideal’ of removing such restrictions,” of getting on with social reconstruction and advancing democratic reforms (SW: 406). How can the democratic changes be effected? Mead sought the answer to this question in the temporal dynamics of social interactions. Social change in the pluralistic universe is inextricably linked to its spatio-temporal structure and our ability to fashion disparate actions into a meaningful whole via the continually renewed sense of re-envisioned past and re-imagined future. Each society has its own time horizons, its own unique history that its members recount to themselves and their offspring. When the historical narrative changes, the pluralistic universe slips off its symbolic moorings and expands its familiar confines. “The past that is there for us, as the present is there, stands on the same basis as the world about us that is there…. The histories that have most fastened upon men’s minds have been political and cultural propaganda, and every great social movement has flashed back its light to discover a new past” (PA: 94–7). We can pull off this remarkable feat of reinventing our pasts because society provided us with minds whose

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locus is not in the head but in the situation implicating the entire group and the generalized other. It is this decentered, time-conscious mind that “frees us from bondage to past or future. We are neither creatures of the necessity of an irrevocable past, nor of any vision given on the Mount” (PP: 90). Thanks to its special brand of relativity, rational intelligence not only cushions the effect of biological drives but also delivers humans from the dictate of implacable social norms. Our minds allow us to revise our past, set up a hypothetical future, select suitable means, and appropriate the self that ties all the elements of the situation together in a continual passage from the past to the present and into an indefinite future. The pluralistic universe owes its spatio-temporal structure to self-referential conduct; when the latter undergoes restructuring, the former changes as well. For all his commitment to mediation and rational discourse, Mead did not see social reconstruction as a purely cognitive affair. Social institutions are ingrained in our emotional habits as much as in logical thinking, which is why social change has to engage both “me” and “I,” with the rational “me” pointing the way and the unconscious “I” bodying forth the imagined future. It takes time for the biological individual to slip into the new self and change the habits of the heart, which resist the siren voice of reason as much as the stern application of coercion. The new discourse must be backed up by the adjustments in the entire body where our values are sedimented into habits and thwarted by our unruly impulses. To achieve its goal, social reconstruction has to mobilize the embodied self, “the individual as embodying the values in himself…. We want a full life expressed in our instincts, our natures. Reflective thinking enables us to bring these different values into the realm of possibility” (PA: 625, 463–4). Social reconstruction feeds on emotional substance, it is literally “bodied forth” by the agent redeeming its claim to selfhood in the flesh. Social changes that result in lowering social barriers release emotions conducive to democratic discourse and bring about selves conversant with wider-ranging communities: “The breakdown of barriers is something that arouses a flood of emotions, because it sets free an indefinite number of possible contacts to other people which have been checked, held repressed. [The] person does get out of himself, and by doing so makes himself a definite member of a larger community than that to which he previously belonged” (MSS: 219). Despite the confident outlook Mead shared with other progressives, he stayed away from optimistic predictions about the future of democracy, nor did he put a seal of approval on specific forms it ought to take. Such predictions ran contrary to his pragmatist spirit that favored experimentation over doctrinaire social engineering. The future is uncertain, Mead said repeatedly, there are no fixed or determined ends or goals toward which social progress necessarily moves; and such progress is hence genuinely creative and would not otherwise be progress…. The moral question is not the one of setting up a right value against a wrong value; it is a question of finding the possibility of acting so as to take into account as far as possible all the values involved. (MSS: 294; PA: 465)

Still, we can glean the broad outlines of a democratic society he favored from praises he sang to “team work,” “universal discourse,” “international mindedness,” and “the community values of friendship, of passion, of parenthood, of amusement,

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of beauty, of social solidarity in its unnumbered forms” (SW: 311). Whatever helps make the universe of discourse more inclusive is progress. Whoever incorporates the experience of the other into one’s own and guides one’s actions accordingly is a moral being. Whichever value finds its embodied expression in a democratic community is a concrete universal. Mead’s pragmatic optimism was tempered by the realization that no society can assure the individual a happy life. Meaningful, yes, but not necessarily a happy one. Because the pluralistic universe is forever changing, humans are never completely at home in it: “Human society is not at home in the world because it is trying to change that world and change itself; and, so long as it has failed to so change itself and change its world, it is not at home in it as the physiological and physical mechanism is” (PA: 476). What this statement implies is that we cannot lead an authentic life in society as long as we are not trying to change it, and yet our concerted efforts to transcend the existing order turn us into spiritual nomads unable to identify completely with any given self. There is no such thing as an authentic self in Mead’s social cosmology; every self we claim as our own will have to be shed, however snugly we might be wrapped into our conventional “me’s.” The biological individual disguised under a historical mask will sooner or later turn into a corpse, but our dramatic personae will go on, reenacted by numerous others, eager to step into our shoes: “There is a need for salvation – not the salvation of the individual but the salvation of the self as a social being” (PA: 476).

THE INTELLECTUAL LEGACY Today’s commentators are in agreement about the enduring relevance of Mead’s thought for the discipline of sociology. Joas (1985: 2) calls Mead “the most important theorist of intersubjectivity between Feuerbach and Habermas.” According to Collins (1989: 263), “George Herbert Mead is no doubt America’s greatest sociological theorist.” And for Deegan (2008: 329), Mead is “the most important sociological theorist in the world from 1892 to 1938.” The current consensus about Mead’s place in the history of sociological thought has taken time to evolve. Today’s commentators have access to a wide range of materials printed after Mead’s death, some based on lecture notes compiled by students who took classes with Mead between 1912 and 1929. Mind, Self, and Society (MSS) is the best known, most cited, yet still controversial addition to Mead’s corpus (Joas 1985: 2–3, 235; Cook 1993: 15–19; da Silva 2008: 142–5). The problem with this opus and several other posthumously published books based on students’ notes is that they raise questions of whether the published texts adhere to Mead’s true wording and intent. Even though the notes were based on stenographic accounts, significant additions were introduced during the editing process. Charles Morris, who was primarily responsible for editing MSS, relied on the lecture notes for the courses Mead gave at the University of Chicago between 1927 and 1930. Stressing the “verbatim” character of class transcripts, Morris acknowledged that the original notes were “rearranged, pruned of superfluous repetitions, and stylistically corrected” (Morris 1934: vi). In some cases, they were supplemented by excerpts from Mead’s published works, the excerpts identified as such in the text. As it turned out, the MSS subtitle – “From the

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Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist” – was supplied by the editor, the term “social behaviorism” appearing nowhere in the original notes (Cook 1993: 70–1). This wording, suspiciously close to the behaviorist stance Morris took in his signature work Signs, Language and Behavior, should make one pause. Given the heated polemics about Mead’s behaviorism that divided Mead scholars in later years, choosing the right moniker is hardly an idle matter. Such liberties made some commentators charge that MSS is too compromised by its “unreliability, insufficient precision in the recording of Mead’s words, and the obfuscation of the coherence of Mead’s thought” (Joas 1985: 2). The importance of close textual analysis is beyond doubt, particularly when the researcher tracks the evolution of Mead’s thought, but those who cast doubt on the value of the posthumously printed materials should be reminded that the burden of proof lies with the interpreter disavowing a particular edition. It is not uncommon for those expressing concerns about the veracity of Mind, Self, and Society to go on citing the work at length, without pausing to explain why this or that passage merits consideration. We should bear in mind, also, that the best of writers sometimes need editing, that Mead was a great conversationalist who did much nimble thinking on foot, and that Mind, Self, and Society is the most systematic statement of Mead’s mature thought, tying together the diverse strands of his sprawling theoretical corpus. Until we have an authoritative edition of Mead’s works, we should make the most of the available materials currently in print. In this section, I will trace the reception of Mead’s ideas and examine the main currents in sociological thought claiming his legacy. My work has been aided by the critical scholarship collected in the four volumes edited by Peter Hamilton under the heading George Herbert Mead: Critical Assessments (further abbreviated as CA, with the roman numeral identifying the volume, and the arabic numeral indicating the cited page). Mead scholars will also find helpful the Mead Project, an online source with links to over 100 articles, newspapers columns, and book reviews published by Mead, assorted documents, and Mead’s course offerings, as well as many of his posthumously published works. This site also provides references to many scholarly publications exploring Mead’s philosophical, sociological, and political system. Four volumes of Mead’s work that appeared after his death produced a steady stream of reviews and occasioned mostly good press, which seemed to bode well for the future of Mead scholarship (Merton 1935; Morrow 1935; Faris 1936; Hook 1936; Bierstedt 1938; Burke 1939). Some reviewers confidently predicted that “Mead will enjoy comparable stature with James and Dewey in the extent of his influence” (Bierstedt 1938: 28). Given the powerful endorsements from the likes of Dewey and Whitehead, one had reasons to expect Mead’s reputation to spread quickly, yet when Maurice Natanson published his study of Mead in 1956, he observed with dismay that this “truly major American philosopher is today largely unknown, frequently misunderstood where it [sic] is known, and, more often than not, simply ignored” (Natanson 1956: 1). The failure to come to grips with Mead’s legacy paralleled a decline in fortunes of American pragmatism, which midway through the twentieth century was seen by many in the United States and abroad as an intellectual current whose time had come and gone and whose progenitors had little to offer to contemporary debates dominated by analytic philosophy.

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Mead’s reputation among sociologists took an equally long time to gel. The famous Introduction to the Science of Sociology that saw its first printing in 1921 did not mention Mead, nor did the second edition that came out in 1924. Among the readings collected in this volume one finds articles by Cooley, Dewey, Simmel, Durkheim, Hobhouse, Gumplowicz, and scores of other luminaries, yet the editors did not see fit to sample Mead’s writings. This is puzzling, given that Park and Burgess knew Mead personally, were well aware of his work, and encouraged their students to take his classes. The absence of Mead in this sociology primer suggests that he was not considered a principal figure at the time. We find an occasional reference to Mead in the works of Park and his University of Chicago colleagues following publication of Mind, Self, and Society, but the references are brief, generic, and not nearly as laudatory as those accorded to James, Dewey, and Cooley. Until the 1950s, several milestone publications failed to recognize the centrality of Mead to the sociological enterprise, with such classics as The Structure of Social Action (1937) and The Social System (1951) omitting his name altogether. Later on, Parsons (in Parsons, Blumer & Turner 1975: 126) conceded that “there is a very considerable area of overlap in the structure of conceptualization by George Herbert Mead himself, and the theory of social action,” that “an intensive reading of Mead’s work was not undertaken by me until fairly well after the completion of The Structure of Social Action,” and that “this was doubtless an oversight” (Parsons, in Parsons, Blumer & Turner 1975: 127). Elsewhere he wrote, “I came to attribute great importance to the convergence of Durkheim and Freud – a convergence which extended in an attenuated sense to Weber, but very importantly to the American social psychologists, especially to G. H. Mead” (Parsons 1970: 2). Had he chosen to revise The Structure of Social Action, intimated Parsons (1949: xv) in the preface to the second edition, Mead would have figured prominently in the update. Merton was among the first to review Mind, Self, and Society (Merton 1935), giving this seminal volume a nod of approval, in part because of Mead’s emphasis on the social nature of truth. Yet Merton had little use for Mead’s ideas in his own work, relegating the relevant comments to footnotes. When he did mention Mead, it was typically in the context of “Cooley’s still enduring formulation” presaging the reference group theory and “George Mead’s extension in turn” (Merton 1968: 19 n.39). C. Wright Mill’s voluminous dissertation on the influence of pragmatism in American sociology recognized Mead passim. In a later note, Mills signaled a change in his attitude toward Mead: An account of George H. Mead must be included. It is true that many features of Mead’s thought are treated by consideration given to the work of John Dewey. However, in view of the course of the pragmatic movement and of Dewey’s differential evaluation of Mead and James, the inclusion of James and the omission of Mead is an unrepresentative act that is intellectually unwarranted. (Mills 1966: 464)

Herbert Blumer, who did more than anyone else to bring Mead back to the center stage of sociological analysis, had relatively little to say about his intellectual role model until the 1950s. His early scholarly output shows few references to Mead. In his 1940 article “The Problems of the Concept in Social Psychology,” Blumer (1969: 178) evokes Mead’s name once, while discussing corporeal actions that “can be

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translated into a space-time network or brought inside of what George Mead has called the touch-sight field.” The term “symbolic interaction” that Blumer had coined in 1937 remained dormant for two decades before Blumer resurrected it in his 1962 article “Society as Symbolic Interaction” (Blumer 1969: 78). Starting in the mid-1950s, Mead’s name begins to crop up in Blumer’s publications with increasing frequency, culminating in the 1966 paper “Sociological Implications of the Thought of George Herbert Mead” (Blumer 1969; see also 61, 65, 94, 101). About the same time Mead began to attract national and international attention. Several monographs on Mead appeared in quick succession (Victoroff 1953; Pfuetze 1954; Natanson 1956). Conferences devoted to Mead were staged from the 1960s on, supplemented by anthologies showcasing Mead scholarship (Corti 1973; Joas 1985; Gunter 1990; Aboulafia 1991). Meanwhile, more systematic studies exploring Mead’s corpus were being published in the United States and abroad. This was accompanied by an interest in specific aspects of Mead’s work: the temporal structure of reality, the genesis of language, the politics and ethics of reform, and the relationship between pragmatism and sociology (see Reader’s Guide for details). By the 1960s, textbooks in sociological theory caught up with the trend, many offering separate chapters on Mead. The 1966 edition of Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition still had no reference to Mead, but Martindale’s The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (1960) made room for Mead, which would increase with every new edition. By 1970, all textbooks in sociological theory and history of sociological analysis allotted ample space to Mead. And when the primers in symbolic interactionism flooded the market, they all gave Mead’s ideas pride of place. Why this sudden upsurge of interest in pragmatist philosophy and Mead as a sociological thinker? The decline of Marxism sent its adherents searching for a viable alternative; some embraced postmodernism as a creed antithetical to authority as such; others were drawn to the radically democratic ethos championed by Dewey and his comrades in arms. The growing dialogue between European and American sociologists contributed to the enshrinement of Mead in the sociological canon. Alvin Gouldner in particular stressed Mead’s role as a vital link between the Continental and American sociological traditions. The most important influence of Romanticism on Academic Sociology in Europe, is to be found in Weber, while its most important influence in American sociology is through George Herbert Mead…. The purest vein of Romanticism in American sociology is, I believe, to be found in the “Chicago School”, which had the most concentrated exposure to the German tradition and was, in fact, established by many (A. W., Small, W. Y. Thomas and R. E. Park) who were directly trained in it. Currently, its leading exponents are Anselm Strauss, Erving Goffman and Howard Becker. (Gouldner 1970: 116; 1973: 345; see also Shalin 1984)

Commenting on the reasons behind the growing popularity of interactionist ideas and qualitative research, Gouldner singled out the growth of the middle class in postwar America, the insecurities endemic to the periods of heightened social mobility, and the tendency to downplay class divisions and the structural sources of inequality in the United States (Gouldner 1970: 378–90).

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Jeffrey Alexander (1987: 215) had a different take on the emergence of the interactionist paradigm, which he linked to the confrontation between the once dominant Midwestern tradition represented by Chicago sociologists and the emerging functionalist paradigm articulated by scholars trained at Harvard and Columbia. In Alexander’s interpretation, symbolic interactionism was an attempt to shore up the sagging fortunes of Chicago-based sociology. Sociologists trained at the University of Chicago agreed that interactionism was the “reaction to the eclipse of the Chicago school by the ascendant functionalist project” (Colomy & Brown 1995: 23), that the “general theory at Harvard under Talcott Parsons and the development of survey research and functionalism with Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia were where the new and exciting mainstreams were flowing” (Gusfield 1995: ix). But the interactionist narrative accentuated the maverick status of the Meadian tradition and its latest incarnation, “the Second Chicago School,” formed in the postWorld War II era (Carey 1975; Fine 1995; Abbott & Gaziano 1995; Colomy & Brown 1995). Looked at from this vantage point, when “Blumer went on the offensive [he was, in the words of Shibutani] ‘the spokesman for a small minority of dissidents’ ” (Colomy & Brown 1995: 23). Meanwhile, the battle for Mead’s legacy and the right to wear the successor’s mantle intensified, with Blumer’s interpretation coming in for tough criticism from various quarters (Kuhn 1964; Bales 1966; Blumer & Bales 1966; Huber 1973a, 1973b; Blumer 1975, 1977, 1980; Stryker 1980; Johnson & Shifflett 1981; Fine & Kleinman 1986; Warshay & Warshay 1986). Critics outside the interactionist circles maintained that “Mead’s most important successors have emphasized his indeterminacy, the strain in his work that emphasized individualism,” that “contemporary interactionism has moved away from Mead’s own institutional and collectivist thrust” (Alexander 1987: 214). Robert Bales found Blumer’s work lacking in scholarly precision and overcommitted to general statements: “Blumer seems to have a way of leading us to ultimate antinomies, created by the process of abstraction, rather than to operational solutions based on a process of empirical research” (Bales 1966: 42). Echoing some of these charges, Joan Huber asserted that pragmatism-inspired research is plagued by “the ambiguity toward the logico-theoretic component of their work,” the failure “to spell in advance and in detail what is expected,” as well as the inability to “integrate the findings into a larger body of work” (Huber 1973a: 62–3). Jenice and Larry Reynolds (1973) accused symbolic interactionism of “astructural bias” and failure to come to grips with the realities of social class and power (see also Shaskolsky 1970; Ropers 1973). Leon Warshay and Diana Warshay (1986: 265, 260) contended that Blumer was guilty of “the individualizing and subjectivizing of Mead,” that his codification “went against Mead’s [insistence on] working from the outside to the inside rather than the other way around,” and that the attempt to latch on to Mead’s legacy could be seen as a stab at the “legitimation of Blumer.” The polemics within the interactionist community was every bit as heated. The first to challenge Mead’s position and its symbolic interactionist rendition was Manford Kuhn (1964: 11–12) who announced the end of the “long era of the ‘oral tradition’ ” in symbolic interactionism, the era marked by the unsystematic attempts to “get it right,” “debate over orthodoxy,” “casuistry and criticism.” Now that this era is coming to a close, observed Kuhn, we enter “the age of inquiry in symbolic interactionism,” which is marked by empirical investigation with its “drudgery of

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testing and justification.” After reviewing the empirically grounded studies of selfidentity, Kuhn outlined a program of quantitative research on self that would become known as the “Iowa school.” What sets this school apart is its proponents’ determination to move past “conjectural and deductive orientation – as represented by Cooley, Dewey, and Mead” – and toward “a derivative but developing set of generalizations, tested by empirical research” (Kuhn 1964: 18). David Lewis rejected the version of symbolic interactionism articulated by Blumer on philosophical grounds. He advanced a thesis according to which “there were two opposing branches of American pragmatism: (1) the social realism of Peirce’s pragmatism, and (2) the social nominalism of James’s pragmatism. The writings of Dewey and Mead reflect the influences of both of these branches. Dewey, however, was more closely aligned with James while Mead’s work is more consistent with Peirce’s principles” (Lewis 1976: 137; see also Alexander 1987: 203). Lewis went on to argue that Blumer’s version of interactionism was subjectivist and individualist and ultimately antithetical to Mead’s behaviorism and collectivism. Interactionists favoring the behaviorist reading of Mead are sometimes referred to as the “Illinois school,” the label reflecting the affiliation of several behavioristically minded critics with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From this critical perspective, Clark McPhail and Cynthia Rexroat published a strongly worded comment, in which the authors charged that Blumer’s interpretation “bears no resemblance to Mead’s position” and that “Blumer’s naturalistic inquiry neither complements Mead’s methodological perspective nor facilitates the examination of Mead’s theoretical ideas” (McPhail & Rexroat 1979: 459). Not one to shrink from a challenge, Blumer vigorously defended his position. In his reply to Bales, Blumer inveighed that Mead must shudder in his grave at such butchering of his thought. For Mead an object is something that is designated and does not exist apart from designation…. If there is any single matter that is abundantly shown in Mead’s lengthy analysis of “object,” it is that objects do not have an inherent or self-conscious character, this is a cornerstone of his pragmatic position. (Blumer, in Blumer & Bales 1966: 45–6)

To Lewis’s criticism, Blumer responded that this is a wild and foolish caricature of the view that I have presented of the human being as an actor. It ignores (1) that the actor has to fit his developing action into the on-going actions of others and thus is necessarily constrained by their actions; (2) that the actor in defining his situation is guided by the scheme of definition that he has got from the group; (3) and that in forming his action the actor is guided by the generalized roles from which he addressed himself. (Blumer 1977: 154)

To Parsons, Blumer averred that the structuralist has an erroneous understanding of the symbolic interactionist point of view that stems from George Herbert Mead, a misunderstanding traceable in large measure to Parsons’ failure to grasp the nature of the “self” as seen by Mead. For Mead, the self is far more than an “internalization of components of social structure and culture.” It is more

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centrally a social process, a process of self-interaction in which the human actor indicates to himself matters that confront him in the situation in which he acts, and organizes his action through his interpretation of such matters. (Blumer 1975: 136)

Blumer bristled at McPhail and Rexroat’s broadside, writing a lengthy rebuttal in response where he quoted himself and Mead at length and strained to show that the social behaviorism advocated by the critics fits Watson’s scheme more than Mead’s, that “Mead did not have such a debased view of human social behavior as to equate it with reflex movements,” and that Mead would have rejected “such a constricted view of human social behavior as to confine it to small portions of simple, overt, quantifiable actions” (Blumer 1980: 177). Thus the battle for Mead’s legacy was joined, with each party pressing its version of Mead, citing suitable passages from his work, claiming a lock on the meaning of his theory or at least the thrust of his ideas, and criticizing the misguided efforts of their opponents. Ellsworth Faris might have been the first to shoot across the bow when he complained that “Mind, self, and society is the reverse order to that which the structure of Mead’s thought should seem to make appropriate” (Faris 1936: 17). Yes, but reversing the order would not do justice to Mead either, for he insisted that there is no human society devoid of selfhood, and no selves outside of society. Welcome and enlightening, the polemics can grow petty and partisan when academics band together to prove their points. Disputes over the founder’s legacy are common in the history of social thought. If the canonization process under review has turned out to be overheated, it is not because interactionists are an especially cantankerous bunch, spirited though some are, but because Mead left no systematic statement of his sociological theory, because his dialectical premises lend themselves to conflicting interpretations, and because the successful claim to the framer’s mantle carries with it the promise of a power base within the discipline. As commentators were quick to point out, the debate over the past feeds the politics of the present, with the classics marshaled in the cause of new orthodoxy. “[T]he commentators claim to discover a new Mead, altogether different from the older Mead we thought we knew,” point out Fine and Kleinman (1986: 215), but “the new Mead is, of course, the old Mead somewhat twisted out of shape” (Johnson & Shifflett 1981: 109). It is hard to say which contemporary sociology current claiming Mead’s legacy is more authentic. Mead did not have much to say about sociology, a fledgling discipline struggling to carve out a niche for itself and making headway at the University of Chicago, the site of the first sociology department in the United States (established in 1895). We do know that Mead knew personally principal figures in Chicago sociology, with one of whom, William Thomas, he had a close relationship. When in later years he surveyed the evolving domain of sociology, he referred to his colleagues as standard bearers in the new science of society. Here is Mead’s take on sociology, as gleaned from a fragment dating back to the 1920s: In recent years another discipline emerged, that of sociology. Both its definitions and its procedure are uncertain. It approaches nearer to a physiology of the social process than to the anatomy of social institutions. It is interested in the sociality that finds its expression in institutions and their functions, and it is particularly interested in this sociality

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as an expression of the experience of the individual; it has a special affinity, therefore, with social psychology. [The sociological] science is in this sense a more general one than that of the other social sciences. (PA: 498–9)

As this passage suggests, Mead saw Chicago sociology as akin to, if not identical with, social psychology, a field focused in particular on the dynamics of self and society: [I]t is evident that the acceptance by the sociologists of a society of selves in advance of inner experiences opens the door to an analysis which is behavioristic. I refer to such analyses as those of W. I. Thomas, Park and Burgess, and Faris. In many respects Cooley’s analyses are of this type, but they always presuppose a certain normal social order and process as given…. To this type of analysis Cooley’s assumption of the psychical nature of society closes the door. And it commits him to a conception of society which is mental rather than scientific. (GHM: 305–6)

While Mead’s juxtaposition of Chicago behaviorism and Cooley’s introspectivism is instructive, it does not tell us much about the subsequent development of his ideas at the University of Chicago and elsewhere. Reviewing these developments is beyond the scope of the present chapter. Suffice it to say that the researchers examining Mead’s legacy need to bear in mind the unfinished nature of his literary corpus, the ambiguous character of some of his ideas, the propensity of the followers to emphasize some and undervalue other insights, and the possibility of creative misreading that advances a particular research agenda beyond the founder’s intent.

CONCLUSION I have pieced together disparate strands of Mead’s thought and tried to show them as parts of a vast, unfinished project that will continue to nourish sociological imagination well into the future. In my closing remarks, I would like to bring into sharper relief a few key insights and unresolved issues in his pragmatist cosmology. Central to the pragmatist project is the problem of historically situated agency. There are two radical solutions to this problem that romantic idealists bequeathed to modern social thought. One equates human agency with reason, grammar, norm, or a similar structural principle that disembodies subjectivity and drains agency of its emotional substance. Another approach tends to naturalize and deracinate human agency, reducing the transcendental a priori to more or less immutable drives, impulses, and behavioral dispositions. Pragmatists refuse to linguistify or biologize agency. Steering between these two extremes, they conceptualize human agency as a historically situated, fully embodied, emotionally grounded selfhood. Mead acknowledges that the individual is born into a physical universe that is already there, the universe transformed by collective action, but he declines either to dissolve agency into symbolic forms or to reduce it to behavioral drives. There is more to personhood than its symbolic hulk; we are vested in the world with our entire bodies, which are as much a product of society as our beliefs and values. Sociality shapes our neural circuits and affective responses, but our emotional habits and behavioral

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proclivities feed right back into social structure. Sociological analysis is impoverished when it is preoccupied exclusively with the normative/structural/discursive or the impulsive/affective/behavioral side of the social processes. That is what pragmatist sociologists mean when they say that culture is embodied and body is encultured – the two must be studied jointly in the context of human history. While Mead brought into focus the relationship between the biological individual and the self, he might have drawn too sharp a line between conscious and unconscious processes, between the rational self and the biological individual. This can be gleaned from his belief that animals have no selves, that they know neither past nor future, and that, consequently, “animals have no rights” and “there is no wrong committed when an animal life’s is taken away” (MSS: 183). An argument can be made that for all their inferior instrumental and symbolic skills, animals are not as different from humans as Mead contended. Since we think not just with our heads but with our entire bodies, rational thinking, emotional intelligence, and corporeal savvy share evolutionary grounds. Pragmatist sociologists should take a closer look at the continuity of animal and human intelligence. They might want to juxtapose Mead and Freud and reconceptualize the unconscious as habitualized agency – as a historically embodied a priori. They also need to reexamine the “I–me” dialectics, particularly the manner in which the self cares for its body in different cultural settings. The sitogenetic analysis of self–body interactions is a promising line of inquiry that Mead’s followers should take seriously. Mead’s social cosmology offers a fresh look at social structure as an emergent event predicated on its members’ ability to manage perspectives and process time. This view breaks with the classical theory that casts social structure as something akin to immovable ether subsisting in absolute space and time and informing individual conduct without being informed by it. In the pragmatist reckoning, social structure is an event unfolding in situ where it is determined by conscious agents terminating indeterminacy in terms they inherit and invent as they keep situating themselves across space and time. The self is conceptualized here as a nonclassically propertied object, a social particle quantum leaping from one interactional field to another. Every time agents assume new disguises and lend emotional substance to their selves, they affect the group’s status as a universal, objective, and meaningful whole. This relativist dynamics renders social structure emergent: stable as it appears on the macro level, it is continuously brought into existence, contingent on the quantum of objectivity supplied by self-conscious individuals in their micro-level interactions. The structure of the self evolving in the individual’s experience reflects the structure of the community to which this individual belongs, and, vice versa, the group structure is encoded in the self-identities of its individual members. Society as a whole transpires here as an emergent system of generalized perspectives held in common by individuals inhabiting the same symbolic environment endowed with emergent spatio-temporal properties by self-conscious agents. This innovative approach problematizes the relationship between the micro and macro levels of sociological analysis, questions that Mead had not answered adequately and that continue to puzzle his successors. Interactionists of different stripes latch on to one or the other dimension of the quantum dynamics, accentuating either indeterminacy built into the agents’ ability to shift perspectives instantaneously, or the determinacy predicated on the enduring properties of the generalized other.

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While symbolic interactionists posit an over-emergent view of social order that does not do justice to recurrent patterns in social interactions, their structuralist opponents have difficulty squaring off with the stochastic nature of agency. It is true that group perspectives owe their objectivity to self-conscious agents, but the degrees of freedom with which individuals may choose a perspective as the basis for self identification vary greatly from one interactional field to another, just as they vary among agents differentially located in social structure and grappling with unequal access to resources. Societies privilege some perspectives, discourage their members from taking others, allowing competition to determine winners in still other circumstances, often in contexts that are rigged to benefit particular classes of agents. Social control mechanisms determine who can raise specific self-claims, under what circumstances, and how such claims can be redeemed and validated. Mead showed that the emergent evolution is built into human agency as it manifests itself on the micro level in concrete situational encounters. He did not explain why certain families of duration become privileged, how social groups manage to privatize the opportunity structure, which logic governs the evolution of institutionalized perspectives, and what is to be done to socialize life chances and equalize access to scarce identities. More conceptual and methodological work has to be done here to demonstrate how the emergent time-processing generates relatively stable societal patterns. Interactionists need to realize with Everett Hughes (1955: 6) “that, not change, but the dynamics of remaining the same, is the miracle which social science must explain.” The gap between macrostructural persistence and microemergent transformations is yet to be bridged in interactionist sociology. The pragmatist emphasis on corporeal selfhood adds a potentially valuable dimension to the theory of social and political institutions. Classically trained sociologists tend to equate it with a symbolic code or a normative grammar enciphering relations between individuals in a given organization. The Meadian approach draws attention to the corporeal dimension of social institutions and invites an inquiry into authoritarian emotions, aristocratic demeanor, and the body language of democracy. Indeed, polity affects – permeates – our entire body; democracy is an embodied institution. There is more to it than a constitutional system of checks and balances and a list of civil rights. It is also a demeanor, the practical care we take of our own and other people’s bodies and selves. The body politic is the politics of the body. The strength of democracy is in civility, which cannot be legislated any more than it can be reduced to a biological drive. Democracy communicates in the flesh; it is a conversation that blends non-significant and significant gestures, with each set codifying democratic politics in its own special way. Body language speaks volumes about the body politic and affects the quality of life. The interfaces of neurology, brain research, crosscultural research, and sociological analysis that have drawn much attention in recent years bode well for fleshing out Mead’s thoughts on the role that the central nervous system plays in expanding human control over our bodies and ourselves, our physical and symbolic environment. The problem with Mead’s political theory is that it does not confront head-on the issue of power. Mead tends to blur the distinction between symbolic and economic resources, understates the barriers that the market economy places on equitable distribution of resources, and underestimates the extent to which economic, cultural, racial, ethnic, and other divisions subvert the universal nature of intelligence. While

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he acknowledged the role conflict plays in the pluralistic universe, Mead believed that the cooperation between individuals, groups, and nations is the order of the day, that “revolutions might be carried out by methods which would be strictly constitutional and legal” (SW: 150–1). Alas, Mead might have overdosed on the Progressive Era’s optimism about the plasticity of human nature and the perfectibility of society. Mead’s unhappy encounter with the drunken workers oblivious to the voice of reason should remind us that the historically embodied agency places limits on our reform designs. His enthusiasm for democracy is infectious, but his take on American political institutions and their democratic promise needs to be complemented by a closer analysis of power, class, and inequality. The pragmatist challenge is to conceptualize the obdurate realities of power delimiting our freedom to assume roles without losing sight of the somatic-affective, verbal-symbolic, and behavioral-performative resources we can draw upon in our quest for a world that is more intelligent, sane, and fair. Finally, I want to single out the ecological dimension of the pragmatist social cosmology. Mead places humans at the pinnacle of evolution and treats selfconsciousness as the highest known form of relativity. At the same time, he considers human agency to be an extension of natural phenomena, an emergent product of natural evolution. Although self-referential conduct dramatically alters the way living beings exist in the world, social intelligence does not exempt humans from mechanical laws, nor does it insulate them from biological limitations. For all our fabled reflexivity, we are still suffering, mortal beings. Physical, biological, physiological, psychological, spiritual, and sociological perspectives intersect in our existence, determining our unique mode of being in the world. Selfhood designates a new mode of integration of these qualitatively different forms of relativity. Divested from its corporeal substance, the self is just a linguistic fiction, an unsubstantiated discursive claim. By the same token, agents outside their self-conscious reference frames are nothing more than biological entities devoid of rationality and unable to feel oneness with the rest of the world. Our ability to empathize with all creatures, large and small, to place ourselves in the shoes of any other thing, is, indeed, unique. “Is it necessary that that feeling of unity or solidarity should go beyond the society itself to the physical universe which seems to support it?” asks Mead (PA: 478). He hesitates to answer this question in the affirmative. As a lapsed Protestant, he probably did not want to be accused of spiritualism and religious exaltation. But our ecological awareness might cause us to reconsider this question and ponder the spiritual implications of Mead’s social cosmology.

Reader’s Guide to George Herbert Mead The first monographs about Mead appeared in the 1950s, beginning with a survey of Mead’s ideas by Victoroff, G. H. Mead, Sociologue et philosophe (1953); Pfuetze’s Self, Society, Existence (1954) which explored the continuities between Mead and Buber; and Natanson’s The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead (1956) in which the author gave a phenomenological reading of Mead. More systematic studies exploring Mead’s corpus were being published in the United States and abroad in subsequent decades. In Russia, Kon and Shalin (1969)

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examined Mead’s concept of self, drawing parallels between Marxist philosophy, the social psychology of Lev Vygotsky, and Mead’s theory of self and society. In 1973, David Miller published a study of Mead’s pragmatist philosophy, George Herbert Mead: Self, Language and the World, which included an extensive biographical survey. In Germany, Hans Joas (1980) wrote a comprehensive analysis of Mead’s ideas in their historical development, Praktische Intersubjektivität. Die Entwicklung des Werkes von George Herbert Mead (the English translation of this influential investigation appeared in 1985, with a new introduction added to this volume when it was reprinted in 1997). In the following years fresh monographs were added to the body of Mead scholarship, notably Thomas Goff’s Marx and Mead: Contributions to a Sociology of Knowledge (1980); John Baldwin’s George Herbert Mead: A Unifying Theory of Sociology (1986); Mitchell Aboulafia’s The Mediating Self: Mead, Sartre, and Self-Determination (1986) and The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy (2001); George Cronk’s The Philosophical Anthropology of George Herbert Mead (1987); Gary Cook’s George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (1993); Andrew Feffer’s The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (1993); E. I. Kravchenko, Dzhordzh Gerbet Mid: Filosof, Psikholog, Sotsiolog (2006); and Filipe Carreira da Silva’s G. H. Mead. A Critical Introduction (2007) and Mead and Modernity. Science, Selfhood, and Democratic Politics (2008). Several dozen PhD theses on Mead were defended between 1950 and 1990 (see Mead Project). Mead scholarship received a boost from Continental thinkers who produced influential studies vouching for the intellectual importance of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead (Apel 1967; Joas 1980; Habermas 1981; Tugendhat 1986). Several rich veins in Mead’s corpus drew close attention: the temporal structure of reality (Bergmann 1981; Maines, Sugrue & Katovich 1983; Flaherty & Fine 2001), the genesis of language (Ionin 1975; Glock 1986; Koczanowicz 1994), the politics and ethics of reform (Lichtman 1970; Ropers 1973; Deegan & Burger 1978; Schwalbe 1988; Shalin 1988a; Deegan 2008), and the relationship between pragmatism and sociology (Kuklik 1973; Fisher & Strauss 1979; Joas 1981; Harvey 1986; Shalin 1986a; Joas 2001).

Bibliography Writings of George Herbert Mead 1932. Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1964. George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology. Ed. Anselm Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1964. Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead. Ed. A. J. Reck. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. 1968. George Herbert Mead: Essays on His Social Philosophy. Ed. John W. Petras New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University. 1982. The Individual and the Social Self. Unpublished Work of George Herbert Mead. Ed. David L. Miller). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2001. Essays in Social Psychology. Ed. Mary Jo Deegan. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

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(Note: CA refers to Peter Hamilton (1992) George Herbert Mead. Critical Assessments, vols. 1–4. London: Routledge; with the roman numeral designating the volume, and the arabic numeral indicating the page number.) Abbott, Andrew and Emanuel Gaziano (1995) “Transition and Tradition: Departmental Faculty in the Era of the Second Chicago School.” In Gary Alan Fine (ed.), A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 221–72. Aboulafia, Mitchell (1986) The Mediating Self: Mead, Sartre, and Self-Determination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Aboulafia, Mitchell (ed.) (1991) Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead. Albany: State University of New York Press. Aboulafia, Mitchell (2001) The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Alexander, C. Jeffrey (1987) Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War Two. New York: Columbia University Press. Apel, Karl-Otto (1967) Charles S. Peirce. From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Baldwin, James M. (1897) Social and Ethical Interpretation in Mental Development. New York: Macmillan. Baldwin, John (1986) George Herbert Mead: A Unifying Theory of Sociology. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Bales, Robert E. (1966) “Sociological Implications of the Thought of George Herbert Mead.” American Journal of Sociology 71: 535–44 (CA.II.30–46). Barry, Robert M. (1968) “A Man and a City: George Herbert Mead in Chicago.” In M. Novak (ed.), American Philosophy and the Future: Essays for the New Generation. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, pp. 173–92. Bergmann, Werner (1981) “Zeit, Handlung und Sozialität bei G.H. Mead.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 10: 351–63. Bernstein, Richard (1966) John Dewey. New York: Washington Square Press. Bernstein, Richard (1972) Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bernstein, Richard (1992) The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bierstedt, Robert (1938) Review of The Philosophy of the Act, by George Herbert Mead. Saturday Review (July 2): 16 (CA.I.27–8). Blumer, Herbert (1969) Symbolic Interactionism. Perspective and Methods. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Blumer, Herbert (1975) “Comment on Turner, ‘Parsons as a Symbolic Interactionist.’ ” Sociological Inquiry 45: 59–62. Blumer, Herbert (1977) “Comment on Lewis ‘The Classic American Pragmatists as Forerunners to Symbolic Interactionism.’ ” Sociological Quarterly 18: 285–9 (CA.II.152–7). Blumer, Herbert (1980) “Mead and Blumer: The Convergent Methodological Perspectives of Social Behaviorism and Symbolic Interactionism.” American Sociological Review 45: 409–19. Blumer, Herbert and Robert F. Bales (1966) “Sociological Implications of the Thought of G. H. Mead.” American Journal of Sociology 71: 535–44 (CA.II.30–46).

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Burke, Kenneth (1939) Review of George H. Mead, vol. 1: Mind, Self and Society; vol. 2: Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century; vol. 3: The Philosophy of the Act. The New Republic 11: 292–3 (CA.I.29–31). Carey, James T. (1975) Sociology and Public Affairs. The Chicago School. London: Sage Publications. Collins, Randall (1989) “Toward a Neo-Meadian Sociology of Mind.” Symbolic Interaction 1: 1–32 (CA.IV.263–96). Colomy, Paul and David J. Brown (1995) “Elaboration, Revision, Polemic, and Progress in the Chicago School.” In Gary Alan Fine (ed.), A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 17–81. Cook, Gary A. (1993) George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Corti, Walter Robert (ed.) (1973) The Philosophy of G. H. Mead. Geneva: Winterthur. Cronk, George Francis (1987) The Philosophical Anthropology of George Herbert Mead. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. da Silva, Filipe Carreira (2007) G. H. Mead. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. da Silva, Filipe Carreira (2008) Mead and Modernity. Science, Selfhood, and Democratic Politics. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Deegan, Mary Jo (2008) Self, War, and Society. George Herbert Mead’s Macrosociology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Deegan, Mary Jo and John S. Burger (1978) “George Herbert Mead and Social Reform: His Work and Writings.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14: 362–73. Dewey, John (1910) The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy. New York: Henry Holt. Dewey, John (1916) Essays in Experimental Logic. New York: Dover. Dewey, John ([1934] 1958) Art and Experience. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Dewey, John (1969–72) John Dewey: The Early Works, vols. 1–5. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Edwards, Anne (2007) “An Interesting Resemblance: Vygotsky, Mead and American Pragmatism.” In Harry Daniels, Michael Cole, and James V. Wertsch (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 77–100. Faris, Ellsworth (1936) Review of ‘Mind, Self, and Society’ by G. H. Mead. American Journal of Sociology 41: 909–13 (CA.I.17–20). Feffer, Andrew (1993) The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fine, Gary Alan (1995) “Introduction.” In Gary Alan Fine (ed.), A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–16. Fine, Gary Alan and Sherryl Kleinman (1986) “Interpreting the Sociological Classics: Can There Be a ‘True’ Meaning of Mead?” Symbolic Interaction 9: 129–46 (CA.I.214–32). Fisher, Bernice M. and Anselm L. Strauss (1979) “George Herbert Mead and the Chicago Tradition of Sociology: Part One and Part Two.” Symbolic Interaction 1: 9–20; 2: 9–20 (CA.I.184–213). Flaherty, Michael G. and Gary Alan Fine (2001) “Present, Past, and Future: Conjugating George Herbert Mead’s Perspective on Time.” Time and Society 10: 147–61. Glock, Hans-Johann (1986) “Vygotsky and Mead on the Self, Meaning and Internalisation.” Studies in Soviet Thought 31: 131–48.

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Goff, Thomas (1980) Marx and Mead: Contributions to a Sociology of Knowledge. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gouldner, Alvin W. (1970) The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. Gunter, Pete A. Y. (1990) Creativity in George Herbert Mead. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Gusfield, Joseph R. (1995) “The Second Chicago School.” In Gary Alan Fine (ed.), A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. ix–xvi. Habermas, Jürgen ([1981] 1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Realization of Society. Boston: Beacon Press. Halton, Eugene (1986) Meaning and Modernity. Social Theory in the Pragmatist Attitude. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamilton, Peter (1992) George Herbert Mead. Critical Assessments, vols. 1–4. London: Routledge (abbreviated as CA). Harvey, Lee (1986) “The Myths of the Chicago School.” Quality and Quantity 20: 191–217 (CA.I.233–58). Hegel, G. W. F. ([1807] 1967) The Phenomenology of Mind. New York: Harper and Row. Hinkle, Gisela J. (1972) “ ‘Forms’ and ‘Types’ in the Study of Human Behavior: An Examination of the Generalizing Concepts of Mead and Schütz.” Kansas Journal of Sociology 8: 11–22 (CA.III.9–30). Hinkle, Gisela J. (1992) “Habermas, Mead and Rationality.” Symbolic Interaction 15: 315–31. Hook, Sidney (1936) Review of ‘Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century’ by G. H. Mead. The Nation 143: 220–1 (CA.I.21–3). Huber, Joan (1973a) “Symbolic Interaction as a Pragmatic Perspective: The Bias of Emergent Theory.” American Sociological Review 38: 272–84 (CA.II.53–66). Huber, Joan (1973b) “Reply to Blumer: But Who will Scrutinize the Scrutinizers?” American Sociological Review 38: 798–800. Hughes, Everett Cherrington (1955) “Preface.” In The Collected Papers of Robert Ezra Park, vol. 3. Ed. Everett Cherrington Hughes, Charles A. Johnson, Jitsuichi Masuoka, Robert Redfield, and Louis Wirth. New York: Free Press, pp. 4–8. Ionin, Leonid Grigor’evich (1975) “Kritika sotsialnoi psikhologii Mida I ee sovremennye interpretatsii.” Sotsiologicheskie-Issledovaniya 2: 164–74. James, William (1890) Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover. James, William ([1909] 1970) The Meaning of Truth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Joas, Hans ([1980] 1985) G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Reexamination of His Thought. Cambridge: Polity Press. Joas, Hans (1981) “George Herbert Mead and the ‘Division of Labor’: Macrosociological Implications of Mead’s Social Psychology.” Symbolic Interaction 4: 177–90 (CA. III.84–97). Joas, Hans (1993) Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joas, Hans (1997) “George Herbert Mead and the Renaissance of American Pragmatism.” In Charles Camic (ed.), Reclaiming the Sociological Classics: The State of the Scholarship. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 262–81. Joas, Hans (2001) “The Emergence of the New: Mead’s Theory and Its Contemporary Potential.” In George Ritzer and Barry Smart (eds.), Handbook of Social Theory. London: Sage, pp. 89–99. Johnson, G. D. and P. A. Shifflett (1981) “George Herbert Who? A Critique of the Objectivist Reading of Mead.” Symbolic Interaction 4: 143–55 (CA.III.98–110).

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Kant, Immanuel ([1790] 1951) Critique of Judgment. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Kant, Immanuel ([1804] 1983) What Real Progress has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? New York: Abaris Books Inc. Kilpinen, Erkki (2000) The Enormous Fly-Wheel of Society. Pragmatism’s Habitual Conception of Action and Social Theory. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Koczanowicz, Leszek (1994) “G.H. Mead and L.S. Vygotsky on Meaning and the Self.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 8: 262–76. Koczanowicz, Leszek (1995) “Meaning – Dialogue – Society. The Comparison between G.H. Mead’s, L.S. Vygotsky’s and M.M. Bakhtin’s Concepts of Dialogue and Meaning.” Culture and Value. Philosophy and the Cultural Sciences. Papers of the 18th International Wittgenstein Symposium, Kirchberg am Wechsel, pp. 656–60. Kon, Igor S. and Dmitri N. Shalin (1969) “D. G. Mid i Problema Chelovecheskogo ‘Ia’.” Voprosy Filosofii 12: 85–95. Kravchenko, E. I. (2006) Dzhordzh Gerbet Mid: Filosof, Psikholog, Sotsiolog. Moskva: Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Lingvistsicheskii Uuniversitet. Kuhn, Manford H. (1964) “Major Trends in Symbolic Interaction Theory in the Past TwentyFive Years.” Sociological Quarterly 5: 61–84 (CA.II.3–10). Kuklick, Henrika (1973) “A ‘Scientific Revolution’: Sociological Theory in the United States, 1930–1945.” Sociological Inquiry 43: 3–22 (CA.I.85–116). Lewis, J. David (1976) “The Classic American Pragmatists as Forerunners to Symbolic Interactionism.” Sociological Quarterly 17: 347–59 (CA.II.137–57). Lichtman, Richard (1970) “Symbolic Interactionism and Social Reality: Some Marxist Queries.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 15: 75–94. Maines, David R., Noreen M. Sugrue, and Michael A Katovich (1983) “The Sociological Import of G. H. Mead’s Theory of the Past.” American Sociological Review 48: 161–73 (CA.IV.170–90). Marx, Karl ([1844] 1964) The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: International Publishers. Marx, Karl ([1844–5] 1947) German Ideology. New York: International Publishers. McPhail, Clark and Cynthia Rexroat (1979) “Mead vs. Blumer: The Divergent Methodological Perspectives of Social Behaviorism and Symbolic Interactionism.” American Sociological Review 44: 449–67. Mead Project, www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/inventory5.html#sectM. Merton, Robert (1935) Review of George H. Mead (1863–1931) Mind, Self and Society. Isis 24: 189–91 (CA.IV.15–16). Merton, Robert K. ([1949] 1968) Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Miller, David L. (1973) George Herbert Mead: Self, Language and the World. Austin: University of Texas Press. Mills, C. Wright (1966) Sociology and Pragmatism. The Higher Learning in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Morrow, Glenn R. (1935) Review of Mind, Self and Society. Philosophical Review 32: 587–9. Morris, Charles (1934) “Preface.” In George H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. v–vii. Morris, Charles (1938) “Peirce, Mead, and Pragmatism.” Philosophical Review 47: 109–27. Natanson, Maurice (1956) The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press. Parsons, Talcott ([1937] 1968) The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott (1949) The Structure of Social Action. With a New Introduction. New York: Free Press.

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Parsons, Talcott (1954) Essays in Sociological Theory. New York: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott (1970) Social Structure and Personality. New York: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott, Herbert Blumer, and Jonathan H. Turner (1975) “Comments by Talcott Parsons. Exchange on Turner, ‘Parsons as a Symbolic Interactionist’.” Sociological Inquiry 45: 59–68 (CA.II.120–36). Peirce, Charles (1976) The New Elements of Mathematics. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Pfuetze, Paul E. (1954) Self, Society, Existence. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Reynolds, Jenice M. and Larry T. Reynolds (1973) “Interactionism. Complicity and the Astructural Bias.” Catalyst 7: 76–85. Ropers, Richard (1973) “Mead, Marx and Social Psychology.” Catalyst 7: 42–61. Rorty, Richard (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rorty, Richard (1982) Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rosenthal, Sandra (1991) Mead and Merleau-Ponty: Toward a Common Vision. Albany: State University of New York Press. Royce, Josiah (1894) “The External World and the Social Consciousness.” Philosophical Review 3: 513–45. Royce, Josiah (1895) “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature.” Philosophical Review 4: 465–85. Royce, Josiah (1919) Lectures on Modern Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schwalbe, Michael L. (1988) “Meadian Ethical Theory and the Moral Contradictions of Capitalism.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 14: 25–51. Shalin, Dmitri N. (1984) “The Romantic Antecedents of Meadian Social Psychology.” Symbolic Interaction 7: 43–65 (CA.I.273–84). Shalin, Dmitri N. (1986a) “Pragmatism and Social Interactionism.” American Sociological Review 5: 9–29. Shalin, Dmitri N. (1986b) “Romanticism and the Rise of Sociological Hermeneutics.” Social Research 53: 77–123. Shalin, Dmitri N. (1988a) “Mead, Socialism, and the Progressive Agenda.” American Journal of Sociology 92: 913–51. Shalin, Dmitri N. (1988b) “Socialism, Democracy and Reform: A Letter and an Article by George H. Mead.” Symbolic Interaction 10: 267–77. Shalin, Dmitri N. (1989) “Mead Behaviorism and Indeterminacy.” Symbolic Interaction 12: 27–41. Shalin, Dmitri N. (2007) “Signing in the Flesh: Note on Pragmatist Hermeneutics.” Sociological Theory 25: 193–224. Shaskolsky, Leon (1970) “The Development of Sociological Theory in America: A Sociology of Knowledge Interpretation.” In Larry T. Reynolds and Jenice M. Reynolds (eds.), The Sociology of Sociology. New York: David McKay Co., pp. 6–30. Shusterman, Richard (1991) Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Oxford: Blackwell. Shusterman, Richard (1997) Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life. New York: Routledge. Stryker, Sheldon (1980) Symbolic Interactionism: A Social Structural Version. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin.

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Tugendhat, Ernst (1986) Self Consciousness and Self Determination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Victoroff, David (1953) G. H. Mead, Sociologue et philosophe. Paris: Presse de Paris. Wallace, David (1967) “Reflections on the Education of George Herbert Mead.” American Journal of Sociology 72: 396–408 (CA.I.49–65). Warshay, Leon H. and Diana W. Warshay (1986) “The Individualizing and Subjectivizing of George Herbert Mead. A Sociology of Knowledge Interpretation.” Sociological Focus 19: 177–88 (CA.I.259–72). Watson, John B. (1914) Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. New York: Henry Holt. Weber, Max ([1926] 1946) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North ([1929] 1937) Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan.

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13 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois PAUL C. TAYLOR

THE PERSON William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868. A member of Great Barrington’s tiny African American minority, he attended integrated public schools and began writing for newspapers at the age of 15. After graduating at the top of his high school class (of 13), he went south to historically black Fisk University, where he first began to identify himself as a “Negro,” and to experience the daily, visceral consequences, both positive and negative, of that identity. Earning his bachelor’s degree in 1888 after three years at Fisk, Du Bois earned a second bachelor’s from Harvard in 1890. (Harvard did not recognize Fisk degrees, and admitted Du Bois as a sophomore.) He took this second degree in philosophy, under the tutelage of William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and George H. Palmer. When James offered Du Bois the same discouraging advice about philosophy that he had previously given Santayana – philosophy is no way to make a living, he told both men, if one can do anything else – Du Bois listened, and turned to history and economics for graduate study. After securing his master’s degree in history (in 1892) under Albert Bushnell Hart, he won a fellowship to the University of Berlin, where he studied economics. Prevented from earning his PhD in Berlin only because his fellowship expired before he satisfied a residency requirement (despite having written his thesis and having it enthusiastically accepted by his advisors), Du Bois returned to Harvard, expanded his master’s thesis into a dissertation under Hart’s direction, and became, in 1894, the first African American to receive a Harvard doctorate. Du Bois’s public life after 1894 unfolded in four broad stages, each distinguished by his orientation to the task of ameliorating what was then called “the Negro Problem.” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Epistemic suasion Between 1895 and 1910, Du Bois’s work was based in the academy, and grew out of the conviction that systematically uncovering and promulgating the truth about racial conditions would bring about racial justice. After a short stint teaching classics and mathematics at historically black Wilberforce University, he was hired to conduct a study of Philadelphia’s black population. He did this work as an “assistant instructor” at the University of Pennsylvania – a job title created to distinguish this anomalously credentialed Negro from the rest of the faculty – with no office and little contact with his nominal colleagues. Barred by anti-black racism from permanent employment at dominant culture institutions despite his rigorous preparation and elite pedigree, Du Bois joined the faculty of historically black Atlanta University in the fall of 1897. Atlanta’s new professor of economics and history immediately took over a recently inaugurated series of yearly research conferences on the conditions of black life in the urban US. Also during this time in Atlanta, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the extremely popular and influential collection of “essays and sketches” that cemented his status as a national figure and public intellectual, and which remains his best-known book. Several developments during this time signaled Du Bois’s impending departure from the academy. In his autobiographies, he tells the story of seeing a lynched black man’s knuckles on display in an Atlanta storefront, and explains that this began to sour him on the prospects for epistemic suasion. In the grip of a growing determination to combine his scholarly impulses with public activism, he launched a couple of short-lived journals, and helped establish the American Negro Academy. Then, in 1905, he turned to something with a brighter future: he joined William Monroe Trotter and others in founding the Niagara Movement, an organization of elite blacks opposed both to white supremacy and to Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist strategies for responding to it. The membership of this organization soon largely folded into the interracial collaboration that would, in 1910, become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), eventually one of the half dozen most influential organizations in the US struggle for racial justice. The only black person among the organization’s original officers, Du Bois left Atlanta University in 1910 to become the NAACP’s Director of Publications and Research.

Activism and propaganda From 1910 to 1934, Du Bois served as the editor of the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, and in this capacity became one of the foremost shapers of opinion in the Afro-US community. His impassioned, erudite editorials, his fastidious reviews of novels, plays, and scholarly studies, and his choices about which writers and artists to promote in his pages shaped Afro-US opinion on everything from World War I to the Harlem Renaissance. During this time he wrote a sequel to Souls called Darkwater, and composed two hefty, epic, political novels. In addition, he committed himself to the Pan-African movement, playing a major role in organizing four historic international congresses. (A fifth would follow in 1945.)

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Segregated socialism Growing dissatisfaction with the pace of liberal reform and with the bourgeois bureaucracy of the NAACP encouraged Du Bois to resume his scholarly work in the academy, and to reconsider the theoretic grounds for this work. Inspired in part by a 1928 trip to the Soviet Union, he began to argue that it was shortsighted to push for racial integration without a plan for economic modernization, and he undertook a detailed study of Marxian thought. After considering offers to teach at Howard University and at Atlanta, he returned to Atlanta in 1934, where he became the chair of sociology. The reappearance of Professor Du Bois did not, however, silence the pen of Du Bois the propagandist. He compensated for the loss of his platform in The Crisis by supplying weekly columns to two celebrated African American newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and The Amsterdam News. His major publications during this period were the pioneering historical studies Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and Black Folk: Then and Now (1939), a memoir, Dusk of Dawn (1940), and a probing, popular critique of imperialism entitled Color and Democracy (1945). After a forced retirement from Atlanta in 1944, he returned to the NAACP as Director of the Department of Special Research. This arrangement ended badly, as the indefatigable Du Bois tried to turn what was meant to be a ceremonial role into a platform for his increasingly radical views. The organization installed Du Bois as lead author on an official report to the United Nations on US anti-black racism, but delayed and downplayed the release of the report when its critical tone seemed to eminent figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt, to undermine US interests in the emerging Cold War climate. After Du Bois pointedly complained to the leadership about its cooptation by the US federal government, his contract with the NAACP was not renewed.

Anti-colonial pacifism After his final separation from the NAACP in 1948, Du Bois began working with the Council on African Affairs. In 1950 he became chairman of the Peace Information Center, charged with building support for the Stockholm Peace Petition for nuclear disarmament. He also ran (unsuccessfully) for the US Senate on the American Labor Party ticket and continued his work as a journalist, writing columns for radical publications like the National Guardian and Paul Robeson’s Freedomways. In 1951 he was indicted for failing to register as an agent of a foreign power, which led to the seizure of his passport and prevented him from satisfying his voracious appetite for travel. The resultant legal battle ended with a whimper rather than a bang – the judge dismissed the spurious charges. But the fissures in and limits to the public support for Du Bois made clear just how completely his base of support had shifted from the increasingly bourgeois black elite to the anti-colonial, anti-war, and labor movements. In 1959, after the US government returned his passport, he visited China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, where he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize; then in 1960 he attended the ceremonies formally establishing the newly independent state of Ghana and installing the new leadership of independent Nigeria. In 1961 he applied for membership in the CPUSA and emigrated to Ghana, where he became a citizen. He died in Ghana on August 27, 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington.

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THE SOCIAL CONTEXT Du Bois lived in times of momentous change, and his public life engaged with many of the key dynamics of these times. As many commentators have noted, his lifespan is eerily coterminous with the post-slavery phase of US racial politics that so informed his work. But Du Bois’s work, like the racial conditions with which it was most clearly engaged, also reflected the impact of other social conditions. What historian Rayford Logan calls the “nadir” in US racial politics began in the wake of the US Civil War (1861–5). The systematic federal effort to rebuild the country on more egalitarian and democratic lines – called “Reconstruction” (1867–77) – resulted in, among other things, attempts to consolidate the gains of the post war amendments to the US Constitution. But freedom and citizenship remained formalities for African Americans, who remained overwhelmingly mired in an exploitive plantation economy and in stigmatizing, segregated, and oppressive social structures. Reconstruction may have begun the year before Du Bois’s birth, but the infamous Plessy decision, with its insistence that Negroes had no rights that white people had to respect, came down from the US Supreme Court in 1896, just as Du Bois completed his graduate training. The plantation economy eventually gave some ground, as the burgeoning forces of industrial capitalism drew many blacks from the peasantry to the urban proletariat. But anti-black social structures remained in place and in fact after Plessy hardened into the oppressive structures of Jim Crow segregation. The nadir came to an ambivalent close in the 1960s, with the passage of major federal civil rights legislation. The fortunes of de jure white supremacy waxed and waned around the world much as they did in the US. Just as Du Bois was finishing high school, Otto Von Bismarck hosted the conference in Berlin that formalized European claims to specific African “spheres of influence.” This methodical approach to the “Scramble for Africa” launched the most aggressive phase of colonial exploitation of the continent, and eventually spurred the development of robust Pan-African anti-colonial movements. As Du Bois neared the end of his life, African states began to win their independence. But like their counterparts on the US domestic scene, these developments marked a shift from racial domination to racial hegemony. This was so because these developments were intertwined with momentous economic shifts, brought to a head by the emergence of the Bretton Woods institutions and the consolidation of the US and Soviet spheres of influence after World War II. These developments in domestic and global racial politics were of course intertwined with various shifts in political economy, culture, and social life. The key point is that what one scholar calls “the maturing of industrial society” (Hall 1996: 143) in modern states sets the context for the social transformations that most concerned Du Bois. Consequently, many of the standard manifestations of late Victorian socio-economic dislocation figure prominently in the world that Du Bois studied. These include the arrival of migrants from Europe and Asia, the northward and urban migrations of US blacks displaced by the South’s reconstituted planter society, the pressures and problems that resulted from the convergence of these migrants on overcrowded urban areas, the upheavals of labor politics, the growth of the middle classes, the expansion of employment markets for women, and the ongoing political

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negotiation between capital and state, especially in the wake of the Great Depression. One way to trace the impact of political economy on Du Bois’s career is to track the history of his rivals for black leadership. Early on he was most famously at odds with Booker T. Washington, whose accommodationist approach to black uplift assumed that blacks could settle into economic niches that, as Du Bois rightly predicted, would soon disappear. After Washington’s death in 1915, Du Bois sparred publicly with Marcus Garvey, whose authoritarian nationalism imagined Africa as an imperial black nation-state, governed by the same state-managed capitalism as fascist Italy. After the decline of the Garvey movement, Du Bois’s main antagonists were former allies – Walter White and the leaders of the Cold War-era NAACP, whose determination to remain in the good graces of the state precluded any sympathy for socialist or anti-colonial agitation. As the “respectable” black leadership in the US became increasingly bourgeois and liberal, Du Bois drew closer to the likes of Paul Robeson and Kwame Nkrumah, for whom anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism were intertwined. Leadership struggles in Afro-US politics acquired transnational significance because of the centrality of US blacks to the global struggle against white supremacy, and in particular because of the prominence of leaders like Du Bois. Colonial subjects studying in the metropoles diligently read Souls and articles from The Crisis, and often modeled their own activist literature on Du Bois’s work. This wide renown enabled Du Bois to retrace the steps of Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, and many others, who contested white supremacy from within transnational circuits of cultural practice, intellectual exchange, and political debate. Finally, the social transformations that marked the end of the Victorian era may have had their most direct impact in the new forms of subjectivity that they coaxed into being. Late Victorians and late Moderns had new resources for constructing their life-plans and their senses of self. They could define themselves by appeal to a variety of newly significant identities, from workers, freedmen, New Women, and national citizens to intellectuals, flâneurs, New Negroes, and consumers. These labels could now denote and organize entire structures of aspiration, expectation, and cultural practice, in ways that would have been impossible in previous generations.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT Du Bois was born within a decade of such canonical figures as Weber, Durkheim, Mead, and Simmel, and as a result explored the foundational questions of social theory less under their influence than as an inhabitant of the same intellectual climate. Accordingly, he joined the rest of his generation in wrestling with the legacies of Herbert Spencer (and in evading, until much later, the influence of Marx, whose works were verboten in Germany as well as in the US). Spencer’s ambitious commitment to data-gathering, objective social inquiry, and evolutionary progress was profoundly influential, but for Du Bois it was at best a stepping-stone to a more rigorous approach, shorn of, among other things, a priori commitments to progress and to the analogy between social and biological processes.

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Du Bois worked toward this more rigorous approach under the tutelage of Gustav von Schmoller, the director of his Berlin dissertation. A non-Marxian state socialist and leader of the German historical school of economics, Schmoller rejected the deductive theorizing of classical economics (and of the insurgent marginalists) and insisted on the empirical study of economic history. He adopted this approach in the wake of the great historian Leopold von Ranke, who famously argued that historians should depict the past “as it essentially was” (Woolf 2005: lix). There is some controversy over just how narrowly to read Ranke’s claim, and over just how closely he kept to it. But in practice he prioritized the close scrutiny of primary source documents, and was perhaps the main force behind the professionalization of historical inquiry in Germany and in the US. If we credit Du Bois’s own reports, his ideas about inquiry developed throughout under the influence of philosopher and psychologist William James. Early on, Jamesian pragmatism encouraged his insistence on facts and indifference to speculative schemes. Later, though, James helped complicate his dispassionate search for facts, and opened him to the further influence of Marx and Freud. Du Bois’s interest in social inquiry derived also from his prior interest in questions about the meaning of social identity for modern life and scholarship. It is tempting to trace human biological variation, cultural and psychological differentiation, and social stratification all to some basis in human bodies – but is this scientifically acceptable? Can different human types – races, nations, “sexes” – be ranked by appeal to differential endowments of human capital, such as rationality, continence, hardiness, beauty, and so on? Is it possible to close these gaps in human endowments? If so, how? And, if not, what then? While Du Bois developed his orientation to social inquiry by grappling with Spencer’s legacy, he worked out his approach to social identity by grappling with Spencer’s heirs. Advocates of Social Darwinism, beginning with pioneering sociologist William Graham Sumner, adopted Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” as their slogan and guiding idea, and dominated social thought in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US. Their approach made it possible to treat the results of systematic oppression and exploitation as evidence of the relative fitness and, by extension, worthiness of society’s winners and losers. So the dislocated subjects of modern life – from Ireland’s economic migrants to the colonized subjects in the Philippines and the Congo – were simply losers in the struggle for survival that constituted human history. A respected line of scholarly and public argument even held that at least some of these losers were headed for their Darwinian comeuppance – literal extinction. An easy way to imagine the groups facing each other in Darwinian struggle was to think of them as races. But what had once struck many as the most promising way to think of race – as part of nature, and as the subject of a “science” that would reduce cultural attainment (and much more besides) to the inner potential of human body types – was already under widespread attack by the time Du Bois entered graduate school. Biological reductionism of this sort remained a live option in gender politics, but something more nuanced seemed necessary in explaining the rise and fall of other groups. Vindicating the potential of a black nation in the era of Social Darwinism and, later, of eugenics meant explaining the unity of “the Negro people” in ways that

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blocked the equation of current condition with overall “fitness.” Anthropologist Franz Boas was a crucial influence here. Boas insisted on understanding different cultures on their own terms, instead of trying to rank them as more or less civilized or barbaric. On his way to doing this, he countered the commonsense view that African-descended peoples had done nothing to deserve notice in the grand tale of human history. Boas’s detailed discussions of the features and achievements of different African societies made this Hegelian view much harder to sustain, and helped open Du Bois’s eyes to the complexities of African history and culture. Late Victorian and inter-war reflections on the relative attainments of human types were always overlaid with considerations of economic class. By the time Du Bois began his second stint at Atlanta University, he had moved away from romantic nationalism and toward a more clearly Marxian view that linked the condition and potential of non-white peoples to their place in the global economic order. Race remained central for him, but now in a way that anticipated world systems theory or recent ideas about intersectionality: black and brown peoples had become, in effect, a global proletariat, and race joined capital as different aspects of a single, transnational social formation. This appropriation of Marx is interesting from the standpoint of exploring Du Bois’s intellectual context in part because of the lack of influences in play. Taking up his study of Marxism in a moment marked by extreme doctrinal dissension in Marxian circles, Du Bois had no allegiance to any interpretive camp, and could find his own accommodation with Marx and Lenin directly (Robinson 2000: 228). Both, he found, were insightful, but neither had thought deeply enough about the economic transformations that emerged with the end of the slave trade and the emergence of European colonialism.

THE WORK For many, the expression “social theory” names a meta-reflective practice, the core of which we can locate by asking two essentially philosophical questions: What is the object of social inquiry? And what is the proper way to study this object? Du Bois has valuable and penetrating insights into these broad questions and into some of the narrower questions that they implicate. He spends less time explicitly developing his philosophy of social inquiry than displaying it in his research practice, but he does offer a few direct statements that reward close study. At the same time, Du Bois goes beyond these traditional questions to pose new questions. These questions mark him as a critical social theorist, who works to situate the phenomena of sociality and of social inquiry in relation to specific structures of power and hierarchies of privilege.

The aims and objects of social inquiry – persistent themes Unlike much else in his life and thought, Du Bois’s sense of the aims of social inquiry – a sense that was equal parts modern, positivist, and pragmatic – remains fairly constant over time. He never settles on proprietary or recondite language to state his view, and he is often dismissive of its metaphysical implications in ways that recall the charges of intellectual laziness that dogged his teacher, William James. But for

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him as for James, the evasion is part of a broader view about what inquiry is and what it requires to be productive.

Positivism Du Bois was a positivist in an older and more Comtean sense than we are now accustomed to using. He believed that there are facts about the social world, and that there are humanly accessible truths about these facts. He believed also that empirical investigation was the key to uncovering these facts, and that once they were uncovered, some of the truths about them could be stated abstractly, in the more or less formal terms of law-like generalizations (as opposed, say, to requiring poetic or symbolic expression). And, finally, he believed that some of these facts have to do with patterns, or, as he put it, “rhythms,” in human conduct. He was not, however, a vulgar positivist, of the sort that has turned the very name into an accusation. He denied what has been called “the myth of the given” – the idea that the world somehow presents itself directly to attentive observers, making proper facts somehow above, or beneath, inference and interpretation (Sellars 1963). Like his teachers Hart and Schmoller, Du Bois knew that observation occurs in a context, under the guidance of hypotheses and theories. He knew, moreover, that observers are context-bound, value-driven beings with distinctive perspectives and purposes, and that these contexts, values, purposes, and perspectives must be excavated and accounted for. He would eventually revise his sense of how deep the work of excavation should go. But as a black person in an anti-black world, he knew from the beginning that preexisting conditions could constrain the pursuit and interpretation of facts.

Pragmatism The modesty of Du Bois’s positivism points in the direction of the second broad feature of his approach to social inquiry: his pragmatism. Scholars have debated the depth, provenance, and importance of Du Bois’s pragmatist commitments, but that discussion has little bearing on the simple point at issue here. Whether he developed these views under the tutelage of William James, as he claims, or whether his apprenticeships to Schmoller and Hart led him to converge with the philosophical pragmatists on several key ideas, Du Bois endorsed positions that at least resemble familiar pragmatist moves. Some of these will be part of the shared inheritance of postHegelian thinkers of many stripes, like Marx, but the pragmatist label effectively captures the core elements of this common heritage. Du Bois’s work evinces a kind of pragmatic sensibility first of all in its wariness about metaphysical disputation. Instead of asking about the distinguishing marks of sociality, or about the ontological status of the things that social inquiry studies, Du Bois simply begins with two commonsense realizations: there are things that people refer to as social phenomena; and we know much less about those phenomena than we ought to. To the extent that there are facts to uncover about these phenomena – particularly when groups on the “underside” of Western modernity are involved – then it is better, in his view, to get on with “collating and systematizing” those facts, instead of worrying about what kind of facts they are. This evasion of social ontology was able to take root in Du Bois’s work in part because of his commitment to voluntarism. This takes several forms, from an insistence

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on human agency to a refusal to separate theory and practice. These were common features of the post-Hegelian, late Victorian milieu in which Du Bois operated, with Marxists, settlement workers, and pragmatists all insisting in various ways on the importance of action and on its mutually constitutive ties to reflection. It was also an obvious aspect of Du Bois’s make-up, reflected as it was in his dual career as an academic and an activist. Related to the voluntarist focus on agency, and similarly diffused throughout the late Victorian milieu, is a commitment to the centrality of ethical value. Du Bois was formally trained by scholars who thought of truth-seeking, however dispassionate, as an instrument of social advancement. And he was immersed in (mostly but not entirely black) publics that echoed this view and sought to put it directly to work in human affairs. This commitment leads to an ideal of engaged scholarship, though Du Bois’s interpretation of this ideal would shift over time. A less obvious element of the pragmatic, post-Hegelian inheritance was dynamism – a preference for events and processes over entities and things. Like Marx, Dewey, and many other heirs of Hegel and Darwin, Du Bois approached what he sometimes called “social study” as the study of things in motion – of changes being consolidated, of relationships and institutions transitioning from old conditions to new, of an evolving universe taking provisional but determinate shapes. This commitment reinforces his indifference to ontology and his insistence on agency.

Modernity Alongside his positivist and pragmatist tendencies, Du Bois was a resolutely modern thinker. Just as Enlightenment sensibilities inform Marx’s counter- or post-Enlightenment arguments, modern sensibilities inform Du Bois’s counter-modern and eventually modernist investigations. Two manifestations of this tendency are particularly noteworthy. First, a fascination with rationally guided progress organizes Du Bois’s career from beginning to end. In the early years this fascination is straightforward: he is confident that history is on a kind of upward march, that European-led civilization is essentially progressive, and that this civilization can, through modern forms of rational persuasion, be led to admit and support the contributions of non-white peoples to the human project. In later years the fascination leads to a kind of reaction formation: he flirts with a distinctly modernist pessimism – a kind of disappointment that afflicts only those who took the promises of modern progress seriously. Second, Du Bois’s positivism coexists uneasily with lofty, sweeping claims about world spirits and the messages of world-historical peoples. This is to some degree a matter of rhetorical effusion, understandable in a writer raised on the likes of Carlyle. But it also reflects Du Bois’s participation in the peculiar ferment of late modern thought, as thinkers like Ranke and Peirce struggled to reconcile romantic vitalism and post-Hegelian idealism with early scientific naturalism. Du Bois was religious, though in a complicated, somewhat Emersonian, not entirely theistic way that we haven’t space here to consider. Somewhat like Ranke, and like many other figures from this transitional moment in Western culture, he saw no paradox in approaching earthly affairs as the work of Spirit – provided that earthly inquirers did their best, using careful empirical investigation, to understand precisely what this work involved in the terrestrial sphere (Woolf 2005: lviii).

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The themes in action We can highlight the persistence of positivist, pragmatist, and modern preoccupations in Du Bois’s thought by tracking them across a few key texts, across some 40 years of work. In “The Study of the Negro Problems,” an address delivered in 1897, Du Bois insists on the complexity of what was then simply and simplistically referred to as “the Negro Problem.” “[A] social problem,” he says, “is ever a relation between conditions and action,” which means that “as conditions and actions vary and change … so social problems change, develop, and grow” ([1897a] 1978: 71). This pragmatic gesture at dynamism and change is the beginning of a positivist brief for detailed empirical and historical work, called forth by a typically modern concern with “the backward development of Negroes” ([1897a] 1978: 73). Du Bois’s deep ethical concern with the conditions of black life is a given, despite its Eurocentric and conservative formulation in this early essay. But here the concern remains a subtext, buried beneath appeals to the “sanctity” of “truth-seeking” and warnings that “slip-shod, unsystematic” studies of black life will waste an opportunity that has never before presented itself “to scholars of a modern nation” – the “opportunity to watch and measure the history and development of a great race of men” ([1897a] 1978: 75). Oddly, this public commitment to systematic empirical inquiry emerged almost simultaneously with one of Du Bois’s most sweeping, metaphysically loaded statements. “The Conservation of Races,” an 1897 address to the American Negro Academy, was Du Bois’s most famous early statement on black nationalism and cultural pluralism. In it he offers a highly speculative history of the emergence of human race groups, he identifies the eight races that this historical process had, on his reading, brought into being by 1897, and he enjoins African Americans both to achieve the world-historical mission of the Negro race and to assertively claim their rightful place as American citizens. Some scholars take the sweeping philosophy of history that animates this argument as proof of Du Bois’s intoxication by German idealist metaphysics. But read against the backdrop of his ongoing empirical work, his Rankean lineage, and the ongoing controversy over whether “Negroes” would, literally, survive or die out, the piece stands revealed as another artifact of the complex swirl of intellectual forces that informed his approach to social life (Bernasconi 2009). The grand historical pageant sketched in the “Conservation” manifesto was a gesture at the process of “development” that his empirical studies were meant to track in detail – and a call to further this process through intelligent action. Du Bois had, at the time of these addresses, already demonstrated the sincerity of his call for systematic investigation by almost single-handedly doing the research – personally conducting and analyzing 835 hours of interviews, covering some 5000 people – for “the first large-scale empirical study in U.S. sociology” (Harrison 2008: 459). The resulting document, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), remains a milestone in urban sociology, and has some claim to having launched the field. Du Bois would build on this foundation with his stewardship of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, which produced “the first studies to make factual, empirical evidence the center of sociological work on the Negro” (Green & Driver 1978b: 12 n.29). Before leaving Atlanta, Du Bois had decided to organize the studies around 10 aspects of black life, and to have the Laboratory revisit each subject every 10 years for a century. Had the

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project been completed, it would in his estimation have yielded “a continuous record on the condition and development of 10 to 20 millions of men.” This would in turn have borne out his sense that “the careful, exhaustive study of the isolated group” would yield “a real knowledge of natural law as locally manifest,” which could then, by means of “careful, cautious generalization,” yield “a glimpse and revelation of rhythm beyond this little center” (Du Bois [1897c] 1978: 54). Around the time that he formulated this unprecedented plan for a century-long longitudinal survey of African American communities, Du Bois composed his most abstract statement on the philosophy of social inquiry. The recently recovered essay “Sociology Hesitant” (1905) offers the most concentrated example of pragmatic positivism in Du Bois’s corpus, and is the most theoretically oriented of the dozens of sociological articles, addresses, and studies that he wrote during his time in Atlanta. The essay begins by taking the founders of sociology to task for focusing “scientific thought on the study of an abstraction” ([1905] 2000: 37). The trouble began with Comte, who, “steering curiously by the Deeds of Men as objects of scientific study and induction,” had proposed instead “a study of Society” ([1905] 2000: 38). Du Bois’s verdict on this move is clear, and conspicuously Jamesian: “Thus were we well started toward metaphysical wanderings” ([1905] 2000: 39). After a swipe at Spencer’s commitment to these wanderings and concomitant “verbal jugglery,” Du Bois turns from criticism to a plea for positivist inquiry built on pragmatic grounds. The “true students of sociology,” he reports, “have refused to cloud their reason with metaphysical entities undiscovered and undiscoverable” ([1905] 2000: 42). They have instead sought simply “to discover the laws underlying the conduct of men” ([1905] 2000: 41). This project begins where the standing commitments of ordinary language tell us to begin: with the twin assumptions that “the laws of men’s deeds are physical laws,” and that “Man is not wholly a creature of unchanging law, he is in some degree a free agent and so outside the realm of scientific law” ([1905] 2000: 41). Having “flatly face[d] the Paradox” of law and chance coexisting in human affairs, a paradox that Kant articulated and that the everyday experience of human agency should make familiar, these “true sociologists” have simply gone about the business of systematic investigation ([1905] 2000: 42). And when asked, “Is this a science? Where are your natural laws?”, they have “refused to be thrown into confusion,” and “have been content with pointing out bare facts, general rules and principles, and” – he adds, tellingly – “moral advice” ([1905] 2000: 43). The same cluster of themes that we find in “Study” and “Sociology Hesitant” – the positivist insistence on facts and truth-seeking, the pragmatic refusal to let truthseeking spin off into metaphysics and away from ethics and “the deeds of men,” and the modern preoccupation with scientific and social advancement – remain evident in Du Bois’s later work. Black Reconstruction in America (1935a), for example, is a commanding, explicitly Marxist reinterpretation of US history after the Civil War, written in response to the “slip-shod and unsystematic” approach to black life taken by mainstream US historians of the time. Mainstream historians had assumed and advanced the racist mythology of the landmark film, Birth of a Nation. According to the totalizing, essentialist racism of these myths, “Negroes were ignorant,” they were “lazy, dishonest, and extravagant,”

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and their participation in formal politics during the Reconstruction era had resulted only in “bad government” (Du Bois [1935b] 1995: 201–2). But, Du Bois rightly argued, they could sustain this interpretation – false in many respects other than the ones noted – only because they “spoiled and misconceived the position of the historian,” and refused “to distinguish between fact and desire” ([1905] 2000: 211). They ignored available evidence (e.g., documentary evidence from formerly enslaved people), glossed over the wanton destruction of other evidence (e.g., the refusal of the Restoration legislatures to preserve the records of debates), and accepted without argument the essential goodness of white people and the essential depravity of blacks. Before closing with a bitter reproach – “I stand at the end of this writing, literally aghast at what American historians have done to this field” ([1905] 2000: 213) – Du Bois offers a clear statement of his modern, pragmatic positivism: “If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation” ([1905] 2000: 204).

The practice of inquiry – the evolving program While Du Bois’s commitment to modern, pragmatic, positivism remained consistent throughout his life, his ideas about what this commitment required did shift. The texts considered above come from three very different eras in Du Bois’s career as a scholar and intellectual. I discuss these differences here.

Critical empiricism Until about 1899, we might say that Du Bois was a critical empiricist. During this phase he was, as always, committed to some variety of inductive “truth-seeking.” While he would qualify this commitment more and more over time, early on the principal qualification emerged from his refusal of the idea of raw, uninterpreted facts. He was critical of the yawning gaps in the reigning accounts of social life that waited to be filled by rigorous scholarship, and aware that racism had something to do with them. But by and large, he thought, “[t]he world was thinking wrong about race because it did not know” (Du Bois [1940] 2007: 30). For such a world, more and better scientific study would solve the Negro problem, and work clearly aiming to fill the relevant gaps would be sought after and rewarded. The critical empiricist phase of Du Bois’s pragmatic positivism came bundled with a handful of related commitments. The most crucial of these are scholarly historicism, scholarly engagement, and civilizationist pluralism. Du Bois was a scholarly historicist in the sense that he saw historical depth as an essential part of all academic social investigations. He says this explicitly in “Study,” where he calls for a four-pronged approach to Negro problems, involving history, statistics, physical anthropology, and “sociological interpretation” ([1897a] 1978: 81). Like much else for Du Bois, this insistence on trans-disciplinary methods has multiple sources, from his apprenticeship to Schmoller to his lifelong irritation at US indifference to the real facts of the nation’s history. These motivations often came together in his early work, devoted as it was to replacing the mythology of the

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ill-researched “Negro problem” with facts. Accordingly, the massive Philadelphia Negro, commissioned as a synchronic study of the status of the blacks in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, begins with an extensive diachronic survey of the history of black Philadelphia. Through this historical examination – tracing, among other things, the emergence and development of the community’s class distinctions, its many voluntary associations, and its growing migrant communities – Du Bois was able to refute the assumption of a monolithic Negro “mass” and prepare a responsible point of entry for engaging with the problems that beset the members of the community. A commitment to scholarly engagement marked Du Bois’s early work in obvious ways. He was located in the academy and sought to solve social problems by dispelling the ignorance that surrounded them. He came to think differently about the prospects for this program, but only after years of work that “blended empirical rigor and moral indignation” (Levering-Lewis 1995b: 151). This commitment to ethically driven scholarship is evident in Du Bois’s dissertation and first book. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896) is an uneven but still remarkable attempt to combine archival work, critical scrutiny of published documents, economic history, and moral purpose. The book relies on and advances several specific claims that later scholarship has overturned – about such matters as the number of Africans imported to the US after the trade was banned in 1808. Other claims, like those concerning the connections between the Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution, have proven more incisive and influential. But the text’s center of gravity was its persistent “moralizing about the … original sin” of chattel slavery (Levering-Lewis 1994: 158). Finally, Du Bois was committed to a civilizationist mode of pluralism in his early days. As a pluralist he held that the human race was divided into smaller groupings, and that these smaller groupings – which he described typically as races or nations – had distinct contributions to make to the human project. His pluralism was civilizationist early on because it still presupposed the basic superiority of European cultural models. This racial conservatism hangs over his early work like a cloud – typically in formulations like this one: “Negroes do not share the full national life [in part] because as a mass they have not reached a sufficiently high grade of culture” ([1897a] 1978: 72–3).

Radical empiricism After 1899 or so – after the lynching of Sam Hose, which left the optimistic Atlanta scientist feeling that “something had died in me” (1944: par. 63) – Du Bois moved from critical to radical empiricism. During this phase his early criticisms about missed opportunities and slipshod scholarship gave way to the realization that a deeper critique was necessary, and to a sense that the academy could not be the primary site of anti-racist social criticism and knowledge production. With the move to a more radical empiricism came a revision of the supplementary commitments from the critical phase. First, scholarly historicism gave way to a broader culturalist historicism. This view was devoted to the proposition that “facts are elusive things” ([1905] 2000), and to the realization that he would later describe thus: [G]radually and with increasing clarity, my whole attitude toward the social sciences began to change: in the study of human beings and their actions, there could be no such rift between theory and practice, between pure and applied science, as was possible in the study of sticks and stones. The “studies” which I had been conducting at Atlanta I

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saw as fatally handicapped because they represented so small a part of the total sum of occurrences; were so far removed in time and space as to lose the hot reality of real life; and because the continuous, kaleidoscopic change of conditions made their story old already before it was analyzed and told. (1944: par. 71)

This was a radical empiricism because the operative sense of the empirical realm had expanded. Instead of focusing on measurable facts and on the testimony of official documents, he now accepted “the scientific value of the creative impulse in prose, poetry, and illustration” ([1935c] 1995: 217). Now expressive and vernacular culture would play a larger role in his work, both as subject and as medium. At this point, Du Bois’s commitment to scholarly engagement gave way to a broader form of intellectual engagement. He left the academy to become a crusading journalist. He wrote epic novels – Dark Princess (1928) and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) – which are less successful as literature than as extended narrative reflections on politics and political economy. (A sociologist I trust has told me that there are few better introductions to the cotton economy of the old southern US than Quest.) And, most famously, he published Souls – a polyphonic blend of history, sociology, ethical exhortation, cultural criticism, essays, and literary fiction, all aimed at pulling back “the veil” that obscured the truths of black life from, among others, the typical readers of the Atlantic Monthly. As he moved away from his already complicated naturalistic conception of social inquiry and toward a more hermeneutic and culturalist conception, Du Bois also exchanged his civilizationist pluralism for a critical humanism and diasporic nationalism. He gave up the honorific sense of “culture” that he had inherited from Carlyle, Crummell, and others and deployed to the detriment of “backward” blacks in the Americas and on the Continent. “Culture” no longer referred to “the best that has been thought and said,” but to the total ways of life that defined historical peoples. This move, inspired by Boas and others, led Du Bois toward a kind of protoAfrocentrism, as evidenced by The Negro (1915), a popular history that anticipated by several generations the emergence of Black Studies. It also led him toward a diasporic sensibility that would encourage him to pursue anti-imperialist political mobilization across racial lines. Souls, the most famous written product of this period, has received more commentary than any of Du Bois’s other work. But other, less familiar texts may be at least as important to an understanding of Du Bois the social theorist. One of these is “Sociology Hesitant,” discussed above. Similarly valuable are essays like “The Damnation of Women” (1920c), an expression of Du Bois’s willingness to think through the interlocking nature of racial and gender subordination; and “The Souls of White Folk” (1920b), a trenchant repudiation of the idea of Europe’s civilizational superiority. Written after the devastation of World War I, “White Folk” was a modernist manifesto, a bitter farewell to the idea of European civilization as a model of modern progress. Modernity had become a problem, not an achievement.

Anti-colonial materialism In the last great phase in his evolving orientation to social inquiry, Du Bois’s lingering positivist commitments found expression in a kind of anti-colonial materialism. Taking Marx and Freud more seriously than ever before, he moved even farther

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from the idea of a world thinking wrong because it did not know. Beginning in earnest around the time of the 1928 trip to the Soviet Union, he traced the problems of modernity to deeply rooted, subconscious habits, dialectically intertwined with various powerful, evolving, economic and psychocultural forces – all actively blocking the pursuit of justice and of truth. The most striking and influential example of this epistemological and ideological reorientation appears in Black Reconstruction, discussed above. The entire work is a testament to Du Bois’s determination not just to gather facts but also to combat the distortions of prejudice and ideology by putting old facts in a new light. Here it is instructive to think of two of the book’s specific claims, one disputed and one more widely accepted. Du Bois argued that enslaved African Americans hastened the Confederacy’s fall, and their own emancipation, by means of a “general strike.” Scholars from across the political spectrum excoriated Du Bois for anachronistically and overzealously assigning Marxian categories to phenomena that they did not fit. But this criticism missed the broader agenda. Du Bois was insisting on the agency of the enslaved persons and on the ineliminability of political-economic context for that agency, while also rejecting prominent myths about Negro passivity and about the scarcity of slave resistance. It is not inconsequential that contemporary scholarship has come around to something like Du Bois’s position, although with the benefit of more supple, typically post-structuralist, theoretical vocabularies. Du Bois also argued that the Marxian vision of an interracial army of workers rising to throw off their chains had not come to pass in part because the white workers derived a “psychic wage” from their racial identity. In this way, white supremacy converged with capitalism to prevent the development of proletarian consciousness, to extend the juridical life of anti-black racism, and to help capitalism remake itself in more modern forms. This view is now widely accepted, and reveals the later Du Bois’s heightened and more genealogical sense of culture. A people’s total way of life, with its expressive and vernacular practices, was not just an object of study or a resource for intellectual work; it was also a site for the formation of human subjects, who then negotiate their relationship to the material base of society by reference to their encultured identities.

Modernity, humanity, and power The gradual transition from critical empiricism to anti-colonial materialism points to the clearest legacy of Du Bois’s work. He was a critical social theorist, in “the most general sense, designating simply … a social theory critical of present forms of domination, injustice, coercion, and inequality” (Best 1995: xvii). In this capacity, Du Bois was preoccupied with highlighting modernity’s reliance on specific and interlocking structures of power and privilege and contesting modern accounts of the human. Two of Du Bois’s most famous statements can provide points of entry for thinking through these aims. In 1903, Du Bois issued the most famous version of his most famous statement: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” ([1903a] 1989: xxxi). He returned to this thought on multiple occasions over a span of over half a century, using it to track his own development as a thinker and the world’s progress

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toward what he never stopped calling Truth and Right. This was more than a rhetorical flourish: his point throughout was that a particular form of race-thinking – white supremacy – had woven itself into the fabric of modern life, and had done this so effectively that its distortions of truth and right were accepted as normal. In the face of this situation, the consequences of race-thinking had to be excavated and insisted upon. This thought animates his lifelong attempt to grapple with the omissions and mistakes of mainstream scholarship, and with the exclusions and assaults of white supremacist culture. Du Bois was determined to link these consequences of race-thinking to what he saw as the other great engines of injustice: gender, class, and, eventually, imperialist militarism. Accordingly, he argued in many places for the interpenetration of these categories. We have already seen the point made at length in Black Reconstruction. There are other examples, including a revision of his signature statement in Darkwater, where he writes, “The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause” (Du Bois [1920c] 2007: 87). He was not a paragon of pro-feminist virtue, as we can begin to see from his consistent equation – more prominent early than late in his career – of racial justice with the securing of “manhood rights” for blacks. But he was ahead of his time in adopting an intersectional approach to the major categories of social identity. The second famous passage that we will use to orient this discussion also appears in Souls. Du Bois writes, It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body … (Du Bois 1986: 364)

Here, and throughout Souls, his preoccupation with race takes phenomenological form. He offers a hermeneutic of blackness, filling in “the hot reality of real life” that he found missing in the Atlanta studies. This hermeneutic failed to go as deep as it might have, or as deep as Du Bois would eventually go. Specifically, it channels a distinctly bourgeois conception of racial alienation, one that is impossible to generalize to the majority of American blacks at the turn of the twentieth century. But it takes seriously the role that the processes of racialization have come to play in the formation of modern subjects. Race, he wanted to say, is an ideological, discursive, and material force, shaping individual conceptions of the self and of the self’s prospects – and doing so dialectically, as the Hegelian overtones of this formulation make clear – as surely as it shaped the distribution of social goods like housing and wealth. This insistence on racialized subject-formation and on color-lines forced Du Bois to navigate carefully between the dominant approaches to race. He was from the beginning of his career extremely critical of biological notions of race, but he was nearly as critical of attempts to dispense entirely with race-thinking. He said in many places that the race concept was not likely to be a part of an adequate biological science – not, at least, as race was understood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As with Boas, traces of nineteenth-century racialism lingered in his work to the end of his life; but these traces are, in effect, scars that he acquired as he

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clawed out of an older way of thinking and toward a newer one. The clear import of his work was to move away from classical racialism and scientific racism and toward more complicated understandings of human difference. Du Bois was similarly critical of the call to dispense with race-thinking altogether. As a political thinker and activist, he thought of race as a resource for political mobilization. But as a social theorist he recognized that a reconstituted, diagnostic concept of race could perspicuously highlight certain features of modern life that might otherwise escape notice. And as a cultural theorist, he recognized that the social groups that had grown up within the constructed boundaries of racial populations had become laboratories of cultural experimentation, and he believed that these experiments in living were worthy of study and respect. His achievement as a race theorist, then, was to develop a critical, post-racist form of racialism, a form that highlights the centrality of racialization processes to the modern world and the modern subject, but that does not succumb to the temptations of invidious essentialism. Du Bois’s abiding interest in the centrality of race is a theoretical commitment in the human sciences, not a facile preoccupation with identity politics. Having argued that the burden of social research is to understand the patterns and rhythms of human deeds, he could not turn away from the patterns that linked life chances around the world to physiognomy and descent. These patterns had framed his career and life, and had anchored his career as a theorist in a question of philosophical anthropology (Gordon 2000). In several places he turns aside from a reflection on criteria of epistemological adequacy to say something like this: “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience” (Du Bois [1935a] 2007: xliii). His critical racialism was part of an attempt to vindicate black humanity, and to complicate the notion of the human that mainstream scholars typically confused with whiteness or dissolved into abstractions.

IMPACT AND ASSESSMENT Du Bois’s impact as a social theorist was of course muted by his exclusion from the elite circles of cultural and knowledge production during his lifetime. Until quite recently, his influence was largely limited to the counter-public spheres of radical thought and black intellectual activism. Once the diversifying influences of the sixties revolutions started to take hold in the academy, though, Du Bois the writer and activist began moving closer to the intellectual mainstream. The institutionalization of Black and Africana Studies, in particular, has facilitated this process, as Du Bois is universally and rightly regarded as one of the chief inspirations for the field (Rampersad 1996). The reclamation of Du Bois as a social theorist outside Black Studies circles has gained momentum rather more recently, as scholars in traditional disciplines have returned to his work for insight into the phenomena he studied. As telling as it is that esteemed historians like David Roediger (1999) and Thomas Holt (2002) have explicitly revived Du Boisian themes, the most fitting example of Du Bois’s renewed prospects may come from the University of Pennsylvania. The university hardly acknowledged his presence in the late 1890s and could not dream of hiring him in

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any permanent capacity; but a century later it sponsored a two-day symposium devoted to The Philadelphia Negro, and published a volume of the symposium papers (Katz & Sugrue 1998). There are substantive reasons for this revival of interest in Du Bois’s work – it is not simply a matter of celebrating a figure who should have been better appreciated in his own time. He has provided vital resources for the work that awaits contemporary scholars in the still-unfolding aftermath of the civil rights era and America’s second reconstruction. These resources include his intersectional analysis of class, race, and gender; his subtle reconfigurations of racial discourse; his insistence on uncovering the facts of racialized phenomena instead of relying on myths and assumptions; his refusal of “metaphysical wanderings” and “verbal jugglery” when there are manifest problems to tackle; his trans-disciplinary approach to the human sciences; and his hermeneutic, historicist, materialist, and culturalist readings of modern experience. Since the civil rights movement in the US and since the “third wave” of democratic revolutions worldwide, the clock has in many ways been turned back, making Du Bois’s intertwined analyses of imperialism, capitalism, and social identity as relevant now as they were a century ago. There are problems with his work, to be sure. His criticism of gender oppression did not prevent him from obscuring the impact that various women, like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Jessie Fauset, had on his work, nor did it prevent him from recycling various masculinist assumptions. His critique of capitalism did not sensitize him to the class biases in his work until quite late in his career. And his empirical work is not impeccable, not least because he often had to improvise around severe resource constraints. With all that said, though, Du Bois is surely, as Cornel West was once fond of saying, the brook of fire through which serious students of black life must pass. Taking seriously the lessons of Du Bois’s work requires putting the point even more broadly than this. Du Bois is one of the pre-eminent theorists not just of black life but also of modernity, in part because he unveiled the racial dimensions of this complex social formation.

Reader’s Guide to W. E. B. Du Bois For anyone with the time to spare, the best place to begin studying Du Bois is with LeveringLewis’s (1994, 2001) Pulitzer-winning biography. It is detailed but readable, and deals as carefully with the facts of Du Bois’s life as with the substance of his thought. Levering-Lewis (1995a), the most capacious, best-organized single-volume selection of Du Bois’s work, includes the most famous short pieces as well as important excerpts from the big books. Readers specifically interested in Du Bois the sociologist should begin with Green and Driver (1978b), which introduces their valuable collection (1978a) of Du Bois’s shorter writings in the field. Wright (2005, 2006, 2008) and Dawson (2002) brilliantly locate Du Bois on the wider terrain of sociology and political science. Gillman and Weinbaum (2007) gather a number of insightful, mostly humanities-oriented articles on Du Bois’s sex and gender politics. James (1997) sets the standard for commentary on Du Bois’s evolving views on gender and class. Finally, several journals have run indispensable special issues on Du Bois, including Judy (2000a) and Anderson and Zuberi (2000).

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The best primary text to start with may be Dusk of Dawn (1940). In this memoir Du Bois focuses intently on his theoretical shifts and their connection to the social context, and uses less baroque prose than in the earlier writings. Still, Souls is the canonical text and, with Black Reconstruction and articles like “Sociology Hesitant” and “Study,” must be confronted. The Philadelphia Negro and Suppression are hard going because they are dated in both style and content. But each offers extremely rewarding moments of cultural analysis and empirical interpretation. Unfortunately, the Du Bois revival has not yet led to a complete critical edition of the scholarly writings and correspondence. Oxford University Press has produced nice editions of the books, each with an intelligent introduction by an important contemporary thinker. But for the correspondence, the collected newspaper columns, and the rest, no one has improved on the mostly out of print Aptheker volumes (1973a, 1973b).

Acknowledgment I am deeply indebted to Tamara Nopper for her advice on this essay. Her penetrating insights into Du Bois’s work, and her willingness to share them with me, have made possible whatever success this essay achieves.

Bibliography Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois [1896] 2007. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade. New York: Oxford University Press. [1897a] 1978. “The Study of the Negro Problems.” Abridged in Dan Green and Edwin Driver (eds.), W.E.B. Du Bois on Sociology and Black Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 70–84. [1897b] 1995.“The Conservation of Races.” In David Levering-Lewis (ed.), W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Holt, pp. 20–7. [1897c] 1978. “The Atlanta Conferences.” In Dan Green and Edwin Driver (eds.), W.E.B. Du Bois on Sociology and Black Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 53–60. [1899] 1995. “The Meaning of All This.” In David Levering-Lewis (ed.), W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Holt, pp. 162–4. [1899] 2007. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. New York: Oxford University Press. [1903a] 1989. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. New York: Bantam Classics. [1903b] 1995. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” In David Levering-Lewis (ed.), W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Holt, pp. 28–33. [1905] 2000. “Sociology Hesitant.” boundary 2 27(3): 37–44. [1911] 2007. The Quest of the Silver Fleece. New York: Oxford University Press. [1915] 2007. The Negro. New York: Oxford University Press. [1920a] 2007. Darkwater. New York: Oxford University Press. [1920b] 2007. “The Souls of White Folk.” In Darkwater. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 15–25 [1920c] 2007. “The Damnation of Women.” Darkwater. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 78–89. [1928] 2007. Dark Princess. New York: Oxford University Press.

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[1935a] 2007. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Oxford University Press. [1935b] 1995. “The Propaganda of History.” In David Levering-Lewis (ed.), W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Holt, pp. 201–14. [1935c] 1995. “Apology.” In David Levering-Lewis (ed.), W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Holt, pp. 215–17. 1939. Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race. New York: Holt. [1940] 2007. Dusk of Dawn. New York: Oxford University Press. 1944. “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom.” In Rayford W. Logan (ed.), What the Negro Wants. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 31–70. 1945. Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. New York: Harcourt Brace. 1986. Writings. New York: Library of America/Penguin.

Further Reading Anderson, Elijah and Tukufu Zuberi (eds.) (2000) Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 568 (Special Issue: The Study of African American Problems: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Agenda, Then and Now). Appiah, K. Anthony (1992) In My Father’s House. New York: Oxford University Press. Aptheker, Herbert (ed.) (1973a) The Complete Published Works of W.E.B. Du Bois, 37 vols. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thompson Publishers. Aptheker, Herbert (ed.) (1973b) The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1877–1963, 3 vols. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Bernasconi, Robert (2009) “ ‘Our Duty to Conserve’: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Philosophy of History in Context.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108(3): 519–40. Best, Stephen (1995) The Politics of Historical Vision: Marx, Foucault, Habermas. New York: Guilford. Bogues, Anthony (2003) Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals. New York: Routledge. Bruce, Dickson (1992) “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” American Literature 64(2): 299–309. Dawson, Michael (2002) Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gillman, Susan and Alys Eve Weinbaum (eds.) (2007) Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gilroy, Paul (1992) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gooding-Williams, Robert (2009) In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gordon, Lewis (2000) “Du Bois’s Humanistic Philosophy of Human Sciences.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 568 (Special Issue: The Study of African American Problems: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Agenda, Then and Now): 265–80. Green, Dan and Edwin Driver (eds.) (1978a) W. E. B. Du Bois on Sociology and Black Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Green, Dan and Edwin Driver (1978b) “Introduction.” In Dan Green and Edwin Driver (eds.), W.E.B. Du Bois on Sociology and Black Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–48. Hall, Stuart (ed.) (1996) Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Hancock, Ange-Marie (2005) “W.E.B. Du Bois: Intellectual Forefather of Intersectionality?” Souls 7(3): 74–84. Harrison, Faye (2008) “Du Bois, W. E. B.” In William A. Darity, Jr. (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd edn., vol. 2. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, pp. 457–61. Gale Virtual Reference Library. (Accessed April 26, 2010.) Holt, Thomas (2002) The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, Joy (1997) Transcending the Talented Tenth. New York: Routledge. Judy, Ronald (ed.) (2000a) boundary 2 27(3) (Special Issue: Sociology Hesitant: Thinking with W. E. B. DuBois). Judy, Ronald (2000b) “Introduction: On W. E. B. Du Bois and Hyperbolic Thinking.” boundary 2 27(3) (Special Issue: Sociology Hesitant: Thinking with W. E. B. DuBois): 1–35. Katz, Michael and Thomas J. Sugrue (eds.) (1998) W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and its Legacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. King, J. E. (2003) “Non-Marxian Socialism.” In Warren J. Samuels, Jeff E. Biddle, and John B. Davis (eds.), A Companion to the History of Economic Thought. Oxford: Blackwell. Blackwell Reference Online. www.blackwellreference.com.libproxy.temple.edu/subscriber/ tocnode?id=g9780631225737_chunk_g978063122573713. (Accessed December 31, 2009.) Kirkland, Frank (1997) “Modernity and Intellectual Life in Black.” In John Pittman (ed.), AfricanAmerican Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions. New York: Routledge, pp. 136–65. Levering-Lewis, David (1994) W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: Henry Holt. Levering-Lewis, David (ed.) (1995a) W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Holt. Levering-Lewis, David (1995b) “Introduction to Part 3, ‘Social Science and Civil Rights’.” In David Levering-Lewis (ed.), W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Holt, pp. 215–17. Levering-Lewis, David (2001) W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. New York: Henry Holt. Peterson, Charles (2007) Dubois, Fanon, Cabral: The Margins of Elite Anti-Colonial Leadership. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Posnock, Ross (1998) Color and Culture: Black Writers in the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rampersad, Arnold (1996) “W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and the Making of American Studies.” In Bernard Bell, Emily Grosholz, and James Stewart (eds.), W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, pp. 289–307. Reed, Adolph (1997) W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line. New York: Oxford University Press. Reiland, Rabaka (2006) “The Souls of Black Radical Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois, Critical Social Theory, and the State of Africana Studies.” Journal of Black Studies 36(5): 732–63. Robinson, Cedric (2000) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Roediger, David (1999) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. edn. London: Verso Books. Sellars, Wilfrid (1963) “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” In Science, Perception and Reality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 127–96. Shelby, Tommie (2005) We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sullivan, Shannon (2006) Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Tribe, Keith (2003) “Historical Schools of Economics: German and English.” In Warren J. Samuels, Jeff E. Biddle, and John B. Davis (eds.), A Companion to the History of Economic Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, Blackwell Reference Online. www.blackwellreference. com.libproxy.temple.edu/subscriber/tocnode?id=g9780631225737_chunk_ g978063122573715 (Accessed December 31, 2009.) Turner, Bryan S. (2009) “Introduction: A New Agenda for Social Theory?” In Bryan S. Turner (ed.), The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Blackwell Reference Online. www.blackwellreference.com.libproxy.temple.edu/subscriber/ tocnode?id=g9781405169004_chunk_g97814051690041 (Accessed 29 December 2009.) West, Cornel (1989) The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Woolf, Daniel (2005) “Historiography.” In M. C. Horowitz (ed.), New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, pp. xxxv–lxxxviii. Wright, Earl (2005) “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory.” Sociation Today – The Official Journal of The North Carolina Sociological Association 3(1). www. ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v31/outline5.htm Wright, Earl (2006) “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Atlanta University Studies on the Negro, Revisited.” Journal of African American Studies 9(4): 3–17. Wright, Earl (2008) “Sociology, American.” In William A. Darity, Jr. (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd edn., vol. 7. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, pp. 666–8. Gale Virtual Reference Library. (Accessed June 16, 2010.)

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14 Joseph A. Schumpeter HARRY F. DAHMS

Schumpeter’s writings embody a highly interdisciplinary orientation that exceeded the traditional scope of economic theory and the history of economic thought – at his time, and even more so today. During much of the first half of the twentieth century, Schumpeter straddled the line between economic theory and social theory, as he pursued an interest in methodological and historical issues relating to the advancement of economics as a social science, with economic theory as its foundation and as the frame providing rigorous and consistent standards for delimiting the kinds of issues economists should address and illuminate. Schumpeter conceived of economics as an integrated social science, combining economic theory, economic history, economic sociology, and economic statistics. Economics was to be the central social science in, of, and to modern society, as a civilization whose most important sphere of human and social activity is economic in nature. Though frequently associated with the Austrian School of economics, Schumpeter’s perspective resulted from a unique blend of different traditions, concerns, and theories. Among the latter, the works of Marx and Weber were especially important. With Marx, whose overall perspective and followers he rejected, he still shared an interest in and commitment to studying the dynamic and historically contingent nature of capitalism (Elliott 1980; Foster 1983). With Weber, Schumpeter shared the orientation toward value-free social science and an assessment of modernity as inherently irreconcilable, along with a largely pessimistic perspective on the ability of modern societies to actualize claims relating to individual autonomy, liberty, equality, or the capacity of democratic politics to facilitate rational solutions to persistent problems. Schumpeter’s work provides contributions to social theory in that it furthers our understanding of the rise and nature of modern society – much more so than is common for economists – and in that he employed methodological tools that are compatible with a number of well-established and recognized social-theoretical The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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frameworks. If combinations of Marx and Weber are the foundation of choice for studying modern capitalism (Sayer 1991), with Weberian Marxism (Dahms 1997) being one variant, then Schumpeter could be viewed as a Marxian Weberian. Schumpeter’s reputation rests largely on his writings on innovative entrepreneurship, business cycles, the shift from liberal to corporate capitalism, and what he regarded as the likely – though not necessarily imminent (at his time, and, according to his logic, ours) – transition from capitalism to socialism. The perspective that informed Schumpeter’s writings, if understood in terms of social theory, presented a context for recognizing the importance of – and for tracking – the changing relationship between economy and society. De facto, his main emphasis was on the need to grasp how economic reality is entwined with social reality, as a dynamic process whose appreciation facilitates an understanding of how economy, society, culture, and politics influence each other, are reciprocally constituted, and change over time. This entwinement can be observed in all societies – its particular configuration differing from place to place and time to time – but its illumination is especially important in modern societies, where the dynamic capitalist economy is the primary cause of qualitative rather than quantitative change in politics, culture, and society. Although capitalist economies can only maintain themselves and their position in modern society by continuously changing, it is not possible to delineate clearly the nature of their impact on social life and societal conditions, as the latter have the capacity to respond to the pressure to adapt imposed by changes in the economy, in a variety of ways.

THE PERSON Joseph Alois Schumpeter was born on February 8, 1883, in Triesch, Moravia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in the Czech Republic). His father, a manufacturer of textiles, died when Schumpeter was 4 years old. In 1889, Schumpeter and his mother moved to Graz. In 1893, they moved to Vienna, where his mother married an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, enabling Schumpeter to enter what was then the leading institution of secondary education in Vienna, the Theresianum, attended mostly by the heirs of the Empire’s elite. In 1901 he enrolled at the University of Vienna, where he studied political economy under the economists Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and received the JD degree in 1906. During his last year he participated in a seminar taught by von BöhmBawerk; among his fellow students were Ludwig von Mises, Rudolf Hilferding, Emil Lederer, and Otto Bauer, who all went on to distinguished careers in economics or politics, or in both (McCraw 2007: 45–9). In 1907, Schumpeter married Gladys Ricarde Seaver, and began working at the International Mixed Tribunal in Cairo, Egypt, as a trial attorney, until the following year. During this time, he worked on The Nature and Essence of Economy Theory ([1908] 2010), which appeared in 1908, and with which he “habilitated” the following year at the University of Vienna in political economy, thus earning the right to receive a “call” (Ruf) to teach as a university professor. Schumpeter’s first position was at the University of Czernowitz, at the easternmost edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from 1909 until 1911. He published what he regarded as his most important work, the first version of Theorie der

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wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (The Theory of Economic Development), in 1911, when he also began teaching economics at the University of Graz. In 1913–14 he taught at Columbia University. It was at that time that he separated from his wife, who returned to England. During World War I, he continued to teach in Graz and also functioned as an advisor to the government. In late 1918, after the end of the war, he served on the Commission to Socialize the German Coal Industry (Stolper 1994: 202–13), frequently supporting the plans to socialize the industry. From March to October of 1919, he was Secretary of Finance of the Republic of Austria, in the first post war, social democratic government under socialist Karl Renner. From 1921 until 1924 he was President of the Biedermann Bank in Vienna; although not personally responsible for the bank’s later failure, he took responsibility for personal bank deposits and, over the next 15 years, paid back the entire amount. In 1925, he married Annie Reisinger. From 1925 to 1932, he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn in Germany. In summer 1926, first his mother died, and then his wife and child died in childbirth. That same year, he also published the revised version of The Theory of Economic Development, which is the basis for the English translation that appeared in 1934. In 1927–8 and 1930 he taught at Harvard University, and in 1931 at Hitosubashi University in Japan. In 1932, the year before the National Socialists came to power in Germany, Schumpeter moved to the United States to take the position of Professor of Economics at Harvard University, which he held until his death. In 1937, he married Elizabeth Boody Firuski, an economist specializing in Japan. In 1939, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Also in 1939, the two-volume work, Business Cycles, appeared. In 1940–1, he served as President of the Econometric Society. In 1942, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy was published, his best-known work. In 1948, he was elected President of the American Economic Association, and he was to be President of the International Economic Association in 1950. Schumpeter died on January 8, 1950, near Salisbury, Connecticut, where he is buried. Ten Great Economists from Marx to Keynes (1951), History of Economic Analysis (1954), and Das Wesen des Geldes (The Essence of Money, 1970) were published posthumously.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT Schumpeter reached adulthood during one of the most exciting and turbulent periods of the twentieth century, in terms of intellectual production and the expectations among many of what the future held for humankind. The early years of the century were a time of great hope and imminent political and social change. Vienna, in particular, was a city of great intellectual and artistic creativity. Already during his student years, Schumpeter was involved in the discussions between laissez-faire capitalists, liberals, socialists, and Marxists. At that very time, Max Weber worked on and published his analysis of the link between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Across Europe, socialist and communist parties were on the rise, in part because the capitalist economies especially in Western Europe did not perform well enough to outshine the exploitative and socially unequal order on whose foundation the economic achievements were realized; and the voices of those in whose eyes capitalism was a despicable arrangement grew in strength and number.

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Schumpeter’s world comprised the end of one epoch – monarchy – and the brink of another – democracy. Modernity and enlightenment began to bear clearly discernible fruits in politics, society, and economy. Despite this generally progressive orientation, however, Schumpeter regarded the order in which he grew up as embodying redeeming features that were worth being preserved. He supported the monarchy and assimilated certain aristocratic mannerisms, spun a tale of how he descended from nobility, and his entire lifestyle conveyed a corresponding attitude. In opposition to Weber’s more intricate explanation of the rise of modern capitalism, Schumpeter’s vision adhered to the well-established view that during the eighteenth century, economic activity began to liberate itself from the constraints of tradition and religion to such an extent that a new social order emerged within the old, wherein a number of new structural features took hold, and a new group of “men” were allowed to imprint their values onto society: the widespread possibility of independent entrepreneurial activity facilitated by bank credit; the liberation from religious beliefs, facilitating the engagement of a growing number of people in economic activities, including especially the implementation of innovations; a competitive market; and private ownership of the means of production. It may not be surprising, then, that Schumpeter regarded the British form of government, combining a constitutional monarchy with firmly established democratic procedures, as close to optimal, given the stage of economic development and industrialization reached during the first half of the twentieth century. Schumpeter supported the Habsburg government’s efforts during World War I, and continued to do so actively during its democratic aftermath as Secretary of Finance, but he remained ambivalent with regard to democratic republicanism, which he regarded as permanently in danger of producing weak governments unable to confront the challenges of the time (as he elaborated later on in terms of what he introduced as the “democratic method”: Schumpeter 1942: 250–83; Medearis 2001; also Dahms 2009: 48–9). This attitude began to take hold while he was still in office, continued during the early 1920s, while he was the president of a small bank in Vienna, deepened further after his move to Germany in 1925, during the Weimar Republic, and became still more intense after the beginning of the Great Depression, with political instability and conflict becoming increasingly common in Germany. His attitude did not change profoundly when, a few months after his arrival in the United States in 1932, F. D. Roosevelt became President and, after several months of more or less desperate experiments, the New Deal arrangement became official government policy, inspired to no small extent by the economist Schumpeter regarded as his nemesis, John Maynard Keynes. During the remainder of his stay in the United States, which coincided with the remainder of his life, Schumpeter has been reported to have made, upon various occasions, derogatory statements about Roosevelt and the economic policies that supported and accompanied the New Deal, at times even creating the impression that he was impressed by the ability of the National Socialist government in Germany to pursue and implement economic policies much more predictably and effectively. On the other hand, ever since his second wife, whom he regarded as the love of his life, had died in 1926, his general outlook had become increasingly gloomy and dark, and it is difficult to tell whether his assessments of political and economic developments were tainted by his personal experiences, which tended to end tragically. To be sure, between his personal state of mind and emotions, and the

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political-economic trends during the 1930s and 1940s, with the National Socialists in power in Germany, the Fascists in Italy, and Stalin’s dictatorship in the Soviet Union, Schumpeter had ample reason to be depressed with regard to the future of capitalism. After the end of World War II, he had less than five years to observe and evaluate trends. Although the latter provided some basis for hope, they also brought a new set of challenges – such as the Cold War and the nuclear threat – which were harbingers of changes that would further expedite the erosion of the kind of entrepreneurial capitalism with which he was enamored, and the advance of socialism – or worse.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT When Schumpeter began to study law and political economy at the University of Vienna in 1901, two intellectual and methodological debates influenced his development as an economist most deeply. The first was the Methodenstreit, the German– Austrian battle of methods in economics, which was still very much alive when he was first exposed to economic theory. The dispute, which continued well beyond Schumpeter’s student years, was between the Austrian marginalist school of economics, which had close ties to British classical theory, and the German historical school of economics, which emphasized the importance of empirical and historical research for the advancement of economic theory. The second debate was between Marxist and socialist economists, on the one hand, who favored state intervention in the economic process and the progressive alteration of the structure of social inequality, and free-market economists, on the other, who insisted on the importance of adhering to the role assigned to government in classical economic theory. While the latter debate was dominated by strong pro- and anti-capitalist sentiments, the dispute between the Austrian School – which, during the second half of the twentieth century, commonly came to be viewed as exemplary for neoclassical economics – and the historical school did not pertain directly to the question of whether the capitalist order was legitimate or not, but to the most adequate methodological approach to developing economic theory as the foundation for economics as the social science studying and understanding the functioning of the modern capitalist economy. Neoclassical economists insisted on focusing on the functioning of the economy alone, drawing especially on the “marginal revolution” that facilitated the reconstruction of classical economics (as represented by Adam Smith and David Ricardo) from the 1870s on, as represented by William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras – and the Austrian Carl Menger. By contrast, the adherents of the historical school – represented by Bruno Hildebrand, Karl Knies, and Wilhelm Roscher, and in the next generation by Gustav von Schmoller, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart – maintained that social, cultural, and psychological factors had to be an integral part of the picture. In other words, the gulf between the neoclassical and the historical economists became that between economy and society: while the former insisted on the autonomy of the economic system, the latter denied the existence of such autonomy and argued that the economy is an integral part of society. For the historical school, “social” considerations, in both the formally (i.e., analytically oriented) sociological sense, and the substantive sense of social solidarity, could be

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eliminated only at the risk of promoting economics as a social science whose analytical value was deductive, and thus not only highly problematic, but potentially dangerous to society. Schumpeter encountered the work of Karl Marx while studying at the University of Vienna. At precisely this time, Austromarxism emerged as a theoretical movement. Its beginnings are generally identified with the foundation in 1903 of an association that called itself Zukunft (Future), and with the initial publication of the Marx-Studien (Marx Studies) in 1904. With the publication in 1907 of the socialdemocratic monthly, Der Kampf (The Struggle), Austromarxism had established itself institutionally. Theoretically speaking, the Austromarxists were a group of rather undogmatic Marxist theorists who tried to formulate a holistic concept of theory and practice; politically, the strategies they promoted were more consistent with social democracy, broadly understood. The most important theoreticians and practitioners of Austromarxism were Max Adler, Karl Renner (who would be the first Chancellor of the Republic of Austria, after World War I), Friedrich Adler, and, later on, two of Schumpeter’s classmates in the above-mentioned seminar on Marx that Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk taught in the academic year 1905–6: Otto Bauer, a socialist theorist who later would be foreign minister of the Republic of Austria, and Rudolf Hilferding, an economist and socialist who would be finance minister of Germany twice during the 1920s. His fellow students who later achieved fame also included the Social Democrat Emil Lederer (during the 1930s, the first Dean of the University in Exile, the later Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research in New York), and the advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, Ludwig von Mises, who taught at New York University, and whose most famous student was Friedrich von Hayek. The points of view taken by the five students and Böhm-Bawerk ranged from Marxism, via a softer form of reformist socialism, to unreformed laissez-faire. Lederer, Bauer, and Hilferding represented socialist and Marxist positions, while von Mises, Böhm-Bawerk, and Schumpeter stood for positions representing more or less radical pro-capitalist and free-market-oriented perspectives. One of Schumpeter’s biographers, R. L. Allen (1991, vol. I: 39), wrote that “the defenders and attackers of capitalism and socialism conducted a highly stimulating intellectual controversy for months on end. Schumpeter’s life-long interest in, and respect for, Marx stemmed from this seminar. The Marxists did not convert him, but neither did the spokesmen for capitalism convince him.” Schumpeter, however, did not take a simple middle position either. He tended to adapt his position for the sake of argument, and his vantage point for the purpose of greater understanding and sensitivity. He particularly appears to have enjoyed the role of devil’s advocate, and he did not subscribe to or “believe” in either of the positions his fellow discussants took and fought for. Instead he examined positive and negative aspects of the arguments of both the “socialists” and “free marketeers.” Already at this early stage in his development, Schumpeter was more concerned with integrating the positive aspects of different positions than with pledging allegiance to any of them (Allen 1991, vol. I: 39–40). In the seminar, Schumpeter sided with the pro-market economists, but in a way that differed from most of his fellow economists. For the rest of his life, he would refuse to dedicate his intellectual energy to deflecting criticisms from advocates of the German historical school, Marxists, or socialists. He was more concerned with

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combining contributions from the three traditions, in order to synthesize them into a more complex understanding of capitalist economy and society. In doing so, Schumpeter chose what he thought of as pure economics as his frame of reference – because, in his view, neoclassical economic theory represented the greatest promise for developing economic science that was modeled after the natural sciences – while integrating it with the broader scope of political economy, as exemplified by Marx, and the historical perspective pursued by such scholars as Weber.

THE THEORY With regard to the number of approaches and disciplines he tried to combine, Schumpeter was one of his century’s more complex economists. His view of economics was unconventional, as this passage from the History of Economic Analysis suggests: [S]cience as a whole has never attained a logically consistent architecture; it is a tropical forest, not a building erected according to blueprint … the frontiers of the individual sciences or of most of them are incessantly shifting and … there is no point in trying to define them either by subject or by method. This applies particularly to economics, which is not a science in the sense in which acoustics is one, but is rather an agglomeration of ill-co-ordinated and overlapping fields of research in the same sense as “medicine.” (Schumpeter 1954: 10)

It is difficult to categorize Schumpeter within the social scientific division of labor. Following Max Weber, Schumpeter contended that in order to attain the status of a true science, economics must embrace economic theory, economic history, economic sociology, and economic statistics, under the heading of Sozialökonomik, or socioeconomics (see Swedberg 1991: 84–9). The four approaches fulfill complementary analytical and empirical tasks. Economic theory provides the general and unifying framework in which the contributions of the other approaches are translated into one language and incorporated into a formal model. Economic history provides the data about the context, the concrete developments, and the changes through which the modern capitalist economy emerged. Economic statistics provides past and current data on economic performance – the environmental and structural conditions of supply and demand of natural resources, labor, products, equipment, etc. Economic sociology examines the political, social, and cultural conditions of economic action and institutions. In his early masterpiece, The Theory of Economic Development (1911), Schumpeter had described the function of entrepreneurs as bringing about economic development, by introducing innovations as “new combinations.” He examined the economic, social, and cultural origins of change and innovation in the process of economic development within a largely economic framework, and concluded that, ultimately, the entrepreneur is the source of qualitative economic development – i.e., economic evolution, as opposed to economic growth (see Anderson 2009: 6–15). In the later work with which Schumpeter’s name came to be associated above all, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), while pursuing a more classically

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“politico-economic” orientation that entailed many sociologically useful insights and categories, Schumpeter contended that this function was no longer being fulfilled by individual entrepreneurs, but that by the early 1940s, the entrepreneurial function was becoming the domain of large corporations and the state. Ironically, despite the continuing efforts of organized capitalism to legitimate itself in terms of free enterprise and free markets, the pattern of rationalizing investment, production, and distribution would be described more adequately in terms of economic planning. After having taken account of the development of capitalism over the long term, to assess the role of the entrepreneur in highly differentiated economies, Schumpeter had concluded that in successful, increasingly productive and reliable economic systems, the activity of entrepreneurs, rather than reinforcing an environment conducive to their goals and abilities, contributes to the erosion of the normative foundations of entrepreneurial capitalism. The more complex and successful an economy becomes, the less it needs, and relies on, entrepreneurs. Although Schumpeter set out to examine the dynamics of capitalist evolution in “purely economic” terms, his perspective was much more broadly social scientific, due in large part to his realization that the careful examination of capitalist dynamics requires tools that exceed those consistent with “pure economics.” While the overall framework of Schumpeter’s theoretical and historical investigations was geared toward the methodological standards of neoclassical economic theory, he integrated contributions made in economic history, political economy, sociology, and social economics, with elements of Marx’s theory. Diverse contributions from these areas of economic research came to play such an important role in his pursuit of a clearly circumscribed set of key research questions that stepping beyond the boundaries of neoclassical economics was inevitable. This discrepancy is especially apparent in his sustained attempts to assess the socio-economic role of the entrepreneur, both in his early, “positive” theory of entrepreneurship (first formulated in 1911, revised in 1926, translated in its revised version into English in 1934, and qualified and supplemented during the initial days of 1950 until his death), and in his later, “negative” thesis of entrepreneurial decline (presented first in the early 1920s, and developed further thereafter) (see Dahms 1995). Simultaneously proceeding on two levels of analysis, each defined by distinct yet related sets of research questions, Schumpeter’s early theory of entrepreneurship combined with his thesis of entrepreneurial decline enabled him to grasp how corporate capitalism resulted from the combination of two seemingly incompatible forms of organization – business and bureaucracy. Corporate capitalism thus acquired the ability to manage the entrepreneurial function by routinizing it – with momentous implications for the analysis of dynamic capitalism; the kind of theorizing required to identify what may be referred to, however tenuously, as the “pattern” of societal change basic to dynamic capitalism; and the analytical mind set and tools needed to do justice to the complexity of dynamic capitalism. At the same time, the combination of both levels of analysis provided Schumpeter with a reference frame for contemplating the relationship between economic conditions, processes, and possibilities, on the one hand, and between social, political, and cultural changes, on the other. His work is based upon a strong theory of modernization and a weak concept of modernity, which enabled him to frame the complexity of advanced capitalism as directly related to its contradictory nature (see Blokland [2001] 2006).

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In order to identify Schumpeter’s theoretical contribution to the social sciences beyond economics, the distinction between social theory and sociological theory is useful. Social theory and sociological theory are often used interchangeably, although they signify different types of theoretical discourse, and different types of research projects. Historically, social theories typically have been attempts to understand, explain, or clarify large-scale social changes, such as the rise of the capitalist economy or the establishment of parliamentary democracy in Western Europe and North America. By contrast, sociological theories comprise more rigorous and recent efforts to design frameworks for the systematic organization of the results of empirical research, into a coherent, all-encompassing, and rather ahistorical framework for the systematic study of “society” (Seidman 1991: 131–2; Mouzelis 1995: 1–3). Put differently, social theorists endeavor to understand the logic of historically significant societal transformations; sociological theorists strive to set up a supra-historical frame of reference for theoretical and empirical research oriented toward the linguistic and methodological compatibility needed to be applied to all societies and cultures. To be sure, the two are not mutually exclusive. In terms of the distinction between social and sociological theory, Schumpeter would appear as a social theorist, as he related “stories of origin and development, tales of crisis, decline, or progress” that were closely connected to social conflicts and public debates of his time, especially concerning the transition from capitalism to socialism (Seidman 1991: 131). He endeavored to clarify the social configuration of modern capitalism, although he was too constrained by positivistic tenets to concede the possibility that social actors could shape or guide the outcomes of historical transformations. Furthermore, given that Schumpeter saw himself as an economist, he did not frame his efforts explicitly in terms of sociological theory either – a term that was still uncommon when Schumpeter established his theoretical project. Yet there are elements of his work that contribute to sociological theory. For example, in The Creativity of Action, Hans Joas (1992) outlined a sociologically viable theory of creative action. Although in the chapter most directly related to Schumpeter’s efforts, entitled “Economic and Social Action,” Schumpeter does not appear, his inclusion would not have been surprising, since his theory of the innovative entrepreneur rests on the distinction between creative and rational economic action (see Foster [2005], who described both Schumpeter and Keynes as proponents of “rational capitalism”). This distinction is basic to all of Schumpeter’s historical and theoretical writings, and especially to his depiction of the decline of the entrepreneur, and the concurrent transitions, first, from liberal capitalism to corporate capitalism, and second, from capitalism to socialism. While his distinction between creative and rational economic action should be regarded as a contribution to sociological theory, his perspective on the rise of managerial capitalism as a preparation for the transition to socialism is a contribution to social theory. His underlying socio-historical perspective represents the beginnings of a social theory that is valuable for current debates about the prospects for capitalism, the relationship between economy and society, and the direction of socio-economic change under conditions of what is commonly referred to as “globalization.” Schumpeter did not regard himself as a social theorist, strictly speaking. In his own eyes, for instance, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) was a casual

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attempt to pull together several arguments that he was not able to develop fully in Business Cycles (1939), whose subtitle – A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process – more accurately describes its content and purpose. Schumpeter the economist regarded Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy as his least rigorous, most journalistic work. Its analysis did not conform to the rigorous foundation on rational individual economic action (note that he had coined the term, methodological individualism, in his first book [Schumpeter [1908] 2010), the high level of internal consistency, and the narrow confinement to economic issues that are the defining features of neoclassical economic theory. Yet, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy is a compelling interpretation of the evolution of economy and society in modern capitalism; it constitutes the beginnings of a social theory that takes into consideration the “inner logic” of the economic system. Although Schumpeter’s social theory never can be seen as a whole, because parts of it remain hidden, the crucial outlines of the structure are clear. Modern capitalism evolved via three distinct processes of rationalization that can occur simultaneously over long periods: the rise of competitive, or entrepreneurial, capitalism as the economic rationalization of society; the rise of corporate, or managerial, capitalism as the subsequent process of organizational rationalization resulting from the vast growth of “scale and scope”; and the rise of socialism as the process of social rationalization of the economy in an increasingly secularized civilization that asserts itself over, but not necessarily against, the economy.

Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurship in modern capitalism Initially, Schumpeter’s concern was directed at identifying the inherently static nature of neoclassical economic theory. In The Nature and Essence of Economic Theory ([1908] 2010), he undertook to make explicit the underlying social imaginary of neoclassical economics, as far as the functioning of the market process and the rise of capitalism were concerned. He concluded that as neoclassical economists were concerned with the study of an economic system assumed to have an inherent tendency towards states of equilibrium, the implicit vision of social life they presupposed was of the modern market economy as a stationary state characterized best as a circular flow. Yet, Schumpeter contended, this vision evidently is in conflict with the defining characteristics of market economies – as they are governed by competition and change – and with the actuality of modern conditions, as they are capitalist in nature. Schumpeter agreed with Karl Marx that capitalism is inherently dynamic, not static, and that the bourgeoisie is a social class which, in order to sustain its position in the overall social structure, must continually revolutionize the instruments of production, and thus all social relations. With its emphasis on equilibrium states, neoclassical economics is unable to provide a theory that would do justice to the dynamism of the economic process in modern, capitalist societies. To Schumpeter, then, the defining challenge for economic theorists in the early twentieth century was to present a framework that would make it possible to theorize the dynamic nature of modern capitalism. What is the source of the dynamism? What would a more suitable theoretical framework have to look like? Still, the purpose of such a framework would not be to supplant neoclassical economics, but to complement it.

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In the first, 1911 version of The Theory of Economic Development, Schumpeter had described the function of entrepreneurs as bringing about economic development, by engendering “new combinations.” He set out to identify the economic, social, psychological, and cultural foundations of economic innovations as a major source for economic change. As a result, the entrepreneur appeared as the primary cause of qualitative economic development. In the history of economic theories on growth and development, the 1911 version of The Theory of Economic Development is unique in that it is built around a category that is both economic and sociological. While neoclassical economists tend to presuppose that the entrepreneur is a product of the free market system comparable to the capitalist, banker, manager, or worker, Schumpeter argued that the innovative activity of entrepreneurs is the economy’s life-blood. Yet Schumpeter’s combination of economic and sociological conceptions made smooth incorporation of his theory of the entrepreneur and economic development into the rigid models of neoclassical economics impossible, while sociologists with their more flexible frameworks of analysis tended to shy away from the difficulties associated with immersion in economic thought and terminology. As a consequence, the second edition of this work, published in 1926 and the basis for the English translation, transposed the theory of the entrepreneur onto the level of a more formal theory of the entrepreneurial function. In 1939, Schumpeter published his most expansive work, Business Cycles. The subtitle aptly denotes the content of the work: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process. In two volumes, Schumpeter set out to “test” his theory of economic development. On more than 1000 pages, he presented the theoretical framework of his analysis, the different components of a market economy and its functioning, and three historical sketches. Examining the respective histories of economic development in Germany, Britain, and the United States, he again placed the entrepreneur at center-stage. At this point, however, his depiction of the entrepreneur had lost most of its former glory. As a detailed account of capitalist development from the late eighteenth century on, the main focus is on the different business cycles; he traced the “swarming” (i.e., the proliferation) of innovations and the economic crises that result from the creative activity of the entrepreneur as it destabilizes states of equilibrium. Yet, despite Schumpeter’s concern with entrepreneurial capitalism, he was not simply a proponent of the theory of free markets. While he believed in the selfhealing forces of the market, he did not do so blindly. Rather, he conceded that businesses have a tendency to undermine, eliminate, or exploit markets, and strive to attain a position of monopoly – the more so, the larger businesses are. Before we can claim that markets work, especially when, where, and how, the larger political and economic context must be considered. Markets are not a universal feature of modern capitalist society, and their facilitation is a constant challenge. Schumpeter did not regard state interventions as adequate “solutions” to economic problems. Rather than presenting a “remedy,” government tends to amplify the distorting nature of large business organizations: the more concentrated capitalism is becoming, the less markets are likely to work. As he wrote in the preface to Business Cycles, “[s]cientific analysis of an organic process easily creates the impression that the analyst ‘advocates’ letting that process alone …. In order to … make it clear that

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my analysis lends no support to any general principle of laissez-faire, I have sometimes indicated valuations of my own, though I do not think them interesting or relevant in themselves” (1939: vi). The possibility and nature of markets are bound to change over time, as are the role, power, and size in society of large corporations. Similarly, the role of entrepreneurship changes over time: rather than being a constant, the actual role and condition of entrepreneurship must be reassessed continuously, not presumed as a categorical feature of capitalism anywhere, and anytime. Indeed, Schumpeter’s perspective is highly compatible with Karl Polanyi’s concept of “embeddedness”: entrepreneurship is embedded socially, politically, and culturally. Its importance differs depending on historical context, religious traditions, cultural patterns, political institutions, and structures of inequality. In substance, thus, Schumpeter’s social theory is centered on his successive assessments of the changing nature and role of entrepreneurship in the capitalist economic system as an evolving socio-economic process. His particular theories of elites, the tax state, imperialism, business cycles, the democratic method, and the rise of socialism must all be understood as attempts to view entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, and the entrepreneurial function within the larger scheme of transmutations of capitalism. Consequently, the guiding interest of Schumpeter’s theory of capitalism is the fate of the entrepreneur as capitalism continues to undergo changes. As a contribution to the social theory of advanced capitalism at the transition from competitive to corporate capitalism, his work laid the foundation for a comparative social theory of entrepreneurship in different capitalist societies, as well as different times; for analyzing the changing relationship of economy and society; and for indicating what kind of theoretical apparatus will be required to engender an adequate grasp of dynamic capitalism. Whether entrepreneurs play a crucial role in bringing about economic development depends on the particulars of context. During the nineteenth century, at the stage of competitive capitalism, economic progress would not have occurred without the identifiable input of identifiable entrepreneurs. In the age of the modern corporation, however, entrepreneurs began to fulfill a much more ideological function, as they served to conceal the actual working of increasingly concentrated economies. Just as the distinction between dynamic and static features of modern economics was central to Schumpeter’s theory, so too was his historical analysis of the transition from entrepreneurial, or competitive, capitalism, to managerial, or corporate, capitalism. In the set of his writings that comprises The Theory of Economic Development (1911, [1926] 1934), Business Cycles (1939), and a large number of articles, where the entrepreneur played a key role, his work rested on an actiontheoretical and voluntaristic approach wherein creative individuals energize the economic and historical process. In another set of works, ranging from the 1921 essay, “Sozialistische Möglichkeiten von heute” [Socialist Possibilities of Today] (1920/1; see also 1931), to Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) and “The March into Socialism” (1950), Schumpeter traced the emergence of post-entrepreneurial, managerial capitalism. His effort was directed at demonstrating that, in managerial capitalism, innovations have been rationalized to a degree that is rather reminiscent of the circular flow that is at the core of neoclassical economics and its vision of the modern economic process. In modern corporations, a new kind of

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circular flow takes hold through the routinization of innovations in large research and development departments, supplanting the role formerly played by “energetic” individuals.

Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurial decline in corporate capitalism In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter addressed issues pertaining to the intersection of economics, political theory, and sociology, contending that at the stage of managerial capitalism, in economies increasingly dominated by large corporations, the entrepreneurial function was no longer being fulfilled by individual entrepreneurs, but instead by planning departments in businesses, and even in government, responsible for identifying opportunities for innovations, or new combinations. Under such circumstances, the pattern of rationalizing investment, production, and distribution tended to reconstitute itself as economic planning. Schumpeter’s claim that capitalism would prepare its own downfall and facilitate the move toward “socialism” continues to be one of his most contested hypotheses. The concept of creative destruction is of central importance to Schumpeter’s relevance today. Under conditions of globalization, this concept is uniquely applicable. In the chapter on “The Process of Creative Destruction” (1942: 82–6), he introduces the term in order to capture the most disconcerting dimensions of capitalism: all improvements of the economic process, all increases in productivity, all innovations and new combinations, are likely to come at the price of the destruction of forms of production and economic life that were in place for shorter or longer periods of time. The actors involved in the latter forms of production are bound to pay a price as a new form of economic life – a different kind of enterprise, a different method of production – takes hold. Innovations constantly revolutionize the economy from within, destroying old economic structures and creating new ones. “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism” (1942: 83). The distorting impact of large business organizations is especially true with regard to the implications of the rise of modern management, a travesty violating principles of competitive capitalism. In Schumpeter’s view, the “merger movement” was effectively the merging of business and bureaucracy, creating a vast system of control that undermines the principle of modern individualism and autonomy. With the rise of modern management, the entire framework undergoes a reorientation that produces a reconfiguration of the values–facts relationship in advanced, capitalist, and democratic societies. The most explicit consequence was that bureaucratic capitalism had more in common with actually existing socialism than with nineteenth-century competitive, or entrepreneurial, capitalism. Such a paradoxical condition ensued regarding the reconciliation of facts and norms, foreshadowing key dilemmas that have been shaping the direction of globalization. This version of the theory of entrepreneurship, Schumpeter’s thesis of entrepreneurial decline, centers on the supposition that, organizationally, advanced capitalism is built on (and would not have been possible without) large corporations and managerial culture (the guiding concept being control, and the corresponding political form, a system containing elements of totalitarianism), while, culturally, it continues to rely on values and ideals that are residues of competitive, or entrepreneurial, capitalism (the guiding concepts being markets, innovation, and

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the corollary political form, liberal democracy). Schumpeter suggested that as long as this tension between the organizations and the culture of advanced capitalism is not being decided one way or the other (either by making corporate capitalism compatible with liberal democracy and its concurrent values, or by abandoning the latter in favor of a political system more compatible with the actual economic organization and social order of corporate capitalism – or by reconciling both in a qualitatively superior socio-political system), the likelihood will increase that strategies including fascist or totalitarian organizational forms remain as a viable “solution” to confront mounting tensions that emerge from within the socio-economic nexus of order and process (see Schumpeter 1954: 1153–9; also McCraw 2007: 149). Over the years, Schumpeter’s theory of the entrepreneur went through two types of changes. In “positive” terms, he made a determined effort to make his theory compatible with neoclassical theory, by eliminating both the sociological and socialpsychological elements of the early version, and the heroic emphasis on the individual entrepreneur. As a result, his theory became increasingly formal and disenchanted. In “negative” terms, however, Schumpeter’s concern with the social implications of changes in the economic organization of innovation and development that culminated in the rise of the modern corporation and the disappearance of the entrepreneur grew continuously. His early interest in historical and sociological analyses of the economy, even though he tried to downplay it during the 1920s, enabled him to draw a picture of modern society that surpassed the neoclassical model both in complexity and in depth, as became irrepressibly apparent in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). Schumpeter’s thesis of entrepreneurial decline is directly related to his discussion of socialism. Although he did not sympathize with Marxists and most tenets of Marx’s theory, he had a keen sense for the social-analytical value contained in the works of Karl Marx regarding the role of change in capitalism. To Schumpeter, Marx was above all a social scientist, and only secondarily a political philosopher and activist. In Schumpeter’s view, Marx rejected utopian socialism because he wanted to analyze the “necessary outcome of the observed social process” (Schumpeter [1940] 1991: 334) by scientific means. The thesis of entrepreneurial decline is an essential component in Schumpeter’s own scientific observation of the social process of evolution. Since Schumpeter’s reading of Marx was influenced by debates between Austromarxists and free-marketeers early on, and he continued to engage in them between 1901 and 1920, it is important to note that his related understanding was highly pragmatic, and had little if anything in common with the philosophical interpretations that began to proliferate after the Russian Revolution in 1917 – as represented, for example, in the post-1918 writings of Georg Lukács ([1923] 1971), one of the founders of Western Marxism (note the conspicuous absence of such concepts as alienation, commodity fetishism, or reification, in Schumpeter’s writings). In the reception of Schumpeter’s work, the degree to which the social democratic and socialist orientation shaped his assessment of Marx’s relevance is often underestimated, and his work is assumed to be more directly related to Marx’s understanding of “socialism” than is justified. Schumpeter’s thesis of entrepreneurial decline, finally, points to the peculiar tension in his work that derives from its simultaneous though unreconciled foundation

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on three different concepts of action: rational individual economic action (or static action), energetic creative action (or dynamic action), and social action. These three types of action facilitated Schumpeter’s complex vision of economy and society, although he did not fully develop it. Schumpeter’s emphasis on the entrepreneur represented creative action, within the general theoretical framework of neoclassical economics, which represented rational economic action. The rise of socialism adds the socio-historical component, representing social action. To be sure, while Schumpeter discussed rational and entrepreneurial action explicitly, the extent to which his work was pervaded by a concept of social action, and a corresponding notion of social rationality, remained rudimentary, in part because he was not eager to recognize, and still less so, analyze it. Moreover, Schumpeter’s interpretations of the role of the entrepreneur, the nature of the entrepreneurial function, and the socioeconomic significance of the entrepreneur’s decline, are tied together by his contention that economic development is influenced by forces that must be understood in terms of the theory of “rationalization.” Because the rise of socialism is a process, one can envision an infinite number of possible conditions of social and economic life along a spectrum between capitalism and socialism. The process of the social rationalization of the economy, which underlies Schumpeter’s vision of economic and social development in capitalism, is the rapidly unfolding tendency to place the economy “under society’s control,” to make the economy “work” in the interest of society and according to what society regards as desirable and acceptable. Still, because Schumpeter’s work comprises an economic theory that takes the “social” into consideration, and a social theory that takes seriously the imperatives of the economic process, it may provide a unique basis for reconsidering the balance between economic imperatives and social preferences. His long-term perspective provides a general framework for interpreting developments in the organization of the economy, and in the relationship between economy and society. Schumpeter was sharply aware that patterns of economic development and action, and the nature of economic institutions, vary from society to society. In this sense he recognized that economic action and institutions, including entrepreneurship, are socially embedded. Accordingly, a universal model for the transition from capitalism to socialism cannot exist; nor does Schumpeter’s analysis lead to a strategy of reorganizing the relationship between economy and society. Rather, it represents a framework for interpreting actual developments that can inform and enlighten sociologists, and social scientists in general, who pursue a variety of research interests associated with dynamic shifts from one type of socio-economic organization to another. There are conspicuous similarities between Weber’s theory of rationalization and Schumpeter’s description of the rise of managerial capitalism (Collins 1986; Osterhammel 1987; Bottomore 1992; Swedberg 1992). The main difference between Weber’s and Schumpeter’s use of the concept of rationalization can be illustrated by reference to their respective treatments of socialism. As capitalism evolves and becomes more and more successful (i.e., efficient and stable), the economy emerges as a distinct system with a specific logic of evolution and corresponding types of action. The further the capitalist economy develops, the easier it is to employ economic and organizational skills and know-how as standard techniques. At this point, the similarity between Weber and Schumpeter ends: the latter claims that at a certain

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point of development, a transitional process sets in, which reflects the fact that society no longer needs to be organized according to the capitalist mode of production which continues to structure the economy. Once this point is reached, Schumpeter suggests, the economy provides society with its means of material production and reproduction, regardless of the specific social organization (democratic, autocratic, socialist, or religious); that great rationalizer of the economy, the creative-innovative entrepreneur, is no longer needed. The capitalist economic process comprises the most efficient and most productive allocation of labor, the organizational techniques and material means of production, and natural resources. There is no need to abolish the capitalist economy because society is no longer a “function” of the capitalist economy.

IMPACT Schumpeter’s work was eclipsed from the 1950s to the 1970s, but related interest began to surge after 1980. It is interesting to note that according to Augello (1990), as many works on Schumpeter were published during the 1980s as during the entire period prior to 1980. Well before his work attained the renewed interest and prominence that has been expanding especially during the last two decades, what was called the “Schumpeter Renaissance” (Harwood 1979; Bombach 1981) reached an early culmination in 1983, exactly 100 years after Schumpeter’s birth, when he was included in centennial commemorations of the death of Karl Marx and the birth of John Maynard Keynes (Bös, Bergson & Meyer 1984; Bös & Stolper 1984; Seidl 1984; Helburn & Bramhall 1986). Although all three shared a principal concern with the future of capitalism, Schumpeter’s writings received a degree of attention that could hardly have been predicted, in light of the rather scant literature then published on his work, compared to Marx or Keynes. Schumpeter’s politicaleconomic orientation invited comparison of his work with the theories of Marx and Keynes. Contrary to Marx and Keynes, however, Schumpeter represented a conservative outlook, as he regarded the age of competitive capitalism as the height of human civilization. His return after a lengthy period of neglect was also due, at least in part, to his advocacy of entrepreneurship, which returned to favor with the Reaganite economic policies of the 1980s. Sociologists also began to reread some of Schumpeter’s writings during the 1980s, which gave important impulses to the emergence of economic sociology. His overall perspective on the economy and its study is highly compatible with the key concept in new economic sociology, namely that economic action and institutions are socio-culturally embedded (see Granovetter 1985, 1990). Schumpeter was also cited regularly in the works of Giovanni Arrighi, who integrated Schumpeterian categories with world-systems analysis (see, especially, Arrighi 1994, 2007). His writings also inspired innovations within mainstream economics: evolutionary economics aims to understand how capitalist economies change over time, and to show how the overall framework of neoclassical economics is not capable of meeting this challenge (Nelson & Winter 1982; Hanusch 1988; Hodgson 1993, 1999, 2001; Andersen 2009). Schumpeter is being cited with growing regularity in economic policy-related papers and newspaper articles, for ideas and concepts he coined – including, above

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all, “creative destruction”, and his rendering of “entrepreneurship.” With few exceptions, however, both familiarity with the depth and breadth of his work, and appreciation of the degree to which it was an effort to tackle the contradictory nature of modern society, have remained limited. Schumpeter’s works are also mentioned frequently in writings related to globalization.

ASSESSMENT Joseph Schumpeter’s work is widely received as paradoxical and contradictory (e.g., Heertje 1981). When read from a social-theoretical perspective, however, his work gains greater coherence, as a compelling interpretation of the social and economic transformations of capitalism in the twentieth century. Still, there are conspicuous deficits that need to be acknowledged. The fact that Schumpeter largely worked on his own tends to provide his writings, including especially his theoretically oriented writings, with an air of idiosyncrasy: it is hard to avoid noticing that he did not benefit from the advice, suggestions, and criticism of colleagues and fellow scholars with whom he would have shared a common interest, and to whom he could have related as an equal, and vice versa. Instead, he found himself to be a proverbial caller in the desert – first, because his contributions were not compatible with the formalized orientation of neoclassical economics, and later, because the policy elites in the United States in the 1930s had little use for his perspective and its implications for policies, especially when compared to the writings produced and the suggestions put forth by John Maynard Keynes. A second reason that may have played an important role was that his writings were, in fact, more compatible with social theory than with economic theory, as those designations were commonly employed then, and even more so now. He does not appear to have thought of his writings, though, as contributions that were more consistent with the efforts of such social theorists as Marx, Weber (with whom he was acquainted personally), and Talcott Parsons (with whom he worked for a time at Harvard). Also, Schumpeter’s writings impose on any reader a burden of interpretation that is not easily resolved – if it can be resolved at all. Many of his claims, observations, and especially predictions may appear to have been falsified by actual events and developments, such as the collapse of “actually existing socialism.” Yet, if we keep in mind that he viewed one century as a negligibly “short” period of time, in matters of social as well as economic evolution, the verdict may not be in yet, with regard to the future of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, of capitalism, of democracy, and of socialism. Also, Schumpeter’s writings have a strange quality of lending themselves to being read against the grain, or what appears to be the grain. If readers of this work keep in mind that all of his contributions were efforts to circumscribe the importance – nay, the inevitability – of dynamic theorizing, and that he went as far ahead with these efforts as he could, as well as he could, on his own, with the time that was available to him, then a wealth of interpretive possibilities opens up that instantly provides a multitude of research questions, theoretical challenges and framing devices, and visions of alternative futures that can, and should, keep eager scholars busy for some time to come.

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Reader’s Guide to Joseph Schumpeter There are two useful collections of essays by Schumpeter, one edited by Richard Swedberg (Schumpeter 1991), and the other with a new introduction by Swedberg (Schumpeter [1951] 1989). In addition, John Cunningham Wood (1991) has compiled a four-volume set of essays and articles about a variety of aspects of Schumpeter’s work that were published over the course of many decades. Importantly, there are now several Schumpeter biographies available (Allen 1991; Swedberg 1991), with one focusing on the political and public policy aspects of his life and work (Stolper 1994), and the most recent also being the most comprehensive and detailed (McCraw 2007). See also März (1992). Among Schumpeter’s most social-theoretical and sociological writings are his essays on imperialism ([1918–19] 1991), on social classes ([1927] 1991), and the crisis of the tax state ([1918] 1991). Also, the final chapter of the first edition of The Theory of Economic Development, which is among his most sociological pieces, has recently been translated into English ([1911] 2003). The number of collections and monographs about Schumpeter’s contribution, including those that have a bearing on his social theory, has been growing at an accelerating pace in recent years: Shionoya ([1995] 1997), Moss (1996), Medearis (2001), Arena and DangelHagnauer (2002), Cantner, Dinopoulos, and Lanzillotti (2002), Backhaus (2003), Reisman (2004), Blokland ([2001] 2006), Carayannis and Ziemnowicz (2007), and Andersen (2009).

Bibliography Writings of Joseph A. Schumpeter [1908] 2010. The Nature and Essence of Economy Theory. Trans. B. A. McDaniel. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. 1909. “On the Concept of Social Value.” Quarterly Journal of Sociology 23: 213–32. 1911. Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. [1911] 2003. “The Economy as a Whole.” Trans. U. Backhaus. In J. Backhaus (ed.), Joseph Alois Schumpeter: Entrepreneurship, Style and Vision. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 61–116. [1912] 1954. Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch. Trans. R. Aris. New York: Oxford University Press. [1918] 1991. “The Crisis of the Tax State.” In The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism. Ed. Richard Swedberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 99–140. [1918–19] 1991. “The Sociology of Imperialisms.” In The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism. Ed. Richard Swedberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 141–219. 1920/1. “Sozialistische Möglichkeiten von heute.” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik 48: 305–60. [1926] 1934. The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle. Trans. R. Opie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [1927] 1991. “The Social Classes in an Ethnically Homogeneous Environment.” In The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism. Ed. Richard Swedberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 230–97. 1928. “The Instability of Capitalism.” Economic Journal 38: 361–86. 1931. “Les possibilités actuelles du socialisme.” L’Année Politique Française et Étrangère 24: 385–418.

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1939. Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, 2 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill. [1940] 1991.“The Meaning of Rationality in the Social Sciences.” In The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism. Ed. Richard Swedberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 316–38. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper. [1950] 1975. “The March into Socialism.” In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper, pp. 415–25. 1951. Ten Great Economists from Marx to Keynes. New York: Oxford University Press. [1951] 1989. Essays on Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism. Ed. R. V. Clemence. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. 1954. History of Economic Analysis. Ed. E. B. Schumpeter. New York: Oxford University Press. 1970. Das Wesen des Geldes. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1991. The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism. Ed. Richard Swedberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Further Reading Allen, R. L. (1991) Opening Doors: The Life and Work of Joseph Schumpeter, 2 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Andersen, E. S. (2009) Schumpeter’s Evolutionary Economics: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Engine of Capitalism. London: Anthem Press. Arena, R. and C. Dangel-Hagnauer (eds.) (2002) The Contribution of Schumpeter to Economics: Economic Development and Institutional Change. London: Routledge. Arrighi, G. (1994) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time. London: Verso. Arrighi, G. (2007) Adam Smith in Beijing. Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso. Augello, M. M. (1990) Joseph Alois Schumpeter: A Reference Guide. Berlin: Springer. Backhaus, J. (ed.) (2003) Joseph Alois Schumpeter: Entrepreneurship, Style and Vision. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Blokland, H. ([2001] 2006) Modernization and Its Political Consequences: Weber, Mannheim, and Schumpeter. Trans. N. S. Van Weesep. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bombach, G. (1981) “Reflections on the Schumpeter Renaissance.” In W. Wittmann (ed.), Free Enterprise-Pillar of the Future. Stuttgart: Seewald, pp. 29–41. Bös, D. and H.-D. Stolper (eds.) (1984) Schumpeter oder Keynes? Zur Wirtschaftspolitik der neunziger Jahre. Berlin: Springer. Bös, D., A. Bergson, and J. R. Meyer (eds.) (1984) Entrepreneurship: The Bonn-Harvard Schumpeter Centennial, Journal of Economics. Supplement 4. Bottomore, T. (1992) Between Marginalism and Marxism: The Economic Sociology of J. A. Schumpeter. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Cantner, U., E. Dinopoulos, and R. F. Lanzillotti (eds.) (2002) Entrepreneurship, the New Economy and Public Policy: Schumpeterian Perspectives. Berlin: Springer. Carayannis, E. G. and C. Ziemnowicz (eds.) (2007) Rediscovering Schumpeter: Creative Destruction Evolving into “Mode 3”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Collins, R. (1986) “Weber and Schumpeter: Toward a General Sociology of Capitalism.” In Weberian Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 117–42. Dahms, H. F. (1995) “From Creative Action to the Social Rationalization of the Economy: Joseph A. Schumpeter’s Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 13: 1–13.

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Dahms, H. F. (1997) “Theory in Weberian Marxism: Patterns of Critical Social Theorizing in Lukács and Habermas.” Sociological Theory 15: 181–214. Dahms, H. F. (2009) “Democracy.” In G. H. Fagan and R. Munck (eds.), Globalization and Security. An Encyclopedia, vol. 1: Economic and Political Aspects. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, pp. 42–60 Elliott, J. E. (1980) “Marx and Schumpeter on Capitalism’s Creative Destruction: A Comparative Restatement.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 95: 45–68. Foster, J. B. (1983) “Theories of Capitalist Transformation: Critical Notes on the Comparison of Marx and Schumpeter.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 98: 327–31. Foster, J. B. (2005) “The End of Rational Capitalism.” Monthly Review 56(10): 1–13. Granovetter, M. (1985) “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 91: 481–510. Granovetter, M. (1990) “The Old and the New Economic Sociology: A History and an Agenda.” In R. Friedland and A. F. Robertson (eds.), Beyond the Marketplace: Rethinking Economy and Society. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, pp. 89–112. Hanusch, H. (ed.) (1988) Evolutionary Economics: Applications of Schumpeter’s Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harwood, E. (1979) “The Entrepreneurial Renaissance and Its Promoters.” Society 16(3): 27–31. Heertje, A. (ed.) (1981) Schumpeter’s Vision: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy after 40 Years. New York: Praeger. Helburn, S. W. and D. F. Bramhall (eds.) (1986) Marx, Schumpeter, Keynes: A Centenary Celebration of Dissent. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Hodgson, G. M. (1993) Economics and Evolution: Bringing Life Back into Economics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hodgson, G. M. (1999) Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy is Not the End of History. London: Routledge. Hodgson, G. M. (2001) How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science. London: Routledge. Joas, H. ([1992] 1996) The Creativity of Action. Trans. J. Gaines and P. Keast. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lukács, G. ([1923] 1971) History and Class Consciousness. Trans. R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. März, E. (1992) Joseph Schumpeter: Scholar, Teacher and Politician. New Haven: Yale University Press. McCraw, T. K. (2007) Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Medearis, J. (2001) Joseph Schumpeter’s Two Theories of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moss, L. S. (ed.) (1996) Joseph A. Schumpeter, Historian of Economics: Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought. London: Routledge. Mouzelis, N. (1995) Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? London: Routledge. Nelson, R. R. and S. G. Winter (1982) An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Osterhammel, J. (1987) “Varieties of Social Economics: Joseph A. Schumpeter and Max Weber. In W. J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (eds.), Max Weber and His Contemporaries. London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 106–20. Reisman, D. (2004) Schumpeter’s Market: Enterprise and Evolution. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

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Sayer, D. (1991) Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber. London: Routledge. Seidl, C. (ed.) (1984) Lectures on Schumpeterian Economics: Schumpeter Centenary Memorial Lectures, Graz 1983. Berlin: Springer. Seidman, S. (1991) “The End of Sociological Theory: The Postmodern Hope.” Sociological Theory 9: 131–46. Shionoya, Y. ([1995] 1997) Schumpeter and the Idea of Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stolper, W. (1994) Joseph Alois Schumpeter. The Public Life of a Private Man. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Swedberg, R. (1991) Schumpeter: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Swedberg, R. (1992) “Can Capitalism Survive? Schumpeter’s Answer and Its Relevance for New Institutional Economics.” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 33: 350–80. Wood, J. C. (ed.) (1991) Joseph A. Schumpeter: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. London: Routledge.

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15 Karl Mannheim COLIN LOADER

Karl Mannheim’s career took place against a background of social, political and cultural flux in three countries: Hungary, Germany, and Britain. His career began in the second half of World War I and ended with his death less than two years after the end of World War II. In addition to a new form of total warfare, those years witnessed the severe economic dislocation of hyperinflation and the 1930s depression, political instability (giving rise to the extremes of communism and fascism), and significant cultural experimentation. This context of transformation informed all of Mannheim’s work. Although he is best known for one of his German works, Ideology and Utopia, and its concepts of the sociology of knowledge and the socially free-floating intelligentsia, his intellectual corpus is much broader. Moreover, his works were not simply neutral academic exercises but were attempts to aid people in answering one basic question: how can I make sense of the changing world in which I live so that I might act in a fruitful way? Despite the variety of his personal settings and the uncertainty within each of them, Mannheim addressed this consistent theme in his writings. The above question usually took a more specific form: what role do intellectuals play in the orientation of the larger “public,” so that members of that public can react with greater awareness to the dramatic change going on around them? This question always addressed the role of education and its application to the modern world. To address this question Mannheim adopted what he called an “essayistic-experimental attitude” (Mannheim 1929/1955: 52–3), which is reflected in the very form of his writings. He avoided book-length treatises in favor of long essays of 50 or more pages. Even Ideology and Utopia is composed of essays. His essays did not attempt to exhaust a topic as a book might do, nor were they narrowly focused, shorter pieces that one finds in specialist journals. They dealt with a wide variety of larger, provocative topics and invited controversy. One of his greatest critics was Mannheim himself. His introspection led to continual modification, or even The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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abandonment, of concepts and terminology as his thought evolved. This dialectical style makes it difficult to present a single static Mannheim apart from the central question noted above. His career, like his sociology, was very much historical.

MANNHEIM IN HUNGARY Mannheim was born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1893 and came of age during the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the last years of World War I. He began attending the University of Budapest in 1911 and exited with a doctorate in philosophy seven years later. Most importantly, his intellectual activities stretched beyond the university to the rich intellectual life of Budapest, especially two intellectual circles: Oscar Jászi’s Society for the Social Sciences, and a smaller group, the Sunday Circle around Georg Lukács. Both groups were affiliated with journals and both organized “Free Schools” (of the social and human sciences respectively) to provide instruction for the working classes. The Jászi circle was oriented toward positivist science and liberal reform politics, while the Lukács circle rejected positivism (addressing a range of works from idealism to mysticism) and was adamantly apolitical. Although Mannheim associated with both groups, he gravitated toward the Lukács pole. Both circles saw themselves as an intellectual vanguard whose task was the creation of a cultural synthesis and the political and/or cultural education of the lower classes (Kettler 1971; Gluck 1991). During this period, probably at the urging of Lukács, Mannheim also spent time in Berlin, where he attended lectures by Georg Simmel, Ernst Troeltsch, and others. He was especially attracted to the vitalistic philosophy of culture that Simmel was developing (Simmel 1997) and that resonated in the organic historicism of Troeltsch. Back in Budapest in 1917, he delivered a lecture, “Soul and Culture,” which served as a programmatic statement for Lukács’s Free School of the Human Sciences. Here Mannheim follows Simmel’s formulation: the established culture of Europe has become reified and pluralistic, alienating the “works” that comprise it from the vitality of the individuals (“souls”) who have created them and those individuals from one another. Although Simmel’s writings generally appraised this situation pessimistically as “tragic,” Mannheim optimistically believed that the old reified culture was being shattered by the war opening up the possibility of a new culture. Intellectuals could promote this possibility through critical structural analysis of individual works in the various cultural spheres. Although they would amount to an acknowledgment of pluralism, such analyses by the Free School would prepare the ground for a new cultural synthesis (1970: 66–84). In 1918 Hungary followed the pattern of Russia a year earlier in a liberal revolution that was supported by members of Jászi’s group. The new government was succeeded a few months later by a communist one in which Lukács, who had recently shocked many in his own group by joining the Communist Party, became the deputy commissar of education. That regime was crushed in turn by conservative-fascist forces, sending many members of both Jászi’s and Lukács’s groups into exile. Mannheim, who did not follow Lukács into communism, voluntarily left, taking up residence in Germany. He stayed briefly at Freiburg, where he attended lectures by Martin Heidegger, and then in 1921 moved to Heidelberg, where he remained until 1930.

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THE GERMAN ACADEMIC CONTEXT The academic world that Mannheim entered – and which had influenced the Budapest intellectual scene that he left – contained a rich variety of concepts and theories. Here we can focus on two, “historicism” and “cultivation,” which shared some basic premises that were central in German universities. Historicists believed that the human world consists of “individualities,” from individual persons to larger entities such as states, which contain essences that cannot be grasped by reason alone. These individualities exist in an organic harmony with one another based in the ideal realm of mind, or spirit. The individual is a unique entity and also a participant in the larger organic whole. Historicists acknowledged that this organic entity changes over time, but they held that in any one era it possesses a unified spirit, a Zeitgeist. This historicism was very much in accord with the classical ideal of education, or cultivation (Bildung), which focused on the development of the individual personality. The larger cultural totality provides the soil for the growth of that personality, whose creative activities are the basis of cultural vitality. Academics, the true cultural elite, are central in depicting the meaning and values of the organic cultural realm and its participants. Many traditional adherents of the historicist ideal of cultivation believed that civil society, where individuals pursue material interests, must be subordinate to this higher organic realm of values and meaning. They viewed as likely subversive any attempt to analyze society as an entity in its own right. For this reason there were no chairs of sociology before World War I (Ringer 1969). The progressive wing of this school believed that the authoritarian state, which they had increasingly criticized and which ended with the war, could be superseded by culture as the primary unifying agent of the nation. They supported the new postwar democratic republic and sought ways to reconcile the fragmented socio-political sphere with their organic ideals. This task was viewed with utmost urgency, and “crisis” was a term that appeared in most academic discussions. Some, such as the political economist Alfred Weber, who devised a cultural sociology, believed that articulation of social forms was a means to the larger organic cultural end. Few adopted the view of Alfred’s recently deceased brother Max in his “Vocation” lectures of 1919 (Weber 1958) – that the fragmentation of the social and cultural sphere could not be “scientifically” overcome.

Mannheim’s early years in Heidelberg: culture, history, and sociology After his wish to study philosophy with the neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert was thwarted, Mannheim worked under the sponsorship of Alfred Weber. In 1922 he published an important essay on the interpretation of Weltanschauung (world view) and worked on a book-length manuscript on cultural sociology that remained unpublished until long after his death. Like his earlier Budapest lecture, these works were largely in accord with the progressive historicist agenda in assuming an organic cultural unity. Unlike the earlier lecture, they offered no activist agenda to establish that unity in the present or future but instead addressed purely methodological issues.

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In these works Mannheim subscribes to the predominant conceptualization of science among German academics. They divided organized learning (“science”) into the natural sciences and the human/cultural sciences. The former seeks universal generalizations through causal “explanations” of objects assumed to be devoid of inherent meaning. The human sciences are concerned with the creation and communication of meaning, which they attempt to uncover through “interpretation.” Rather than seeking causal relationships and universal generalizations, interpretations seek the immanent meaning of unique individualities. Attempts to simply apply the methodology of the natural sciences to human relationships – positivism – are fruitless (1982: 45–6, 57). In his essay on world views, Mannheim advocates “documentary interpretation” to uncover the relationship of any cultural object and the subject who created it to a larger atheoretical totality. Any fragment of a work (the “document”) can be used, and additional fragments confirm the same meaningful whole “in homologous fashion” (1952: 57, 81). This exercise not only provides better understanding of the context, but also makes sense of documents and allows for the incorporation of more documents. This back-and-forth reciprocity – the hermeneutic circle – provides continuing refinement of the meaning of both the meaningful whole and the activities and objects to which it gives significance. A sociological element, missing in “Weltanschauung,” was present in Mannheim’s unpublished manuscript from the same year, “Cultural-Sociological Knowledge.” That element, the “context of lived experience,” supplements the dichotomy of the individual and the world view. The context of lived experience, like the world view, can be understood as possessing a unity that resists complete conceptual explanation. Just as individuals share a common set of assumptions, their world view, they also share a common lived experience. These two commonalities are reciprocally “connected” to one another, but Mannheim is rather vague about the specifics of that connection. The relationship between individuals and their world views and contexts of lived experience requires “imputation,” the imposition of artificial categories upon an organic continuum. This inexactness means that cultural sociology cannot provide a synthesis because it can only “penetrate” so far into cultural phenomena. Instead, the discipline provides a “distance” that further clarifies cultural products and their world views by locating their function within the context of lived experience. This approach also contains a dynamic element that traces the change from one world view (and the context of lived experience to which it is imputed) to another (Mannheim 1982: 53–92, 123–9). The culmination of Mannheim’s organic cultural approach came in his 1923 essay on “Historicism.” The main body of this essay, following Alfred Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, repeats the earlier organic approach and elaborates on a temporal dynamic. Mannheim accepts the historicist “utopia” that “the overall philosophical process does possess its truth,” but he denies that this truth can be grasped from a position (Standort) above the historical flow. Despite the insight gained into the succession of historical “constellations” by a rational analysis of them, all such analyses are “perspectivistic” in that they are bound to their specific historical positions (standortsgebunden). The knowledge gained from these various perspectives can be progressively comprehensive but not teleological. Although Mannheim’s perspectivism discards the notion of eternal and universal purpose and truth, he accepts the historicist assumption that “within one historical constellation only one perspectivistic

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conclusion can be correct” and therefore that every temporal cross-section of a culture possesses its own organic truth (1952: 90, 118–20, 130). “Historicism” was not only the culmination of Mannheim’s organic philosophical approach but also the beginning of a move away from it. In a brief section of the essay on the role of sociology, he treats the recent work of his former mentor Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, not primarily as Marxist but as Hegelian, containing a historicism generally akin to his own “organic-intuitive” approach. He does acknowledge Lukács’s identification of cultural configurations with certain social groups, but he insists that no social group (such as Lukács’s proletariat) can be the “bearer of the total movement” of an era (1952: 124–5). A historical sociological approach can add clarification, but it cannot establish an era’s organic truth. It can only be a handmaiden to the more philosophical approach. However, Mannheim frankly admits that he is unable to provide a standard for a philosophical determination of perspectivistic truth. In a footnote he states that a methodological pluralism exists that has not yet been overcome by his dynamic historicism. “That historicism has not solved this task must be emphasized rather than concealed” (1952: 130–1).

Toward the sociology of knowledge Unable to resolve the historicist quandary, Mannheim once again retreated from the attempt to establish a cultural-philosophical synthesis to narrower methodological concerns. In the process, he began his development of a sociology of knowledge and thereby increasingly distanced himself from the cultural sociology formulated by Alfred Weber. From 1924 to 1928 he produced a series of works that described his new approach and attempted to apply it. In a second long unpublished manuscript in 1924, “A Sociological Theory of Culture and Its Knowability,” Mannheim follows Alfred Weber and distinguishes between “communicative” conceptualization – suprahistorical knowledge that largely ignores cultural products – and “conjunctive” interpretation – historical constructions of contexts of meaning and their connection to specific contexts of lived experience, now termed “experiential realms.” In addition to this element, others – the world view, the individual soul, and the cultural work – are carried over from his earlier writings but with a different emphasis (1982: 203–4, 233, 241–4). In this manuscript he emphasizes one type of conjunctive interpretation, the sociology of knowledge, which would be the subject of an essay the following year. As he had done earlier, he describes this type as “dynamic” to distinguish it from less historical competitors, such as that of Max Scheler. Mannheim defines the experiential realm by the use of an earlier term that is now given a new emphasis – “aspiration” (Wollen), the will to produce something or accomplish something, which cannot be separated from activity (1952: 186). He is most concerned with the “world aspiration” (Weltwollung), the will to establish one’s world view in the experiential realm. Because aspirations are related to activity and the experiential realm, Mannheim sees the need to examine the Marxist division of that realm into classes and their interests, i.e., economic aspirations. He believed such an approach was too “one-sided” and proposes replacing it with a more inclusive concept, “commitment” (Engagiertsein) of a group to its world aspiration. With this concept, meaning (the group’s world view) and

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existence (its aspiration toward action) are indirectly and reciprocally connected (1952: 183–6; 1982: 273–6; Simonds 1978). In his Habilitationschrift (a second dissertation required to begin an academic career) on Conservatism (1986), which is published in a shortened version as “Conservative Thought” (1953: 74–164), Mannheim offers a specific application of this methodology. First he imputes the conservative world view with an approach akin to the documentary interpretation of his earlier essay on world views. Then he identifies an “intellectual stratum,” whose commitment to the world view made it a world aspiration, and discusses four thinkers who represented varieties of conservative commitment. Examining their individual constructions of conservatism keeps it from simply being an ahistorical generalization. Next he discusses the different social strata with which these thinkers were connected, demonstrating that the intellectual and social strata were not identical. One intellectual stratum could be connected with several social strata and vice versa. Finally, he adds a developmental element in the changing situations facing intellectual and social strata, such as the French Revolution, the Battle of Jena, and the spread of the Enlightenment, to prevent his interpretation from becoming a static construction. While the world aspiration might maintain its basic configuration, its specific intellectual and aspirational contents are subject to change (1953: 94–102; 1986: 111–88). In “Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon” (1952: 191–229), Mannheim expands his discussion from Conservatism and anticipates Ideology and Utopia by positing a current “polarized” competition among three concentrated “intellectual currents,” i.e., world aspirations, to determine the “public interpretation of existence.” Each polar position – conservatism, liberalism, socialism – tries to overcome the existing pluralism by establishing its interpretation as the sole one. The experiential units corresponding to these intellectual currents are political parties, each of which is defined not by economic interests or organizational structure but by commitment to a world aspiration (1952: 195–7, 208–12). Mannheim makes a similar type of argument in his 1928 essay, “The Problem of Generations” (1952: 276–322). He offers a number of levels of generational identification, beginning with the simple biological one of birth date. The most important of these levels is the “generational unit,” which is characterized by a common world aspiration. The members of the unit do not have to be spatially connected as long as they share a common aspiration and nucleus that originates in a concrete group. As did intellectual currents in “Competition,” generational units compete with one another to establish their world aspiration as that of the larger generation. This makes the generational unit a political concept, and the examples Mannheim offers are the same as those in “Competition” – liberalism, conservatism, and socialism (1952: 288–90, 303–15). Together this series of essays moved Mannheim away from the belief in an organic temporal unity that characterized his earlier writings and towards the spatial pluralistic competition that would be most fully depicted in Ideology and Utopia, which brought him into intellectual conflict with Alfred Weber. Mannheim’s “Competition” essay was delivered at a meeting of the German Sociological Association in September 1928, and in the discussion that followed, Weber leveled his criticism (Meja & Stehr 1990: 86–106). This debate continued the following February in a joint seminar the two held in Heidelberg on the topic of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness

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(Mannheim 2001: 109–29). In both forums Weber accuses his junior colleague of “intellectualism,” by which he means the analytical reduction of cultural unity into divisive categories that are simply a sophisticated version of Marxist historical materialism. Such categories, says Weber, whether portrayed as material interests or interpretations of existence, mean the fragmentation of the larger organic sphere of meaning. Acknowledging his vitalist premises, Weber claims that only “spiritual creativity” can bridge the gap between that organic whole and the soul of the individual (Meja & Stehr 1990: 89–90; Mannheim 2001: 112–13, 122). Mannheim responds by disputing Weber’s depiction of his approach as intellectualistic. Instead he argues that he and Weber were presenting different conceptions of rationality: his being “functionalist” while Weber’s is a “morphological” attempt to rescue the irrational. Weber’s approach is oriented to the model of “growing,” which attempts to leave a “substantial being” untouched other than nurturing it. His own approach is oriented toward the more modern model of “achievement,” in which “the rationally achievable and controllable comes ever more to the fore.” In sociology the methodology representing this new trend is that of Max Weber, Alfred’s deceased brother (2001: 113, 117–20). Pitting Alfred Weber against his brother would continue in Mannheim’s next and best known work, Ideology and Utopia.

Mannheim, Max Weber, and Ideology and Utopia Between these two skirmishes with Alfred Weber, Mannheim proposed a book to publisher Paul Siebeck with an amended title of Analyses of the Present Situation of Thought: Three Studies of M. Weber, Troeltsch and Scheler. The book would include two previously published essays discussed above, “Historicism” (addressing Ernst Troeltsch) and “The Problem of the Sociology of Knowledge” (addressing Max Scheler), with a new essay on Max Weber, about whom Mannheim had written relatively little. The publisher requested a more integrated book than the one Mannheim envisioned and the manuscript was never delivered (Kettler & Meja 1995: 8–9). What appeared in its place in 1929 was the first edition of Ideology and Utopia, the three middle chapters of the current English edition, which added a 1931 description of the sociology of knowledge and an introduction for English readers. The Max Weber that especially interests Mannheim is the author of two lectures on politics and science as “vocations,” or callings (Weber 1958: 77–156). In the first of these Weber focuses on the politician as the formulator of value judgments and the maker of decisions according to those judgments – the politician as an agent of change. The more these values contradict the existing normative structure, the more the politician’s actions bring about change. Any set of values that brings about important social achievements will be at odds with the existing empirical reality. Using Mannheim’s term, they will be “existentially transcendent.” Weber portrays three types of politician. Of these, the type he advocates combines value orientation with a sense of reality. He has a commitment to a set of values and a willingness to suffer for them, but also a sense of proportion that allows him to assess the world in which he operates. This type, said Weber, has an ethic of responsibility (Weber 1958: 109–10, 115, 122). In his second lecture, Weber writes that the scientist can deliver the sense of proportion needed by his preferred type of political actor, providing clarity about the

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impact of the politician’s conduct through the weighing of ends and means. The scientist can say: “If you take such and such a stand, then according to scientific experience, you have to use such and such a means in order to carry out your conviction practically. Now, these means are such that you believe you must reject them. Then you must choose between the end and the inevitable means” (1958: 151). Weber, in contrast to his brother Alfred, believes that the world is a pluralistic one in which the “gods” (different value orientations) stand in irreconcilable conflict with one another that can never be brought to a final conclusion. In this world, the scientist cannot judge whether the politician’s values and actions are correct; he can only indicate the effects of such a course. Only the political actor can make the actual decision, and it is valid only for him and his followers (1958: 152). Neither the scientist nor the politician can comprehend the totality of history and they thus have to live with its pluralism, but the scientist can at least help the politician to adopt a responsible course of action. This relationship between the scientist and the politician informs Ideology and Utopia. The first of its essays declares itself an introduction to the two main essays – which are self-contained while sharing a deeper connection to the contemporary situation (1929/1969: 49–53) – and synthesizes the two earlier publications that were part of the initially proposed volume by offering an account of the emergence of the historicist orientation and the extension of the Marxist concept of ideology through the sociology of knowledge. The two main essays, one on ideology and the other on utopia, can be viewed as extensions of and commentaries on Max Weber’s lectures on science and politics. Like Weber, Mannheim investigates the role that science can play in politics, and like Weber, he decides that scientists cannot make normative decisions but only outline the ramifications of those decisions. The “scientists” on whom he focuses are the socially free-floating intelligentsia. Despite the restrictions, he does offer them a somewhat more synthetic role than did Weber. The final essay, dedicated to Alfred Weber, presents the utopian mentality, or consciousness, which embodies the political will, the world aspiration (Wille, Wollen, Wollung) discussed above – misleadingly translated as “interest” in the later English edition. Mannheim addresses the question of the survival of this element under the gaze of science. Mannheim uses the categories of ideology and utopia to impute in ideal-typical form the competing world aspirations that he had discussed in his earlier essays – liberalism, conservatism, and socialism – plus a new one, fascism/chiliasm (1929/1955: 102–28, 211–47). Actors having these aspirations, whether ideological or utopian, are “existentially transcendent” and are not aware of their sociological limitation. He defines ideology primarily as the Marxist tactic of “unmasking” rivals’ claims to universality by tying their ideas to a specific social group. Here ideology is viewed as the product of a reflective subject doing the unmasking rather than an active subject making the initial claims for universality. Thus ideology is essentially negative, a technique to attack the legitimacy of opponents’ aspirations (1929/1955: 64–70). Utopia, on the other hand, is the actor’s view of the world. It defines the subjects’ aspiration to change the world by gaining universality for their interpretation of reality. If it acknowledges the opponents’ unmasking of it as socially limited (ideological) as accurate, it will cease to be a utopia, for the political aspiration for universality will be defeated.

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Mannheim argues that what propels history is the utopian will to challenge the status quo of the present and establish its aspiration as universal. These utopias have a degree of success, because they are able to resist being exposed as ideologies. But because of the plurality of aspirations, they are never completely successful. They can shatter the existing order, but because their perspectives are connected to specific social positions, they will in turn be challenged by other utopian aspirations connected to other social positions, giving rise to new historical configurations (1929/1955: 147, 195–6). Mannheim complements this distinction with a reformulation and extension of his earlier theory of historical truth – that truth is not eternal and universal but changes with historical periods. Seekers of such truth are bound, or limited, to the perspective of their place in time (standortsgebunden). He now extends this theory with a social dimension. In his essays on the sociology of knowledge he used the term “existentially connected” (seinsverbunden) to indicate that world views are attached to social groups. What “existentially connected” does not do is address the relationship of world views to one another, to assign a truth value to them. That is done by a relatively new term: “existentially bound” (seinsgebunden), essentially combining the two previous ones. This term dismisses the historicist belief that, although truth changes over time, an organic truth can be intellectually determined for an era. Now truth is not only temporally relative, it is also socially relative. One’s perspective cannot claim validity for the entire era, but is limited (bound) to the social group to which it is connected. The tactic of ideological unmasking serves to indicate not only the existential connection of opponents’ world views, but also their limitation (bondedness). (Unfortunately the English translation of Ideology and Utopia does not preserve this distinction, rendering both seinsverbunden and seinsgebunden as “existentially conditioned” or “situationally determined.”) In contrast to Lukács, who acknowledged the social connection of Marxism to the proletariat but denied its social bondedness by claiming its universal validity, Mannheim denies that any world aspiration can exempt itself from ideological unmasking in the current world. He quotes Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation”: “The materialist interpretation is no cab to be taken at will; it does not stop short of the promoters of revolutions” (1929/1955: 75). This reciprocal unmasking technique sets the stage for the sociology of knowledge, which seeks to establish a more comprehensive context. In 1931 Mannheim writes: “The impetus to research in the sociology of knowledge may be guided so that it will not absolutize the concept of existential connectedness; rather that precisely the discovery of the existential connectedness of the views at hand will be seen as the first step to the solution of existential bondedness itself” (1929/1955: 301, translation modified). This new discipline offers possibilities for clarification, but it also brings dangers. Mannheim worries that the unmasking of all utopias as limited would destroy the utopian will to make itself universal and give rise to a defeatism, a “complacent tendency to accept the present,” in which society becomes simply a “thing.” This “decay of human will” would mean the stagnation of the historical process. “With the relinquishment of utopias, man would lose his will to shape history and therewith his ability to understand it” (1929/1955: 74–8, 263).

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Relationism and the socially free-floating intelligentsia Mannheim offers these two concepts, perhaps the most controversial of Ideology and Utopia, as a solution to the problem of the confrontation of the utopian will and ideological unmasking. Relationism, like his earlier concept of perspectivism, rejects the possibility of universal truth in favor of a historically changing one, but it denies perspectivism’s claim that the truth of an era forms an organic whole that can be established intellectually. Rather it incorporates the interrelationships and competition of world aspirations, providing more orientation by making sense of and even promoting change in the political arena. And because this judgment of success has to be made retroactively (1929/1955: 78–81, 95, 106, 260), relationism means the postponement of certainty. Like Weber’s politician, one struggles for convictions, believing that the future will judge them to have provided the best grasp of the pluralistic political spectrum and promote constructive change. It allows the “existential transcendence” of ideologies and utopias to be replaced with “existential congruence,” a practice informed by a “sociologically fully clarified consciousness.” Mannheim hopes that relationism will preserve the utopian’s commitment to change, not in spite of ideological unmasking but in conjunction with the extension of unmasking in the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim assigns this task to the “socially free-floating (or unattached) intelligentsia,” a term he attributes to Alfred Weber. But he has something in mind quite different from either Lukács’s proletariat or Alfred Weber’s “intellectual leaders.” Mannheim’s intelligentsia is not free from existential connections, being only “relatively classless” (1929/1955: 137), and thus is not capable of a universal truth or an organic cultural totality. It neither culturally subordinates pluralism (as did Alfred Weber’s intellectual leaders) nor dialectically transcends it (as did Lukács’s proletariat), but rather incorporates it. Intellectuals come from increasingly diverse social backgrounds and represent many political groups and their commitments. But despite these connections, their intellectualism keeps them, like Georg Simmel’s stranger, at the margins of these groups. This degree of “distance” (an important attribute for Mannheim) gives each of them a looser connection to the group and hence a broader perspective. Together they form a microcosm of the larger sociopolitical conflict and not simply one part of it. At the same time, as intellectuals, they share a common medium and possess the communicative ability that allows them to exchange perspectives with one another. This combination provides better orientation in the pluralistic world (1929/1955: 153–9). How can Mannheim label the intelligentsia as socially free-floating when all of its members are to some degree existentially connected? The answer is that existentially “connected” is not an antonym of “free-floating.” Rather that antonym is “existentially bound.” Although individual members of the intelligentsia might be individually limited by their social connections, their communicative abilities allow them as a group to escape those limitations. Their exchange of perspectives with one another fosters a better understanding of the interrelationships of their different world aspirations. Their social heterogeneity prevents them from becoming existentially bound as a group. The intelligentsia does not float above social conflict but rather incorporates it. Mannheim does not believe that the intelligentsia can bring change by themselves, for they are not really political actors. The latter are motivated by the political

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commitment of a group to change the world according to their world aspiration. (In fact, this commitment defines the group.) But the intelligentsia represents a whole spectrum of political commitments and so cannot be defined by any one of them. What defines them is a different type of commitment – to science, to clarification of the various political positions. They are not to be politicians but political scientists. Mannheim, like Max Weber, calls on intellectuals to have a calling for science, but at the same time to realize that the vocation of science is different from that of politics. Scientists’ task is to help politicians become relational thinkers and understand the ramifications of their decisions, which allows them to develop the means to orient themselves in the changing world. But intellectuals cannot make those decisions for political actors, nor can they teach them how to make political decisions. Will cannot be taught. All they can do is explain the relationship of decision and perspective (1929/1955: 169–73). Mannheim offers as his own version of the above quoted passage from Weber (which he cites): “Whatever your aspirations, they are your aspirations as a political person, but when you aspire to this and that, you must do this and that, and here is your place in the total process” (1929/1955: 163, translation modified). Mannheim extends Weber with his last clause, which indicates that the scientist-intellectual, in communication with other intellectuals, can map out the political landscape for the politician, even if he cannot advise what decision to make. What is the intelligentsia? It is an ideal type that covers a range of intellectuals inside and outside of the university. German academics had traditionally been aloof from formal politics. Declaring themselves “above parties,” they often dismissed intellectuals with political affiliations as dilettantes. Mannheim is attempting to overcome this separation and urge academics to engage in dialogue with nonacademic intellectuals and to play a part in the political process. These hopes come partly from his experiences in Budapest with its intellectual circles and from those in Heidelberg, where academics and non-academics interacted in circles like the one established by Max Weber. The ideal type of the intelligentsia is not primarily the affirmation of an elite but rather a call to dialogue. As was the case with “Historicism,” Mannheim no sooner published Ideology and Utopia than he began moving away from it. There were undoubtedly many factors behind this shift, but two stand out: the change in his personal fortunes and the change in the political climate of Germany.

Mannheim in Frankfurt: cultivating the sociological attitude Mannheim’s personal career improved in 1930, when he was appointed to the chair of sociology at the University of Frankfurt. The university was one of several urban universities established in the second decade of the twentieth century with a more diverse student body – including more women, Jewish, working-class, foreign, and non-traditional students – and a commitment to new disciplinary fields. Mannheim’s chair in sociology was one of a very few in Germany not created within an already established discipline. Frankfurt was also the home of the Marxist-oriented Institute for Social Research (“the Frankfurt School”), which shared the belief in an expanded role for the social sciences. There were significant differences between Mannheim and the members of the Institute, but they were united in their disagreement with the

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academic traditionalists. Frankfurt replaced Heidelberg as the center of sociology in Germany and Mannheim became its most important sociologist. His lectures were filled with enthusiastic students, and he flourished in this progressive environment, which offered both professional security and intellectual challenge. This type of university was very much in accord with the pedagogical reform agenda of the Prussian cultural ministry, especially Carl H. Becker, who was the cultural minister when Mannheim was appointed. Becker sought a citizenry more able to assume its new democratic obligations. He believed that the universities had become too specialized and divorced from civil society, thereby forfeiting a significant role in public life and leaving their students unprepared for participation as citizens of the republic. In addition to advocating a greater role for students and untenured faculty in university decisions, he tried to make the curriculum more synthetic and move sociology to a central place in it. He wanted precisely what Mannheim offered: a discipline aimed at orienting people in a changing world so that they could make informed decisions. Becker’s plans were attacked by the traditionalists entrenched in academia, and the central role for sociology that he envisioned never came to fruition. Within three years Becker and Mannheim would be gone with the Nazi seizure of power (Loader & Kettler 2002: 50–6). In 1930 Mannheim faced not only new personal circumstances but also significant economic and political change in Germany. Ideology and Utopia was written at the end of a period of relative stability. The country had survived earlier economic and political turmoil, and parliamentary institutions seemed to have become routinized to the point where some perceived the bureaucratization of parties and the loss of any political will to change. It was this loss of a utopian will that Mannheim feared. That situation changed in 1930 with the onset of the worldwide depression and the resulting gridlock in parliament. The parties of the middle that were central to Ideology and Utopia – the liberals, conservatives, and socialists – became weaker. The radical utopian will of antirepublican parties of the extreme Left (Communists) and Right (National Socialists) increased dramatically in strength. In this deteriorating atmosphere Mannheim did not retreat from the political arena but from politics embodied in some affiliation with parliamentary parties. Instead he focused on the role that a sociologically informed curriculum could play in civic education. In his Frankfurt writings Mannheim calls for a “cultivational knowledge,” which “we shall understand [as] the tendency towards a coherent life-orientation, with a bearing upon the overall personality as well as the totality of the objective life-situation insofar as it can be surveyed at the time” (2001: 154). This reformulation of the traditional ideal of cultivation requires the development of a “sociological attitude.” The central component of this approach is “distantiation,” which means placing one’s norms and values in “brackets” rather than simply accepting their validity as given. One views oneself as others do, makes an object of oneself, and thus regards oneself self-reflexively as something that could be something else. This perspective allows for “expansion” of oneself and self- transformation (2001: 9–22, 48, 74–5; 1932: 27–31). This task is similar to that which the free-floating intelligentsia performed for one another and their political contacts in Ideology and Utopia. Now it becomes a technique that can be practiced by individuals within the general population. Mannheim acknowledges that distantiation with its recognition of pluralism can lead to a relativistic fatalism and loss of will. But equally dangerous is “reprimitivization,”

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a political engagement that represents a conscious denial of pluralism, a “decision” to regress to the unequivocal meaning of a communal culture, to become “primitive” in the face of the modern world. He presents communism (“orthodox Marxism”), which implicitly includes his erstwhile mentor Lukács, as one example. More important, however, is fascism, represented here by Carl Schmitt, with its emphasis on the decision and the political myth (2001: 30–52). These were the two utopian elements that prospered in the chaos of the depression. Once again, Mannheim’s alternative is modeled on Max Weber’s ethic of responsibility: engagement for an ideal but with a sense of proportion, a commitment that would prevent a lapse into fatalism but with enough distantiation from the ideal to allow for contextualization. To put it in Mannheim’s terms, the sociological attitude combines decision and expansion, so that they exist in a dialectical relationship to one another. Expansion without political engagement can lead to a sterile fatalism. Decision without sociological clarification assumes the form of purely utopian conviction. Mannheim’s advocacy of the sociological attitude as the central component of a modern cultivation necessitated a rethinking of the relationship between sociology as an academic discipline and the larger public. Where before Mannheim had held expansion to be the role of the cultural elite, now he proposed that it should be a quality of all citizens. Faced with the growing irrationality of society, people’s actual life situations are increasingly thrown into chaos. In a 1932 newspaper article he argues that it is not sufficient to address the current chaos as an intellectual crisis, but rather sociology has to investigate how it impacts the situations of ordinary people (2001: 169–73). Overcoming this disorientation and creating a sense of direction require a sociological cultivation, not only for elites but for everyone. He writes: The democratization of social life, in the widest sense, and especially the democratization of politics, in the sense of the potential co-participation of the broad masses, makes it imperative to subject the latter to sociological-civic schooling…. For this society cannot maintain itself in the long term if the individuals comprising it are unable to exercise rational foresight, if they do not learn to act responsibly on the basis of factual diagnoses. (2001: 150–1)

The intellectual now becomes more important as the teacher of the sociological attitude than as the mediator between political parties. The task is to instill the ethic of responsibility in all citizens, so that self-reflexivity replaces passive adherence. But it is one thing to advocate this new form of cultivation and another to articulate the manner by which it is put into practice. At Frankfurt Mannheim did not offer a clear alternative to conventional formal education, which had not proved up to the task. He had been entertaining ideas at this time about planning as an alternative form of cultivation, but had not yet begun to fully develop them.

Exile to Britain: thought at the level of planning In 1933, with the seizure of power by Hitler and his National Socialists, Mannheim was forced into exile. After brief stays in Amsterdam and Paris he and his wife took up residence in London. Although this was not his first exile, his integration into his

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new land was much more difficult than it had been in Germany. His poor Englishlanguage skills hindered communication with those beyond the Hungarian and German exile communities. His position at the London School of Economics was considered temporary and a tension developed with his sponsors, who subscribed to the more empirical interests of most British social scientists and who rejected his historical and theoretical emphasis. He could not attract the large student following that he had at Heidelberg and Frankfurt. Mannheim’s insecurity about his marginalization can be seen in his first significant work to appear in English, the 1936 second edition of Ideology and Utopia, which he attempted to make more accessible to an English-speaking audience so that it could serve, according to its new subtitle, as “An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge” at the expense of the earlier political agenda. The year before this edition appeared, Mannheim published his last major work in German, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. He later described this work as “an attempt at self-enlightenment, made for the benefit of those who have actually lived through these experiences” in Germany (Mannheim 1935/1940: 3). Like Ideology and Utopia, Man and Society consisted of essays and appeared in both original German and significantly expanded English editions, the 1935 edition containing the first, second, and fourth chapters of the later English edition. As in Ideology and Utopia he presents series of ideal types (only some of which are examined here) to diagnose “the contemporary crisis in culture” and to offer principles for a solution by bringing his embryonic Frankfurt thoughts on planning to a fuller conceptualization. Mannheim introduces a spectrum of types of rationality that he ties to different types of publics. Pre-modern “organic publics” provide individuals with orientation to some larger totality of meaning and coherence through forms of “substantial irrationality,” such as tradition and religion. While these basic orienting elements are not rational, they do not preclude rational actions in subordinate forms. “Functionally rational” actions aimed at a specific goal occur within the larger normative orientation provided by substantial irrationality. The organic public also allows for a certain amount of diversity among the elites, but that differentiation is informed by an organic cultural center, which ties these elites not only to one another but also to the larger community as a whole (1935/1940: 53, 96–7). The traditional German ideal of cultivation discussed above conformed to this type of public. Mannheim writes that the cohesion of the organic public is difficult to maintain in the modern world. Technological progress in all areas of human activity demands more functional rationality and specialization, which increasingly divide society along functionally rational lines, weakening the ability of substantially irrational institutions to provide larger meaning. As people’s technological ability outpaces their ability to orient themselves in the world, the organic public is faced with dissolution into a “disintegrated public,” whose lack of normative and moral certainty Mannheim terms “functional irrationality” (1935/1940: 53, 67, 97). Although classical liberal democracy has retained a degree of earlier cohesiveness, Mannheim believes it is currently yielding to a mass democracy with little substantial orientation. The lack of an integrated elite weakens cultural coherence, and without a sense of shared values, democracy turns upon itself, a condition he labels “massification,” or “negative democratization.” It becomes more susceptible to increasing

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fears and insecurities and to the demagoguery (“reprimitization” in the language of Frankfurt) that preys on this condition. Such a situation potentially gives rise to dictatorship, as had happened in Germany (1935/1940: 42–50, 195–6). Mannheim argues that the cultural crisis brought about by negative democratization can only be escaped through the creation of a “substantial rationality” to replace the lost substantial irrationality (1935/1940: 63). This involves the construction of a new type of orientation that is neither organic nor primarily irrational but rather the result of self-reflexive cognition. Substantial rationality, then, is essentially the ideal of cultivation informed by the sociological attitude. It represents a continuation of his earlier concerns. Mannheim’s emphasis changes from the preceding years by advocating the promotion of substantial rationality through planning, which he addresses at the more abstract level of “thought at the level of planning.” Through “thinking that plans” (planendes Denken), “the individual not only attains a knowledge of himself but he can learn to understand the factors that determine his conduct, and can thus even attempt to regulate them” (1935/1940: 210–13). In his discussion of thinking that plans, much of the analytical focus of the sociology of knowledge and cultural sociology remains in a new concept, “principia media,” inspired by John Stuart Mill. Mill’s “middle principles” mediate between abstract general laws and historical circumstances or, in Mannheim’s words, are “universal forces in a concrete setting as they become integrated out of the various factors at work in a … particular combination of circumstances which may never be repeated” (1935/1940: 178). Mannheim uses the term in the plural, stating that they do not exist in isolation but are mutually related in a changing constellational whole. The latter is neither organically intuited nor causally deduced, but rather structurally and historically interpreted. Mannheim adds a second concept, the “key position,” to organize any given constellation of principia media. He argues that specific principia media cannot always be deterministically privileged (as orthodox Marxists did with economic means of production), nor can they all be assigned an equal status that would be relativistic. Rather, in any historical situation certain principia media are more important than others, that is, they occupy the key position. As the situation changes, so does the key position (1935/1940: 153–4). The key position also demonstrates the difference between thinking at the level of planning and Mannheim’s earlier versions of sociological interpretation. His early cultural sociology assumed an organically unified totality that could be philosophically grasped by a cultural elite centered in the university. Cultural sociology’s task was to aid in the clarification of meaning through supplementary interpretation. The political science of Ideology and Utopia, using the sociology of knowledge as its methodology, assumed a dialectical conflict of political commitments embodied in parliamentary parties and provided a common medium among competitors – in the form of a socially free-floating intelligentsia – that promoted a selection process. Interpretation within a unified sphere became more complex with the need to communicate within a pluralistic one. The Frankfurt years returned the focus to the university but did not abandon the notion of pluralistic political conflict. Instead of simply better communication among political leaders, Mannheim emphasized the “sociological attitude” as a vehicle for the political education of a democratic citizenry. In this progression, later formulations subsumed earlier ones within a

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new framework. Such was also the case with the planning strategy of Man and Society, which utilizes interpretation, communication, and education in the service of strategic management (Disponierung), resulting in an “organized public” (1935/1940: 153–4, 177–90). The planners who practice strategic management differ from Mannheim’s earlier intellectuals in being actors as well as thinkers. However, they do not carry out these actions in a way that makes the public unquestioningly follow them. This process is designed to create substantial rationality not substantial irrationality, to produce informed individuals capable of understanding the changing social relationships between themselves and others. In words that echo the closing of Ideology and Utopia (1929/1955: 262–3), Mannheim writes of such an individual: “His understanding still remains the product of the historical process that rose independently of him. But through his insight into these bonds, the individual for the first time transcends the historical – he becomes more than ever before the master of his own destiny” (1935/1940: 213, translation modified). In its outline of thought at the level of planning, this first edition of Man and Society contained few specifics about actual principia media such as political, economic, and educational institutions. It did not attempt to diagnose the situation in Britain but rather addressed what was theoretically salvageable from Mannheim’s German experience. The later edition of the book and his other writings of that period suggested more specific diagnoses and implementations. Despite new formulations covering issues such as power, religion, and education, his basic premises remain the same. The fostering of substantial rationality throughout society is Mannheim’s ultimate goal. This means the involvement, if indirectly through representative institutions, of citizens in the planning process that impacts them. This reciprocal relationship is at the heart of Mannheim’s theory of planning, and it was central to his work throughout his career. Any strategic management should be responsible to those affected by planning through democratically elected representatives (1951: 149–69; 1935/1940: 327–44). For this reciprocal interaction between planners and planned to work, both groups must have the understanding that sociological clarification provides as well as a commitment to basic democratic values. These later works are held by many scholars to be an unfortunate departure from Mannheim’s German writings, and hence they have drawn little in the way of positive commentary. However, they are in fact a new application of the earlier goals and methodological principles. It is to the latter that I now return.

IMPACT AND ASSESSMENT Of all of Mannheim’s topics, the sociology of knowledge has been the central element in the reception of his work. The immediate response to its depiction in Ideology and Utopia was largely negative, if contradictory. The traditionalist Ernst Robert Curtius accused Mannheim of a “sociologism” that demeaned the spiritual and let party politics intrude into the university, resulting in a divisiveness fostered by his “relativism.” The orthodox Marxist Adelbert Fogarasi scorned him for being too philosophical and portraying the crisis of the times as a spiritual one. Mannheim’s

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“partyless” approach was designed to negate a Marxist sociological approach and thus was nothing but bourgeois false consciousness (Meja & Stehr 1990: 113–20; Loader 1985: 116–18). These two critiques set the tone for much that followed, even if later versions were more sophisticated and recognized Mannheim’s considerable intelligence. On the left, Max Horkheimer of the “Frankfurt School” accused him of an “idealist delusion” that attempted to wed a sociological empiricism with a Hegelian dialectic of spirit (Meja & Stehr 1990: 140–57). Herbert Marcuse was somewhat gentler, praising Mannheim’s historicization of truth while arguing that he failed to offer viable standards for distinguishing true from false consciousness (Meja & Stehr 1990: 129–39; Jay 1974). At the other pole, Alexander von Schelting advanced Curtius’s objections with two primary arguments. First, that “for Mannheim the boundaries between scientific and political inquiry are repeatedly blurred,” so that the validity of knowledge is based on the social location of the thinker. Second, that Mannheim exempts his own theory of knowledge and his concept of the free-floating intelligentsia from this relativistic position (Meja & Stehr 1990: 282). Schelting’s review of the 1936 English translation of Ideology and Utopia in the American Sociological Review (Schelting 1936) served as the template for the American critiques of Mannheim, the best known being Robert Merton’s (1941/1957). Merton had three basic criticisms: that Mannheim’s definition of “knowledge” and its relationship to society was too imprecise (1941/1957: 496– 501), that his theory of relationism amounted to another form of relativism (1941/1957: 502–6), and that his attempt to solve this problem by elevating the intelligentsia to a privileged position above society violated his own basic premises (1941/1957: 507). Merton’s argument is essentially that one cannot offer a causal explanation of knowledge and its validity if the causes, the effects, and the relationship between them are presented through a wide variety of imprecise expressions. Further, Mannheim never rises above the Marxist concept of “false consciousness” but simply extends it, so that no position can be true. Mannheim’s installation of the category of existential transcendence to resolve this dilemma – making utopias valid and ideologies invalid – is subject to the same critique as any other position. Worse, his efforts to exempt the “socially unattached intellectuals” from situational determination “parallel Munchhausen’s feat of extricating himself from a swamp by pulling on his whiskers” (1941/1957: 507). This type of critique reached its nadir in 1974, when Edward Shils, the translator of Ideology and Utopia, stated that Mannheim had escaped neither Idealism nor Marxism and could be admired only by “misologists” (Shils 1974). Shils’s disparaging remarks notwithstanding, a reassessment of Mannheim had already begun seven years earlier when David Kettler urged scholars “to take Mannheim’s work seriously on its own terms” and not to “win easy victories over it by applying standards expressly rejected by Mannheim at the outset of his activity” (1967: 402). Using previously unknown sources, Kettler clarified Mannheim’s position and tied it to a “moral-philosophic” tradition. As additional Mannheim writings have come to light, mostly through the efforts of Kettler and Volker Meja, this position has been expanded and refined. In 1978, A. P. Simonds took Kettler’s plea to heart and wrote the best extended account to date of Mannheim’s methodology, specifically the sociology of knowledge.

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He places Mannheim firmly within the hermeneutic, or interpretative, tradition of German historicism. This approach abandons attempts at universally valid generalizations that characterize the natural sciences, and instead seeks to place human activities into meaningful contexts. Mannheim largely ignores causal “explanations” of relationships between “natural” objects and focuses on “understanding” the meanings attributed by cultural subjects and the interaction of those subjects and meanings. The following assessment owes much to Simonds. From the beginning of his career, Mannheim concerned himself with attempts to provide orientation for human activities, which require communication between individuals, and which in turn require that those individuals share some sort of meaning. For example, one cannot grasp the humor of a joke unless one can understand the meanings upon which it plays. Therefore, locating human activity and its creations in meaningful contexts is central. For individuals to make sense of their actions, to understand them as having significance, they have to communicate with others who share or challenge their interpretations. Communication in turn promotes self-reflexivity, seeing oneself as others see one. The act of understanding the larger meaning of one’s actions and oneself requires exactly what the documentary interpretation of cultural activities does. The open-endedness of this process does not negate its benefits. Mannheim consistently believed that the location of participants is an important element in the interpretation of meaning, although not its causal determinant. He first addressed the temporal location of participants, both creators and interpreters, within the historical stream. Because the human world is constantly changing, recognition that one is bound to a certain temporal location is essential to escaping presentism and acting effectively in light of that change. With the sociology of knowledge, he added spatial location to temporal. This is best seen in his concept of generational unit, which weds the temporal and spatial, and which is regarded as a very fruitful approach to that subject (Starr 1980: 344–67). In short, the method attempts to make sense of human activity and the orientations that result in such activity, and not to judge its universal validity. Given this goal, Mannheim’s methodology is intended to be flexible. He did not claim that the world view imputed to a group is identical with the ideas of each of its members, but rather “every individual participates only in certain fragments of this thought-system, the totality of which is not in the least a mere sum of these fragmentary individual experiences” (Mannheim 1929/1955: 58). The world views he formulates are designed, following Weber, as ideal types that would be modified by empirical investigations. As noted above, in his examination of conservatism, which has been largely overlooked by his critics, he does not mechanistically attribute this ideal type to a single group, but rather describes the varying social locations of individual thinkers for whom conservatism made sense of the world. This same approach resulted in a series of empirical dissertations by his students in Frankfurt (Kettler et al. 2008). The interpretive sociology of knowledge, whether applied to the historical past or to contemporary political debate, is seen by Mannheim as a vehicle for intersubjective and cross-contextual signification. Subjecting the positions of others as well as one’s own to critical analysis provides better understanding of both, which is the key to improved communication. Such an approach “has as its goal not achievement of a super-temporally valid conclusion but the broadest possible extension of our

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horizon of vision” (Mannheim 1929/1955: 106). One hopes that with today’s increased acceptance of the role of interpretation within sociology, further appreciation of Mannheim’s agenda will allow him to cease to be the guest who is always invited to these collections but with whom no one really wants to converse.

Reader’s Guide to Karl Mannheim The best way to approach Mannheim is to read him chronologically, working through his early essays, most of which have been translated into English. One should begin with the Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (1952). These essays can be supplemented by his early, long unpublished manuscripts which are contained in Structures of Thinking (1982) and Conservatism (1986). The latter is a good demonstration of Mannheim using his method empirically. Its abbreviated published version can be found in Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology (1953). Ideology and Utopia (1929/1955) is, of course, his best known work. For the Frankfurt period, see Sociology as Political Education (2001), especially for his inaugural lectures on sociology. The Frankfurt period is also represented by three posthumously published essays in Essays in the Sociology of Culture (1956), which unfortunately cannot be checked against German originals. For his theory of planning in the British writings, one should start with Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1935/1940). Additional specific developments of this theory can be found in the posthumous Freedom, Power and Democratic Planning (1951). Loader (1985) and Kettler and Meja (1995) contain the most complete accounts of Mannheim’s entire career; Loader is more chronological and Kettler and Meja more thematic. Both of these contain full bibliographies, as does Woldring (1986), who also provides useful biographical information. The Frankfurt period, which has drawn attention recently, is covered in Loader and Kettler (2002), and the work of Mannheim’s Frankfurt students is discussed in Kettler et al. (2008). Laube (2004) places Mannheim within the larger context of German historicism, and Frisby (1983) contrasts his sociology of knowledge with that of the other two important versions of the Weimar Republic, those of Max Scheler and Georg Lukács. The earliest German critiques of Mannheim are found in Meja and Stehr (1990). Merton’s critique and another essay on the sociology of knowledge are in Merton (1941/1957). For the methodological reappraisal of Mannheim, see Kettler (1967) and especially Simonds (1978). The latter is essential reading, because it emphasizes the sociology of knowledge as a form of interpretation.

Bibliography Writings of Karl Mannheim 1929/1955. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harvest Books. 1929/1969. Ideologie und Utopie, 5th edn. Frankfurt/Main: G. Schulte-Bulmke. 1932. Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der Soziologie. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). 1935/1940. Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. New York: Harcourt & Brace. 1943. Diagnosis of Our Time. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1951. Freedom, Power and Democratic Planning. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1952. Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. Ed. P. Kecskemeti. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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1953. Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology. Ed. P. Kecskemeti. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1956. Essays on the Sociology of Culture. Ed. E. Manheim and P. Kecskemeti. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1970. Wissenssoziologie. Ed. K. H. Wolff. Neuwied/Rhein: Luchterhand. 1982. Structures of Thinking. Ed. D. Kettler et al. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1986. Conservatism. Ed. D. Kettler et al. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 2001. Sociology as Political Education. Ed. D. Kettler and C. Loader. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Further Reading Frisby, D. (1983) The Alienated Mind. London: Heinemann. Gluck, M. (1991) Georg Lukács and His Generation 1900–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jay, M. (1974) “The Frankfurt School’s Critique of Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge.” Telos 20: 72–89. Kettler, D. (1967) “Sociology of Knowledge and Moral Philosophy: The Place of Traditional Problems in the Formation of Mannheim’s Thought.” Political Science Quarterly 82: 399–426. Kettler, D. (1971) “Culture and Revolution: Lukács in the Hungarian Revolutions of 1918/1919.” Telos 10: 35–92. Kettler, D. and V. Meja (1995) Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Kettler, D. et al. (2008) Karl Mannheim and the Legacy of Max Weber. Aldershot: Ashgate. Laube, R. (2004) Karl Mannheim und die Krise des Historismus. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Loader, C. (1985) The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim. New York: Cambridge University Press. Loader, C. and D. Kettler (2002) Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Meja, V. and N. Stehr (eds.) (1990) Knowledge and Politics. London: Routledge. Merton, R. (1941/1957) Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Ringer, F. (1969) The Decline of the German Mandarins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schelting, A. V. (1936) Review of Ideology and Utopia. American Sociological Review 1: 664–74. Shils, E. (1974) “Ideology and Utopia.” Daedalus 103(1): 83–9. Simmel, G. (1997) Simmel on Culture. Ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone. London: Sage. Simonds, A. P. (1978) Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. Starr, J. (1980) “New Directions in the Study of Youth and Society: A Comment.” Current Sociology 28: 343–71. Weber, M. (1958) From Max Weber. Ed. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. Woldring, H. (1986) Karl Mannheim. The Development of His Thought. Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum.

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16 Alfred Schutz JOCHEN DREHER

The sociologist and philosopher Alfred Schutz is the major representative of a phenomenologically based sociology. Using Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology he established the epistemological foundations of Max Weber’s sociology of understanding. He created the basis for a methodology of qualitative social science and most significantly developed a theory of the life-world. In establishing a specific conception of the life-world, Schutz was able to combine a theory of knowledge and relevance with a theory of social action. He also succeeded in developing a theory of the sign and symbol and a unique methodological perspective to serve as a basis for this entire paradigm. Schutz was born in Vienna on April 13, 1899. After spending his high school years at the Esterhazy Gymnasium in Vienna, he served in the Austrian army during World War I. His deployment in the army was followed by law studies at the University of Vienna with renowned figures such as Hans Kelsen and Ludwig von Mises. As a war veteran he was admitted to an accelerated study program allowing him to rush through a four-year curriculum in two and a half years (Wagner 1983: 8). In 1921, upon receiving his doctorate in law with a focus on international law, he became executive secretary of the Austrian Bankers’ Association; in 1929 he joined the Reitler Bank. Schutz remained with this company when he emigrated with his family to France in 1938 and the United States in 1940 (Kersten 1997: 636). In order to ensure financial security for his family and to support friends who had emigrated to the United States because of the threat of German National Socialism, Schutz continued his work as a banker. As such his biography is characterized by a double life; the philosopher Edmund Husserl portrayed him “as a banker at daytime and a phenomenologist at night.” In 1943, he obtained a part-time teaching job at the New School for Social Research in New York City. It was only from 1956 that he was able to dedicate himself full-time and exclusively to his academic career. Many The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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health difficulties, especially chronic heart disease, were the cause of his untimely death on May 20, 1959 (Barber 2004: 217). During his Viennese years, Schutz’s most significant academic experiences occurred while he was a member of the interdisciplinary “Mises Circle” (Eberle 2009). There he formed friendships with important intellectuals who included, among others, economists Gottfried von Haberler, Friedrich A. von Hayek, Fritz Machlup, and Oskar Morgenstern, philosopher Felix Kaufmann, and political scientist Eric Voegelin. The social scientist who had a major influence on Schutz during that time was Max Weber (especially through his methodological reflections). Weber had lectured in Vienna in 1918 and achieved significant popularity there, and influence on Viennese intellectuals (cf. Barber 2010). Examination of Max Weber’s work was decisive for Schutz in establishing his sociological focus, even though he dealt with Weber’s considerations from a critical perspective. Specifically, Schutz confronted Weber’s basic methodological focus which defined sociology as the science of social action “insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior” (Weber [1921] 1978: 4). From a Schutzian perspective, these fundamental assumptions in relation to the conception of the sociological discipline required further epistemological foundations; Schutz’s major task included a search for the philosophical foundations of Max Weber’s methodological individualism. Although challenging the Weberian position in relation to its methodological background, he accepted Weber’s fundamental approach of a sociology of understanding. Indeed, the sociology of understanding is the basis for Schutzian thinking. What were the major issues for Alfred Schutz? Why did he challenge Weber’s conception of the subjective meaning of human action? For Schutz the fundamentals of this perspective, the complexity of the subject matter, needed more focus. Therefore, he concentrated on determining Weber’s equivocations with the aim of radically defining the notion of subjectivity, thereby developing a subjective approach for his sociological program. Furthermore, he intended to find a solution for the problem of mutual human understanding; that is, for the problem of intersubjectivity. Only if all these theoretical difficulties were resolved, could the creation of a sociology of understanding in all its methodological ramifications be pursued (Wagner 1983: 14f.). This specific subjectivist perspective of a sociology of understanding was decisive for Schutz’s theoretical paradigm and central in his thinking until, in his later works, he developed the theory of the life-world. His project first of all brought him into contact with a popular philosophical orientation of his early years: the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson. During the period from 1925 to 1927, Bergson’s philosophy of consciousness and inner time helped Schutz to clarify concepts such as meaning, action, and intersubjectivity (Schutz 1982). However, because he was dissatisfied with the Bergsonian investigations of temporality in relation to his effort to establish the foundations for a sociology of understanding, following the recommendations of his friend Felix Kaufmann, he discovered the importance of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of the consciousness of inner time (Barber 2010). This suited his need to establish the phenomenological foundations of Weber’s theory of action. It was Husserl’s phenomenology which opened a path for him to solve his research questions. This resulted in the publication of his first and only monograph in 1932. It was entitled Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (Schütz [1932] 2004). Major parts of this

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were translated into English and published as The Phenomenology of the Social World (Schutz [1932] 1997). A wide variety of diverse research papers appeared during Schutz’s lifetime. Posthumously his most significant writings were published in Collected Papers, volume I, The Problem of Social Reality (Schutz 1962), volume II, Studies in Social Theory (Schutz 1964), and volume III, Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy (Schutz 1970a); later on, in 1996, Collected Papers, volume IV (Schutz 1996) appeared. In 1970, Schutz’s important manuscript on Reflections on the Problem of Relevance (Schutz 1970c) was published. In the same year a small collection of selected pieces was presented with the title On Phenomenology and Social Relations: Selected Writings (Schutz 1970b). A translation of his early works, strongly influenced by Bergsonian vitalist philosophy, was published as Life Forms and Meaning Structure (Schutz 1982). At the end of his life, just before his unexpected death, Schutz intended to present his life work in a German-language publication entitled Strukturen der Lebenswelt (The Structures of the Life-World), for which he prepared an outline as well as numerous notebooks. However, because of his death he was unable to finish this planned systematic work, which is why his wife, Ilse Schutz, asked one of his students, Thomas Luckmann, to take on the difficult task of completing the Schutzian theoretical investigations. Volume 1 of the English translation of The Structures of the Life-World (Schutz & Luckmann 1973) appeared in 1973, volume 2 (Schutz & Luckmann 1989) in 1989.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT The academic career of Alfred Schutz was strongly determined by the political and social circumstances of his time. After finishing his dissertation in the 1920s, because of the widespread anti-semitism in Austria, especially in Vienna (Barber 2004: 10f.), it was impossible for him to obtain an academic position at the University of Vienna where Jews were only able to practice as private lecturers without payment. It is highly likely that he was forced into a double life as a banker as well as a sociologist and philosopher, because his Jewish descent made it unfeasible for him to pursue a regular university career. After the German invasion of Austria and the “Anschluss” to the Third Reich in 1938, Schutz left Austria with his family and went into his first exile in Paris, where he stayed with the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch (cf. Embree 2009), and above all established contacts with Paul Ludwig Landsberg, Jean Wahl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Aron, important members of the French phenomenological and sociological disciplines. After 16 months in Paris and because of new orientations and opportunities relating to his job as a bank executive, Schutz decided to emigrate to the United States, just before the beginning of World War II. In the US, he was immediately introduced to a small circle of American phenomenologists around Marvin Farber and Dorion Cairns, whom he knew from meetings within Edmund Husserl’s academic context in Freiburg in Germany (Endreß 2006: 16f.). Furthermore, Schutz wanted to be introduced into American sociological circles, and especially sought Talcott Parsons’s acquaintance, and presented a paper at the Parsons-Schumpeter seminar at Harvard University in Cambridge in 1940. This included an intense discussion of Parsons’s major study on The Structure of

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Social Action (Parsons [1937] 1968a, [1937] 1968b). In 1943, Schutz managed to gain a position in the American academic system when he became a lecturer in sociology at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City (established specifically for European exiles). At the New School, he was appointed to the position of visiting professor in 1944. In 1952 he was appointed full professor of sociology and social psychology (Endreß 2006: 17f.). Among the European immigrants who had to move to the United States because of the National Socialist threat, Alfred Schutz was definitely an exception. He was able to successfully continue his career as a bank executive, and he also managed to establish a career within the academic field. Several incidents in relation to Schutz’s biography, the double experience of exile, and the specific social context of his times are reflected in some of his writings on applied theory. His well-known (in sociological circles) article on “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology” (Schutz [1944] 1964), published in 1944, phenomenologically characterizes the situation of the stranger as a continuing interaction process of adaptation and assimilation to the receiving in-group with a specific taken-for-granted experience and interpretation of the world. In his Viennese years as a marginalized young Jewish academic, and in exile in France and the US, Schutz himself continuously experienced this situation of the stranger. “The Homecomer” (Schutz [1945] 1964) reflects upon his personal experience as a returning soldier in World War I, coming back from the Italian front, as well as on the situation of American soldiers returning from their deployment in Europe and Asia in World War II. From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge Schutz describes the convergence process the homecomer undergoes when away from his home community for a certain length of time and involved in interaction processes of adjustment and adaptation. Another study from 1946 with the title “The Well-Informed Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge” (Schutz [1946] 1964) ideal-typically differentiates between the “man on the street” and the “expert,” establishing the category of the “well-informed citizen” in-between these two. The categorizations can be compared to Schutz’s own biographical situation; as an expert in finance and banking and simultaneously an academic teacher, and as a “well-informed citizen” who helped several family members, friends, and colleagues who had to flee from National Socialism in Europe and emigrate to the United States (cf. Endreß 2006: 23). Furthermore, Schutz’s reflections on “Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World” (Schutz [1957] 1964) specifically concentrate on expressions of inequality within intercultural community life in the US, which basically have to do with racial discrimination. On a more general level, this analysis within the perspective of sociology of knowledge mirrors the intercultural disturbances of the imperial and royal Austro-Hungarian Empire.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT The core influence on Alfred Schutz’s work, as mentioned, comes from Max Weber’s sociology of understanding which was already the focus of his early work. He struggled to discover the foundations of Weber’s postulate that sociology has to concentrate on the subjective meaning the individual actor confers on his or her actions. In the beginning Schutz relied on Henri Bergson’s vitalist philosophy. By examining the

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durée or inner duration of subjective consciousness Schutz was able to study the basic nature of the I and Thou relationship. The idea was to theoretically deal with the subjectivity of the individual actor, which in the sociology of Weber and other orientations of the social sciences would be unreachable. Schutz epistemologically intended to enter a domain which actually was not part of the focus of the social sciences (but rather of psychology), yet nonetheless of high relevance for their research perspective. The question is how legitimate scientific knowledge of the world is defined by everyday, nonscientific life in the natural attitude. Schutz proceeds from the inner duration to the common, typifying I–Thou world of things and events which offers the foundations of the pragmatic everyday life. The concept of “life form,” which is adapted from Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Scheler, and Henri Bergson, was supposed to resolve the problem of the sociality of the I–Thou relationship. However, in formulating the related problem of relevance it was revealed that the concept of “life form” was not suitable for Schutz’s considerations of the I–Thou relationship (Kersten 1997: 636f.), or as an epistemological foundation for the social sciences more generally. Instead, Schutz found the solution to his major theoretical concerns in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, especially when studying Husserl’s lectures on the consciousness of inner time (Husserl [1928] 1991) as well as Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl [1929] 1969), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Husserl [1913] 1982), and Cartesian Meditations (Husserl [1931] 1965). Schutz turned the Husserlian account of temporality in the direction of an action theory, describing levels of passive experience (e.g., bodily reflexes), spontaneous activity without a project of guiding (e.g., acts of noticing stimuli), and intentionally planned and projected activity, which are described by the concept of “action” (Barber 2010) (e.g., committing a murder). Planning an action to be realized in the future functions on the basis of a specific reflexivity, since one imagines a project as completed in the future perfect tense. The point to reach is what will have been realized after one’s acting, and this project establishes the “in-order-to motive” of one’s action (Schutz [1932] 1997: 86ff.). As opposed to this, “because motives” (Schutz [1932] 1997: 91ff.) are based on convictions resulting from socio-historical circumstances in which the individual actor is involved; these motives influence the decision to realize a project and can only be discovered by investigating and exploring those factors that preceded the past decision (Barber 2010). This temporal framework of motivation was the basis for Schutz’s criticism of Weber’s position, namely the idea that it is possible for the social scientific observer to develop statements about the subjective meaning and motivation of individual actors. Phenomenological reflections demonstrate that the constitution process of meaning within action might on the one hand depend on “in-order-to motives,” and on the other it might be based on “because motives.” If the temporality of the action process is not taken into consideration, misinterpretations of action can be a result when, for example, one assumes that the outcome of an act may have been its motive without reflecting on the actor’s “in-order-to motive,” which due to unplanned or unforeseen events may have been changed or may have led to results different from those intended (Barber 2010). Besides phenomenology, especially when entering the American academic context, Schutz became acquainted with the work of pragmatist philosophers such as William

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James, Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, the behaviorist George Herbert Mead, and others. The incorporation of these influences into his theoretical conception was highly relevant for the development of a theory of the life-world which turned out to be the paradigm for Schutz’s life work. One crucial idea, following William James (James [1890] 1950), is that the world of everyday life as “paramount reality” characterized by the pragmatic motive is defined as the core category of the lifeworld. At the same time the subjectively centered life-world consists of everyday transcendent “multiple realities” described as “finite provinces of meaning.” It turned out that Schutz’s early analyses in his monograph Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt had strong affinities to the ideas of the pragmatist thinkers; the basic conception of his theory of the life-world was already present in this early writing.

THE THEORY Schutz’s outline of a theory of the life-world was developed just before his death with the aim of presenting a theoretical summary of his work. This was to be published under the title The Structures of the Life-World. Having prepared the sketch of this major work as well as several notebooks paraphrasing the content of the book, due to his physical condition and his unexpected death he was unable to finish The Structures of the Life-World. As a result it became Thomas Luckmann’s difficult task to complete Schutz’s life’s work, which Luckmann accomplished using Schutz’s manuscripts. These have also been published under the title of “Notebooks” (Schutz 1989: 158–324). The following presentation of Schutz’s theory of the life-world is based on the original outline of The Structures of the Life-World, as intended by Schutz himself.

The life-world of the natural attitude Following pragmatist reflections, Schutz defines the “world of daily life” as the reality experienced within the natural attitude by the alert adult who acts within it and upon it amidst his or her fellow human beings. The “natural attitude” is the state of consciousness in which we accept the “reality of everyday life” as a given. Because it is governed by a “pragmatic motive,” the everyday life-world is something that we have to modify by our actions or that modifies our actions (Schutz [1945] 1962: 208f.). The everyday life-world includes both the cultural meaning-stratum that first of all makes physical objects into objects of naïve experience, as well as the everyday social world. Furthermore, the life-world, in Schutz’s terms, comprises more than the everyday reality. We regularly sink into sleep and relinquish the natural attitude in order to lapse into fictive worlds and fantasies. Furthermore we are able to transcend the everyday life by the means of symbols and, as a special case, are able consciously to modify our natural attitude and shift to different reality spheres. Schutz grasps the idea of the life-world so broadly that it includes all modifications of attitude and alertness, in other words, every tension within consciousness (Dreher 2003: 143; Schutz & Luckmann 1989: 21). The life-world in general must necessarily be seen as a pre-theoretical world of experience; life-world describes a certain stratum of human experience previous to

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the socio-historical world with its essential invariant structures that exist within all human acts of consciousness (Luckmann [1970] 1983: 41). Edmund Husserl, from whom Schutz adopts a modified version of the concept of the life-world, discovers a general structure belonging to the life-world in all its relativities wherein all relative Being is tied to this general structure which itself is not relative (Husserl [1936] 1970). Obviously, this concept of the life-world was sociologically amplified by Schutz, including the social world and everyday transcendent reality spheres. Criticizing Husserl’s conception of the life-world, in a letter to his friend Aron Gurwitsch, he argues: “And granted that the life-world doubtlessly has its essential typicality, I just can’t see how Husserl can hope to come to the idea of an ontology of the life-world without clarification of intersubjectivity” (Schutz & Gurwitsch 1989). It is exactly this typicality Schutz takes into consideration in arguing that the whole intersubjective world of working in standard time and the problem of how the experience of fellow human beings is experienced in the natural attitude is a topic of theoretical contemplation – for Schutz it is the principal matter of the social sciences (Schutz [1945] 1962: 254). The crucial problem resulting from this approach is the possibility for the solitary thinker with his or her disinterestedness and aloofness from all social relationships to find an approach to the world of everyday life in which human beings act among their fellow humans beings within the natural attitude. It is precisely this natural attitude that must be abandoned by the social scientist when theorizing. Only in the We-relation within a community of space and time, can the Other’s self be experienced within the natural attitude; it is of importance that outside the vivid present of the We-relation the Other appears just as a Me, the individual taker of social roles and not as a unity. But why is the natural attitude so important for the social sciences as an expression of the world of everyday life? The interpretation of this world is based on a stock of previous experiences about it which are transmitted to us during our socialization; a familiarity is established for us on the basis of this specific knowledge transferred to us. To the natural attitude the world is not the private world of the solitary individual from the outset – it is an intersubjective world to which we all are accustomed and in which we do not have a theoretical but a practical interest. The world of everyday life is characterized through the fact that we act and interact in it to dominate and to change it in a coexistence with our fellow human beings. “Our bodily movements – kinesthetic, locomotive, operative – gear, so to speak, into the world, modifying or changing its objects and their mutual relationships” (Schutz [1945] 1962: 209). But these objects of the everyday life-world at the same time offer resistance to our acts which we have to overcome or yield to. This is why Schutz argues that our natural attitude is governed by a pragmatic motive toward the world of daily life. Applying such a perspective, the world is something that we constantly have to modify by our actions and which simultaneously modifies our actions (Schutz [1945] 1962: 209). The fundamental assumptions we get from these reflections in relation to the natural attitude of the life-world, which we accept unquestioned as given, are the following: we assume the constancy of the structure of the world, the constancy of the validity of our experience of the world, as well as the constancy of our ability to act upon the world and within the world (Schutz [1957] 1970: 116).

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The stratifications of the life-world A significant aspect of the Schutzian theory of the life-world is the stratification of the life-world into different dimensions. Schutz defines a space, time, and social structure of the life-world; furthermore he divides the life-world into multiple realities, into reality spheres of finite meaning structure; the individual is constantly confronted with given boundaries through this stratification of the life-world. In relation to the spatial stratification, the sphere of the here and now is of major importance since it is the basis for the face-to-face relationship. Furthermore, Schutz differentiates between the world within actual reach and the world within potential reach (restorable and attainable) and describes the manipulatory sphere as the “world within your actual and potential reach” and the “world within your actual and potential manipulatory sphere.” This also describes the spatial presence of our fellow human beings. As far as the time structure of the life-world is concerned, it is relevant that the physical and social world existed before my birth and that they will exist after my death; there is a historicity of the inanimate and the human world. Objective time has subjective correlates which need to be taken into consideration due to the subjectively centered conception of the life-world. Objective time correlates with the actuality of reach with reference to interpretable horizons and the stock of experience, with reference to the restorableness of experiences through retention and recollection, and with reference to the attainableness of future experiences through protention and anticipation (Schutz 1989: 166f.). The time structure of the lifeworld is of course related to the problem of sedimentation and wakening of past experience which from a phenomenological perspective is related to consciousness activities such as association and passive synthesis. The individual actor does not know the time dimension of the vivid present. Instead he or she does have, according to William James, a particular “specious present” within which he or she lives or acts and which is defined at any moment by the span of projects conceived (Schutz [1945] 1962: 253). Concerning the past, the specious present is limited by the remotest past experience which is sedimented and preserved in that section of knowledge at hand that is still relevant for the specific projecting in the present. In relation to the future, the specious present is limited by the span of the projects presently conceived – it is determined by the remotest acts which are still anticipated “modo futuri exacti” (Schutz [1959] 1964: 291). As far as the social structure of the life-world is concerned, the social dimension of the life-world within our reach is considered to be the domain of direct social experience and the subjects we encounter in it are our fellow human beings. With them we share a common span of time and a sector of the spatial time is within our common reach. The bodies of my fellow human beings are within my reach and vice versa; this circle is surrounded by the world of my contemporaries whose subjects coexist with me in time without being within a spatial reach. Furthermore, the world of our predecessors acts upon us but is beyond the reach of our actions, and the world of our successors can be influenced by our actions but cannot act upon us (Schutz [1957] 1970: 119). As we can see, the world of everyday life is intersubjective from the outset; it is not my private world. Rather I am connected to my fellow human beings within diverse social relationships. According to the Schutzian

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reflections, the face-to-face relationship obtains a significant position within the conception of the life-world. Each partner within the face-to-face encounter shares the other, as mentioned, in a vivid present; both participate in a set of common experiences of the outer world and are able to actually influence it with their working acts. Only within the face-to-face relationship can the other be experienced as unbroken totality and a unity, which is highly relevant since all other manifold social relationships are derived from it (Schutz [1945] 1962: 220f.). For all the other social relationships the self of the Other merely appears as a partial self. The encounter with the Other is based on the fundamental axiom of the reciprocity of perspectives (Schutz [1953] 1962: 11ff.; [1955] 1962: 315ff.) ideally relevant for each interaction situation. This axiom opens up the possibility to understand each other in everyday life; it is the obvious assumption to understand and share the standpoint of the Other and its relevances in an idealized form. The world of everyday life as the world of working proves as paramount as opposed to many other sub-universes of reality. It is the world of physical things to which the body of myself and my fellow human beings belongs. I share this world and its objects with others and with them I have ends and means in common with them; I work with them in diverse social acts and relationships. Only within the reality of the world of working, communication and mutual motivation become effective (Schutz [1945] 1962: 226f.). This paramount reality sphere is unique due to a particular tension of consciousness (wide-awakeness and full attention to life), a specific form of spontaneity and form of sociality, as well as a specific time perspective. But there are other reality spheres with a finite meaning structure which belong to our life-world and with regard to all these aspects they differentiate from the reality of everyday life. The subjectively centered life-world is also composed of realities such as the world of dreams, of imageries and phantasms, and specifically the world of art, the world of religious experience, the world of scientific contemplation, the play world of the child, or the world of the insane are such finite provinces of meaning related to the life-world of the individual. They all have a peculiar cognitive style, all experiences within these worlds are consistent in themselves and each one possesses a specific accent of reality. However, as Schutz argues, the “world of working in daily life is the archetype of our experience of reality. All the other provinces of meaning may be considered as its modifications” (Schutz [1945] 1962: 232f.). Particularly important in regard to the experiences of the multiple reality spheres of the life-world is the fact that these experiences – e.g., religious, aesthetic, and scientific – are communicated within the paramount reality of the everyday life with the help of symbols (cf. ch. V).

Knowledge of the life-world: relevance and typicality We now have to concentrate on the specific structure of knowledge in the life-world as experienced within its different spheres of reality. The knowledge of the world, in commonsense as well as in scientific thinking, consists of constructs such as abstractions, generalizations, formalizations, and idealizations specific to the respective level of thought organization. From such a perspective there are strictly speaking no such things as pure facts; all facts are from the outset selected from a universal context by the activities of our mind. For this reason, they are always interpreted facts,

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either facts regarded as detached from their context by an artificial abstraction, or facts considered in their particular setting (Schutz [1953] 1962: 5). All the knowledge which is socially derived is accepted by the individual member of the cultural group as unquestionably given. This is so because it is transmitted to him or her as valid, tested, and unquestionably accepted by the group. Therefore it becomes a schema of interpretation of the common world and a means of mutual agreement and understanding. These reflections are closely related to the structuring of all knowledge about the life-world with its diverse reality spheres. Following William James, Schutz uses the differentiation between “knowledge of acquaintance” and “knowledge about” to demonstrate that there is only a comparatively small factor of our knowledge which is thorough, clear, distinct, and consistent, of which we are competent experts – the “knowledge about.” Our “knowledge of acquaintance” only concerns the what and leaves the how unquestioned (Schutz [1957] 1970: 120f.). This composes the major part of our knowledge of the lifeworld. Both of these zones are surrounded by dimensions of mere belief that are graded in various expressions as to well-foundedness, plausibility, likelihood, reliance upon authority, blind acceptance, and complete ignorance. Considering all these knowledge spheres, only the “knowledge about” stands under the postulate of clarity, determinateness, and consistency. All other spheres belong to the realm of what is not questioned, to the realm of what is “taken for granted” (Schutz [1957] 1970: 120f.), as long as it serves to function within the life-world. All the mentioned knowledge spheres of the life-world perpetually change for the individual, from individual to individual, from individual to the social group, for the group itself, and from one group to the other. Therefore, the content of what we know, what is familiar, believed, and unknown, is relative; for the individual it is relative to the biographical situation, for the social group to its historical situation. If we concentrate on the knowledge of the life-world and if we examine the individual experience of its structure, we discover that the subjective correlates of this knowledge are related to different zones of individual motivation. The individual living in the world always experiences him- or herself in a certain situation he or she has to define. This situation is imprinted by two different moments; one originates from the ontological structure of the pre-given world and the other component results from the actual biographical state of the individual. The ontological component of the situation of the individual is experienced as imposed upon and occurring to him or her, without the possibility of spontaneously changing the pre-given conditions. However, the biographical situation determines the spontaneous character of the situation within the imposed ontological framework (Schutz [1957] 1970: 122). These reflections open up the path to Schutz’s theory of relevance which offers the possibility of connecting subjective motivation with the objectively imposed knowledge structures that regularly confront the individual. Based on his reflections on the objectively given structure of the world and the subjectively experienced biographical situation, Schutz describes two systems of relevance according to which our knowledge is structured, and differentiates between three different types of relevance. He proposes on the one hand the “system of intrinsic relevances” and on the other hand the “system of imposed relevances.” “Intrinsic relevances” are the outcome of our chosen interests, established by our spontaneous decision to solve a problem by our thinking, to attain a goal by our action etc.

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In contrast, “imposed relevances” are not connected with interests chosen by us. They do not originate in acts of our discretion; we have to take them just as they are, without the power to modify them by our spontaneous activities (Schutz [1946] 1964: 126f.). Furthermore, Schutz develops three different ideal types of relevances in distinguishing between “motivational,” “thematic,” and “interpretational relevances,” mentioning that their pure expression cannot be found empirically. With motivational relevance, Schutz describes the aspect in which specific causal relations of the objective world are considered to be relations of interest or problematic items; our interest decides which elements of the ontological structure of the pre-given world are relevant to us (Schutz [1957] 1970: 123f.). This interest in form of a relevance is subjectively experienced as motive for the definition of the situation, independent of the fact of whether the components of the situations are imposed or intrinsically result from the spontaneity of the individual. All motivational relevances are also subjectively experienced as a system of plans within a paramount life plan. Thematic relevances, however, arise from circumstances in which not all motivationally given elements are sufficiently familiar or pre-known; it also might be the case that the actual situation does not coincide with a situation type present within one’s stock of knowledge. Therefore, supplementary knowledge concerning the situation is required; that is, additional knowledge which is relevant for the definition of the situation. In this case, existing knowledge elements are not considered to be unquestionably given or taken for granted; they are questionable. The problem we have to solve in relation to the thematically relevant topic is guided by the rule of “first things first,” which states that the most important problem has to be elucidated first (Schutz [1957] 1970: 124f.). The third ideal type of interpretational relevances refers to those relevances which are used for the solution of thematically relevant topics with reference to the stock of knowledge at hand in which not all elements are relevant. To realize a specific interpretation of a certain thematic issue, some knowledge elements serve for the interpretation and, through the interpretation, typification processes are established. If knowledge about the solution of the actual interpretation problem is obtained and typified, no further interpretation is required (Endreß 2006: 106f.; Schutz [1957] 1970: 127). The concept of relevance in this sense is a most significant regulative principle of reality construction since it coordinates between knowing and experiencing of objects and serves the subjective actor in defining the situation. Without a theory of relevance, therefore, no foundation of a science of human action is possible, a fact that underlines the fundamental importance of the problem of relevance for the social sciences (Nasu 2008: 91, 93). With reference to the problem of relevance and typification, there are no types in general, but only types that are formed for the solution of a particular theoretical or practical problem. Typification in relation to knowledge about a typical kind and way of behavior, the typical concatenation of underlying typical motives or typical attitudes of typical personalities, results from the problem at hand, for the sake of whose definition and whose solution the type is formed. The problem depends on the situation of the individual actor, its foundedness on the ontology of the world, my, his or her biographical situation, and consequently the system of relevances that grow out of it or enter into it (Schutz 1989: 213).

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The life-world as the realm of practice A theory of the life-world rooted in Max Weber’s sociology of understanding has to include reflections on the issue of social action as the key concept of this sociological orientation. The structure of social action analyzed from a phenomenological perspective will be highlighted with reference to the life-world of the individual. Schutz’s aim is to investigate the pattern of action and social interaction which underlies the construction of course-of-action and personal types in commonsense thinking. He uses the term “action” to designate human conduct planned by the actor in advance. Principally, it is based on conduct resulting from a preconceived project. In using the concept “act” he refers to the outcome of this ongoing process which is the accomplished action. From such a standpoint, action may be covert if for example a scientific problem is solved mentally, or overt, gearing into the outer world. The action can be fulfilled by commission or omission, whereas purposive nonparticipation in acting is considered an action in itself. Decisive in this theory of action is the view that projecting of action consists in anticipation of future conduct by way of phantasying, yet it is not the ongoing process of action but the phantasied act as having been accomplished which is the starting point of all projecting. I have to visualize the state of affairs to be brought about by my future action before I can draft the single steps of such future acting from which this state of affairs will result. (Schutz [1953] 1962: 19f.)

In planning my action, I have to place myself in my phantasy at a future point of time, when the action will already have been accomplished. If this phantasying takes place, I am able to reconstruct in phantasy the single steps which will have to be realized to fulfill the future act. According to the Schutzian perspective, it is not the future action but the future act that is anticipated in the project; the act is anticipated modo futuri exacti in future perfect tense (Schutz [1953] 1962: 20). A specific time perspective taken within this theory of action does have consequences; all projects of forthcoming acts are based upon one’s knowledge at hand at the time of projecting. This knowledge is based on the experience of acts from the past which are typically similar to the actually projected one. Projecting of action therefore involves a particular idealization – Husserl calls it the idealization of “I-can-do-it-again” – which refers to the assumption that only under typically similar conditions that were present in acts from the past, I am able to project my action (Schutz [1953] 1962: 20). Furthermore, the time perspective of the project explains the interconnection of project and motive; as mentioned before, Schutz differentiates between “in-order-to motives” as the state of affairs to be brought about by the future action phantasied in its project, and “because motives,” referring to past experiences which have determined the project of action. Taking into consideration the social world as part of the life-world of the individual actor, the structure of action becomes more complex. Social interaction is also based on the general action patterns dependent on the time perspective of the courseof-action. Within the interaction of two persons in a question–answer situation, the in-order-to motive of one actor is to obtain adequate information which presupposes that the understanding of the in-order-to motive of the first actor will become the

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Other’s because-motive to perform an action in-order-to give some information to the asking actor. Actor one anticipates that he or she will be guided by the same types of motives by which in the past, according to his or her stock of knowledge at hand, the actor and many others were guided in typically similar circumstances. This example demonstrates that even the simplest interaction presupposes a series of commonsense constructs, such as in our example constructs of the Other’s anticipated behavior, which are based on the idealization that the actor’s in-order-to motives will become because-motives and vice versa. This is why Schutz designates it as “the idealization of the reciprocity of motives” (Schutz [1953] 1962: 22f.) A further decisive aspect of Schutz’s theory of action was developed in his paper “Choosing among Projects of Action” (Schutz [1951] 1962), in which he discusses the “fiat” to distinguish a merely phantasied project from a decided purpose which depends on one’s in-order-to motive. He analyzed how the actor had to believe that a projected action was feasible at least as to its type in order to approve it as a purpose; such feasibility depended on the world taken for granted offering a horizon of open possibilities with types for potential ends of the action. The biographical situation of the actor, which compels him or her to choose one project over another, converts these open possibilities into problematic ones. It is therefore necessary to contrast between choosing among already existing and well defined objects within reach, and choosing among projects, which do not yet exist and which the chooser generates and considers in succession within inner durée (Barber 2004: 142).

The transcendences of the life-world and their overcoming by signs and symbols As far as the life-world as a whole is concerned, it becomes relevant how the multiple realities and the social world as parts of the life-world are connected to the world of everyday life, respectively connected among each other with a specific meaning structure. Regarding the constitution of the life-world, signs and symbols have a crucial function because as “appresentation forms” they are responsible for the production of an internal meaningfulness of the life-world. From a phenomenological point of view the function of signs and symbols is based on the ability of the subjective consciousness of “appresentation,” a concept that Schutz adapts from Edmund Husserl in a modified form. While Husserl defines “appresentation” as a basic consciousness activity for the constitution of intersubjectivity as part of the experience of the Other (Husserl [1931] 1965: § 42ff.), Schutz describes “appresentation” as the analogical association by which through the perception of an object another object is produced, for example as memory, fantasy, or fiction (Schutz [1955] 1962: 294ff.; Dreher 2003: 145). The Schutzian theory of sign and symbol starts from the already exposed stratification of the life-world. According to this conception, the life-world includes not only the sphere of the “solitary I,” but especially the social world, and particularly collectively shared ideas, such as religious, scientific, artistic, or political realities with a finite meaning structure, but also dreams and fantasy worlds. We act and operate solely within the world of everyday life, in our world of working in which we communicate. This decisive aspect expresses the idea that only within the world of everyday life as paramount reality, communication with signs and symbols is

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possible (Schutz [1955] 1962: 306ff.; 1989: 241ff.; Dreher 2003). These reflections are based on the philosophy of culture of Ernst Cassirer, who calls the human being an animal symbolicum, considering the symbol ability a basic feature of human existence (Cassirer 1972: 23ff.; Srubar 2009). The theory of the life-world assigns signs and symbols a particular “meaning clip function” (Srubar 1988: 247). With the help of signs – for example, as elements of language – one can overcome the boundaries or “transcendences” that exist between individuals; the “transcendences” to the world of others can be overcome by the use of signs. Symbols on the other hand allow extra-ordinary experiences to be communicated, providing a common understanding of religious, scientific, aesthetic, or political experience and everyday transcending ideas and concepts in intersubjective contexts. In this sense, symbols ensure that the boundaries of the everyday world can be bridged and that we as individuals can share symbolically represented spheres of reality with other people. Signs and symbols are the elements of the life-world, which are intersubjectively shared and handed down and thereby ensure the cohesion and the meaningfulness of the individual’s life-world as a whole. Symbolical appresentational systems structure the transcendent world of human reality by connecting their different levels to each other and establishing a relation with the world of everyday life of the acting individual. Appresentational systems are the carriers of the reciprocity of perspectives and communication that transform the reality of everyday life into a paramount one. They provide a link between everyday reality and the realities that transcend it (Srubar 1988: 247f.); in particular they allow one to overcome boundaries of the social world which transcend the everyday world of the experiencing subject. In his most significant section of his theory of sign and symbol, Schutz extends the conception of the symbol to a further stage. He points out that some realities of the life-world with their specific cognitive styles are socializable, and therefore can be transferred into knowledge and action relationships. They themselves may be institutionalized and, as institutions situated outside the reality of everyday life, can become part of the everyday-transcending order of “society” (Srubar 1988: 246). Examples of such systems of appresentational references are philosophy, religion, science, art, and politics. However, in this case, the relationship of symbolization is reversed: within these systems the reality of everyday life is symbolically appresented. Accordingly, it can be argued that signs and symbols are constitutive of the dialectic relationship between the individual and society, as Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann – two scholars of Alfred Schutz – argue (Berger & Luckmann [1966] 1987: 65ff.). The human individual with the ability to use signs and symbols is able to constitute intersubjectivity and to objectify social entities in this context. Collective entities, such as social relationships (Dreher 2009) or groups, communities, or societies, are developed in conjunction with the objectification of symbolic worlds of meaning and thereby receive their effectiveness. It is essential that symbolic knowledge is internalized again in the socialization of the individual, i.e., becomes a component of the individual’s subjective knowledge. Commonly shared, everyday transcendent ideas and concepts that are legitimized as part of symbolic reality spheres cause the constitution of social entities in specific interaction contexts. The “nation” as an idea comes from an everyday transcendent political reality and can be represented symbolically within the everyday world. The constant objectification

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of symbolic knowledge about the nation, for example through their representatives, as well as the continuous reference to relevant existing national symbols, causes the collective of the nation to exist and stay alive. In particular, collective symbols have the potential to overcome and to unite often contradictory ideas and conceptions of individuals with respect to a collective, and various cultural, religious, or ethnic affiliations of individual members of the nation can be harmonized through the help of collective symbolism (Soeffner 2000). For the constitution and collective determination of social structure, collective symbols have a special integrative function because they produce a sense of community in the related individuals and ultimately ensure the cohesion of the collective.

The sciences of the social world When planning his major work on The Structures of the Life-World, Alfred Schutz intended to conceptually integrate a final chapter on “The Sciences of the Social World,” which was not included by Thomas Luckmann who finished this publication. Schutz’s outline for The Structures of the Life-World (Schutz 1989) demonstrates his idea to use the conception of a theory of the life-world to describe the life-world as “unexamined ground of all sciences.” He starts from the assumption that all scientific constructs are designed to supersede the constructs of commonsense thought and, according to this reflection, there is a principal difference between the natural and the social sciences. The facts, data, and events focused by natural scientists are just facts, data, and events within their observational field; it is important to consider that this field does not “mean” anything to the molecules, atoms, and electrons therein (Schutz [1953] 1962: 5). In opposition to the natural sciences, the social sciences concentrate on facts, events, and data of an entirely different structure because their observational field, the social world, is not essentially structureless. It has a particular meaning and relevance structure for the human beings living, thinking, and acting therein. They have preselected and preinterpreted this world by a series of common-sense constructs of the reality of daily life, and it is these thought objects which determine their behavior, define the goal of their action, the means available for attaining them – in brief, which help them to find their bearings within their natural and socio-cultural environment and to come to terms with it. (Schutz [1953] 1962: 5)

At this point of the argumentation, Schutz generates his methodological differentiation between first and second order constructs which is of crucial importance for the social sciences. Schutz claims that the thought objects constructed by the social scientists are founded upon the thought objects constructed by the commonsense thought of human beings living their everyday life among their fellow human beings. This is why the constructs developed and applied by the social scientist are constructs of a second order, “namely constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene, whose behavior the scientist observes …” (Schutz [1953] 1962: 6). From this perspective, for a foundation of their methodology, the social sciences need to take the structures of the life-world into consideration, and especially commonsense thinking as part of the world of everyday life.

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As a result of his methodological reflections Schutz presents a scientific model of the social life-world (Schutz 1989: 234). As a first step he proposes the construction of typical course-of-action patterns, corresponding to the events observed by the social scientist. The second step concentrates on coordination of these patterns with a personal type, namely the model of an actor whom the social scientist imagines as being gifted with consciousness. Following this, in a third step, constant typical in-order-to and because motives are ascribed to this consciousness. In a fourth step it is relevant to consider that these models of actors – he also calls them “puppets” or “homunculi” (Schutz [1953] 1962: 40f.) – are not human beings within the social world of everyday life and do not have any biography or history; they are not in a situation defined by themselves, but in one that the social scientist has defined. The social scientist has equipped them with a particular stock of knowledge and has determined their system of relevances; what is important is that this is the system of scientific relevances of its constructor and does not result from an actor within the world. “Puppets” or “homunculi” are constructions of the social scientist. In a fifth step, the model of actor, the “homunculus,” is brought into a fictional reciprocal interaction relationship with other similar constructed models. Motives, types of action and persons, and the distribution of knowledge related to this social situation are determined by the social scientist according to his or her scientific problematic. As a result of his life-world-based methodology, Schutz develops four postulates for scientific model constructs of the social life-world which summarize his methodological conception (Eberle 1984: 304ff.). The “postulate of logical consistency” requires that the system of types must be constructed by the social scientist with the highest degree of clarity and distinctness of the implied conceptual framework so that it is fully compatible with the principles of formal logic. According to the “postulate of subjective interpretation” it is necessary that the social scientist constructs the model of an individual consciousness in order to explain human action. This warrants the possibility of referring all kinds of human action or their result to the subjective meaning such action had for the actor. Furthermore, the “postulate of adequacy” demands that each term in a scientific model of human action must be constructed in such a way that a human act performed within the life-world by an individual human actors in the way indicated by the typical construct would be understandable for the actors as well as for their fellow human beings in terms of commonsense interpretation of everyday life. Finally, it is relevant that rational interaction patterns and personality types have to be constructed in such a way that the actor in the life-world would perform the typified action if he or she had a perfectly clear and distinct knowledge of all the elements assumed by the social scientist as being relevant to this action (Schutz 1989: 234f.). In establishing this methodological framework for the social sciences, Schutz assumes the unity of science, arguing that there is no different logic for natural and social sciences. This does not mean that the social sciences have to adopt the methodical procedures of the natural sciences – therefore it is unjustified to presuppose that only the methods of the natural sciences, especially physics, are scientific (Schutz 1989: 240). The Schutzian methodology with the life-world of the individual actor as its basis was specifically influential for the development methods of qualitative empirical social science.

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IMPACT AND ASSESSMENT The major impact for social theory resulting from Alfred Schutz’s paradigm was achieved through a productive integration of phenomenology into the field of social science, especially sociology. This was first and foremost accomplished with the elaboration of Max Weber’s sociology of understanding through an epistemological foundation of Weber’s concept of social action and subjective meaning on the basis of phenomenological reflections. Schutz established a phenomenologically founded sociology with a specific focus on the individual actor by establishing a pragmatic theory of the life-world. Schutz’s theory specifically influenced the development of a “new” sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (Berger & Luckmann [1966] 1987), which became one of the classic texts of the sociological discipline. With the help of the Schutzian theory of the life-world and philosophical anthropology, Berger and Luckmann present a sociology of knowledge free of materialist implications which describes society as objective as well as subjective reality with a specific emphasis on the dialectical relationship of individual and society. Another position oriented towards philosophy and human sciences was introduced by Schutz’s student Maurice Natanson who established an existential phenomenology starting from the Schutzian theoretical conception (Natanson 1964, 1986). As far as Schutz’s impact on the creation of qualitative methodologies and methods is concerned, some orientations among several others need to be mentioned: his methodological reflections essentially influenced Erving Goffman’s interaction theoretical conception of frame analysis (Goffman 1959, 1974, [1961] 2007), Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology (Garfinkel [1967] 2003; Psathas 2004, 2009), grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss 1967; Strauss 1987), genre analysis (Luckmann 2002), social scientific hermeneutics (Soeffner 1982), etc. The development of a strong discipline of qualitative empirical research with a tendency to establish a consistent orientation was to a wide extent achieved on the basis of the methodological writings of Alfred Schutz. Due to its focus on the subjectivity of the individual actor, commonsense thinking, and the life-world, the Schutzian paradigm has been criticized by some scholars using similar arguments. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, typifications of a second order, such as state, people, economy, or class, according to Schutz only have a hypothetical nature. Bauman criticizes that “for all practical purposes, concepts like society or class enter the life-world of the human individual as myths, sedimented from a long and tortuous process of abstraction of which the member himself lost control at a relatively early stage” (Bauman 1976: 63). Due to the fact that supra-individual phenomena can only be seen as mental concepts, the Schutzian sociology lacks a potential of critique, as Bauman argues. Defending Durkheim he claims that Schutz’s theory does not offer the possibility of dealing with the effect of objective sociostructural factors. Jürgen Habermas’s criticism of the Schutzian perspective formulates the reproach of “the culturalistic abridgement of the concept of the lifeworld” (Habermas 1987: 135) which needs to be corrected because personality structures and normative orders are not integrated into this notion of the life-world. Although taking over the concept of the life-world from Alfred Schutz, Habermas fails to

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grasp all decisive elements of the Schutzian life-world conception and disregards the fact that normative orders are represented in the life-world through the individual actor’s experience of multiple reality spheres, which are often determined by institutions. A further criticism of Schutz’s “subjectivism” was presented by Pierre Bourdieu who found in Schutz and ethnomethodology “the purest expressions of the subjectivist vision” as opposed to the “objectivist” position as represented by Durkheim (Bourdieu 1990: 127ff.). In trying to overcome the discrepancy between subjectivism and objectivism, Bourdieu tries to demonstrate that subjective representations of the agents constitute structural constraints and at the same time structural conditions determine the socialization of the individual. To bridge the gap between the two perspectives, he introduces the theoretical concept of habitus “as a system of models of perception and appreciation” (Bourdieu 1990: 131) which is acquainted in the lasting experience of a social position. But this habitus concept does not reflect the “subjectivist vision” of Schutz since it cannot describe or does not allow reconstruction of, for example, subjectively centered systems of relevance as part of the lifeworld of the individual actor which are pre-conditioned by social structure, but include the realizations and decisions within the actor’s biography. With the help of the Schutzian concept of relevance, phenomena such as power and inequality (Schutz [1957] 1964; Nasu 2003) in their objective and subjective expressions can be investigated profoundly since a model for the reconstruction of subjective reality is being offered. Schutz’s life work remained unfinished and incomplete, due to his early death, but at the same time it provides a source of a wide variety of starting-points for further theoretical and empirical investigation in social science. Schutz’s theory of the lifeworld especially offers great potential to explore the social world from the perspective of methodological individualism and proposes a theoretical conception to deal with the interrelationship of individual and social collectivity or society. The Schutzian theory establishes a profound and unique conceptual framework for the sociological analysis of the subjectivity of the individual actor in the social world which is incomparable, and the further impact of this paradigm will definitely characterize essential future developments in social science.

Reader’s Guide to Alfred Schutz Schutz’s most significant English-language writings are published in Collected Papers, volume I: The Problem of Social Reality (1962), which among others includes his major methodological papers as well as “Multiple Realities” and “Symbol, Reality and Society.” Collected Papers, volume II: Studies in Social Theory (1964) is also important and includes the essays “The Stranger,” “The Homecomer,” and “Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World.” Furthermore, Collected Papers, volume III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy (1970) includes Schutz’s work on Husserl’s phenomenology such as “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl.” Collected Papers, volume IV (1996) introduces an additional variety of Schutzian texts. His theory of the life-world was presented by co-author Thomas Luckmann as The Structures of the Life-World, volume I (1973) and volume II (1989). As far as secondary literature on Schutz is concerned, two highly valuable biographies must be mentioned. Alfred Schutz: An Intellectual Biography (1983), written by Helmut R. Wagner,

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offers a lucid introduction to the different stages of Schutz’s theoretical work with specific attention to philosophical influences. Second, The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz (2004), by Michael D. Barber, highlights Schutz’s diverse biographical situations: a young Jewish academic in Vienna, in exile in France and the United States, and so on. As well, he continually refers to phenomenological and sociological developments in Schutz’s work. Numerous research papers dealing with Schutzian thought have appeared in the renowned journal Human Studies. A yearbook titled Schutzian Research first appeared in 2009.

Bibliography Writings of Alfred Schutz [1932] 1997. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [1932] 2004. Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. Werkausgabe, Bd. II. Ed. Martin Endreß and Joachim Renn. Konstanz: UVK. [1944] 1964. “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology.” In Collected Papers, vol. II: Studies in Social Theory. Ed. Arvid Brodersen. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 91–105. [1945] 1962. “On Multiple Realities.” In Collected Papers, vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality. Ed. Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 207–59. [1945] 1964. “The Homecomer.” In Collected Papers, vol. II: Studies in Social Theory. Ed. Arvid Brodersen. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 106–19. [1946] 1964. “The Well-Informed Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge.” In Collected Papers, vol. II: Studies in Social Theory. Ed. Arvid Brodersen. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 120–34. [1951] 1962. “Choosing among Projects of Action.” In Collected Papers, vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality. Ed. Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 67–96. [1953] 1962. “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of the Social World.” In Collected Papers, vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality. Ed. Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 3–47. [1955] 1962. “Symbol, Reality and Society.” In Collected Papers, vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality. Ed. Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 287–356. [1957] 1964. “Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World.” In Collected Papers, vol. II: Studies in Social Theory. Ed. Arvid Brodersen. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 226–73. [1957] 1970. “Some Structures of the Life-World.” In Collected Papers, vol. III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy. Ed. Ilse Schutz. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 116–32. [1959] 1964. “Tiresias, or our Knowledge of Future Events.” In Collected Papers, vol. II: Studies in Social Theory. Ed. Arvid Brodersen. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 277–93. 1962. Collected Papers, vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality. Ed. Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1964. Collected Papers, vol. II: Studies in Social Theory. Ed. Arvid Brodersen. The Hague: Nijhoff. 1970a. Collected Papers, vol. III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy. Ed. Ilse Schutz. The Hague: Nijhoff. 1970b. On Phenomenology and Social Relations: Selected Writings. Ed. Helmut R. Wagner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1970c. Reflections on the Problem of Relevance. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1973 (with Thomas Luckmann). The Structures of the Life-World, vol. 1. London: Heinemann.

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1982. Life Forms and Meaning Structure. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1989. “Appendix: The Notebooks.” In The Structures of the Life-World, vol. 2. Ed. Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159–324. 1989 (with Aron Gurwitsch). Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939–1959. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1989 (with Thomas Luckmann). The Structures of the Life-World, vol. 2. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1996. Collected Papers, vol. IV. Ed. Helmut R. Wagner, George Psathas, and Fred Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Further Reading Barber, Michael D. (2004) The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz. Albany: State University of New York Press. Barber, Michael D. (2010) “Alfred Schutz.” In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ schutz/ Bauman, Zygmunt (1976) Towards a Critical Sociology. An Essay on Commonsense and Emancipation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann ([1966] 1987) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bourdieu, Pierre (1990) “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” In In Other Words: Essay Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 123–39. Cassirer, Ernst (1972) An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dreher, Jochen (2003) “The Symbol and the Theory of the Life-World: ‘The Transcendences of the Life-World and their Overcoming by Signs and Symbols’.” Human Studies 26(2): 141–63. Dreher, Jochen (2009) “Phenomenology of Friendship: Construction and Constitution of an Existential Social Relationship.” Human Studies 32(4): 401–17. Eberle, Thomas S. (1984) Sinnkonstitution in Alltag und Wissenschaft: Der Beitrag der Phänomenologie an die Methodologie der Sozialwissenschaften. Bern: Haupt. Eberle, Thomas S. (2009) “In Search for Aprioris: Schutz’s Life-World Analysis and Mises’s Praxeology.” In Hisashi Nasu, Lester E. Embree, George Psathas, et al. (eds.), Alfred Schutz and his Intellectual Partners. Konstanz: UVK, pp. 493–518. Embree, Lester E. (2009) “Some Philosophical Differences within a Friendship: Gurwitsch and Schutz.” In Hisashi Nasu, Lester E. Embree, George Psathas, et al. (eds.), Alfred Schutz and his Intellectual Partners. Konstanz: UVK, pp. 231–53. Endreß, Martin (2006) Alfred Schütz. Konstanz: UVK. Garfinkel, Harold ([1967] 2003) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Glaser, Barney G. and Anselm L. Strauss (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies of Qualitative Research. New York: Aldine Publishing Company. Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Goffman, Erving ([1961] 2007) Asylums. Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Goffman, Erving (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row.

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Habermas, Jürgen (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon Press. Husserl, Edmund ([1913] 1982) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. 1: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. The Hague: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund ([1928] 1991) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, Edmund ([1929] 1969) Formal and Transcendental Logic. The Hague: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund ([1931] 1965) Cartesian Meditations. The Hague: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund ([1936] 1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. James, William ([1890] 1950) The Principles of Psychology, vols. I–II. New York: Dover. Kersten, Fred (1997) “Alfred Schutz.” In Lester E. Embree, Elizabeth A. Behnke, and David Carr (eds.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 636–40. Luckmann, Thomas ([1970] 1983) On the Boundaries of the Social World. In Life-World and Social Realities. London: Heinemann, pp. 40–67. Luckmann, Thomas (2002) “Moral Communication in Modern Societies.” Human Studies 25(1): 19–32. Nasu, Hisashi (2003) “A Schutzian Approach to the Problem of Equality-Inequality.” In Chan-Fai Cheung, Ivan Chvatik, Ion Copoeru, et al. (eds.), Essays in Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. Published at www. o-p-o.net. Nasu, Hisashi (2008) “A Continuing Dialogue with Alfred Schutz.” Human Studies 31(2): 87–105. Natanson, Maurice (1964) “The Lebenswelt.” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 4 (Spring): 126–40. Natanson, Maurice (1986) Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Parsons, Talcott ([1937] 1968a) The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers, vol. I. New York: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott ([1937] 1968b) The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers, vol. II. New York: Free Press. Psathas, George (2004) “Alfred Schutz’s Influence on American Sociologists and Sociology.” Human Studies 27(1): 1–35. Psathas, George (2009) “The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Harold Garfinkel: What was the ‘Terra Incognita’ and the ‘Treasure Island’?” In Hisashi Nasu, Lester E. Embree, George Psathas, et al. (eds.), Alfred Schutz and his Intellectual Partners. Konstanz: UVK, pp. 401–33. Soeffner, Hans-Georg (1982) “Statt einer Einleitung: Prämissen einer sozialwissenschaftlichen Hermeneutik.” In Hans-Georg Soeffner (ed.), Beiträge zu einer empirischen Sprachsoziologie. Tübingen: Narr, pp. 9–48. Soeffner, Hans-Georg (2000) “Zur Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals.” In Gesellschaft ohne Baldachin: Über die Labilität von Ordnungskonstruktionen. Göttingen: Velbrück, pp. 180–208. Srubar, Ilja (1988) Kosmion: Die Genese der pragmatischen Lebenswelttheorie von Alfred Schütz und ihr anthropologischer Hintergrund. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Srubar, Ilja (2009) “Schutz and Cassirer: The Pragmatic and Symbolic Constitution of Reality.” In Hisashi Nasu, Lester E. Embree, George Psathas, et al. (eds.), Alfred Schutz and his Intellectual Partners. Konstanz: UVK, pp. 293–308.

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Strauss, Anselm L. (1987) Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wagner, Helmut R. (1983) Alfred Schutz: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max ([1921] 1978) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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17 Talcott Parsons VICTOR LIDZ

INTRODUCTION Talcott Parsons (1902–79) was, and remains, the pre-eminent American sociologist, noted for the broad scope and analytic depth of his theory of human social action. The trends of thought that brought him to leadership in sociological theory were established in his first articles and sustained, through many changes and elaborations, over 50 years of publication. He published more than 10 books, including several with collaborators, seven volumes of collected essays, three edited books, and perhaps as many as 100 additional essays. Several of his major writings – The Structure of Social Action (1937), The Social System (1951), Economy and Society (1956, with Neil J. Smelser), and “On the Concept of Political Power” (1962, in Parsons 1969) – are landmarks in the development of sociological theory. The central force in shaping curricula in sociology at Harvard University from the late 1920s to the mid-1960s, he was the most influential teacher of sociologists in his generation (Fox 1997). From the 1930s to the early 1970s, he was a mentor to scores of graduate students who later became creative social scientists. Parsons’s main concern was to develop a coherent conceptual scheme for sociology that addresses all aspects of human social organization, applies in all times and places, and yet remains open to progressive refinement and specification into empirically focused hypotheses as the discipline advances in ability to relate theory to factual knowledge. This concern remained constant throughout his career and provides the unity to theoretical and empirical writings that are otherwise extraordinarily diverse in sources of ideas, topics addressed, and levels of elaboration. Parsons’s expansive understanding of the mandate for theory in intellectually disciplined or “scientific” sociology was based on a sophisticated methodology, rooted in his

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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undergraduate and graduate studies of Kant, but modified under the influence of A. N. Whitehead’s philosophy of science. Parsons is often compared to such builders of comprehensive theories as Comte and Spencer, but this mischaracterizes his undertaking. His efforts were focused on developing conceptual schemes or frames of reference to facilitate empirical investigation. Following Whitehead, he viewed establishing frames of reference as logically preliminary to empirical research, including the phase of empirical research that involves generating hypotheses to be tested. He thus regarded his own distinctive contribution as clarifying frames of reference and their consequences for empirical hypotheses and propositional theories (Lidz, in Klausner & Lidz 1986: ch. 6). He understood that empirical feedback, primarily from the research findings of others, was essential for assessing the value of his conceptual and propositional work. Although most of his conceptual work was highly abstract, and some of it became very complicated, it was never a closed system (Lidz & Bershady 2000). A striking characteristic of Parsons’s manner of work was his commitment to progressive development of his ideas. An astute and persistent critic of his own writings, he rarely remained satisfied with particular formulations for more than a brief time. Whenever he returned to a specific topic, even in lectures to undergraduates, he endeavored to advance new considerations and new formulations. (He apparently prepared fresh notes for every class and every public presentation.) He undertook new books or articles with the expectation of developing significantly new theoretical ideas. In second drafts of writings, he typically made major revisions and extensions of ideas he had thought his creative best only weeks or months before. The strength of Parsons’s drive for innovation creates difficulties for scholars who wish to understand and critique his theories. While there are fundamental continuities across his writings, he changed major formulations at several points and subordinate ones frequently. Writings that introduced changes, especially of technical details, often omitted frank justifications for abandoning previous, vigorously advocated ideas. Interpreting the evolution of Parsons’s theory thus requires not only mastery of many difficult writings, but also careful attention to changing conceptual frameworks and shifting arguments.

EARLY LIFE AND STUDIES Talcott Parsons was born on December 13, 1902 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where his father, a Congregational minister by training, served as Professor of English and later Dean of the Faculty at Colorado College. Parsons’s parents maintained the ascetic Protestant culture associated with a New England heritage extending back to the seventeenth century (C. Parsons 2004). Edward Parsons combined a conservative and disciplined personal manner – he and his wife were teetotalers – with liberalism on social issues of the period. He held a strong interest in the Social Gospel movement and in intellectual matters. Talcott Parsons also combined an ascetic modesty in personal manners (but not teetotaling) with a liberalism on social issues and interpersonal generosity to colleagues and students. In 1917, Edward Parsons was forced out of Colorado College by trustees who were displeased with his reporting of improper conduct on the part of the college

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president. He later became president of Marietta College in Ohio. In the short term, however, he moved his family to New York City, where Talcott Parsons prepared for college at the progressive Horace Mann School. He then attended Amherst College, where his exceptional academic promise became apparent. At Amherst, initially planning to follow an older brother into medicine, he studied biology and gained a broad overview of evolutionary theory, comparative anatomy, and physiology that later supported his turn to functional theory in sociology. However, course work in economics resonated with his concern for social reform and social justice. Economics at Amherst was dominated by the institutional school, and Parsons gained exposure, through Walton Hamilton, to its latest trends of thought. Parsons studied figures such as Veblen, Commons, Sumner, and Cooley, whose writings addressed the social and institutional aspects of the economy. He also read various American and English economic historians who described the institutional growth of the industrial economy and the social problems it engendered. He gained sufficient perspective on the institutional school to appreciate that it was largely an outgrowth of the German school of historical economics. A course on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with George Brown, a Scottish-trained philosopher who emphasized disciplined and critical reading of master texts, influenced Parsons’s later tendency to study and restudy chief works of major authors. After graduating from Amherst in 1924, Parsons matriculated at the London School of Economics (LSE). For a young scholar of economic institutions with sympathy for socialist ideals, the LSE was a worldwide academic center, and Parsons enrolled with high expectations. Through classes and personal encounters, he came to know several of the LSE luminaries: the economic historian, R. H. Tawney, the sociologists, L. T. Hobhouse and Morris Ginsberg, the anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, and the political philosopher, Harold Laski (Parsons 1977: ch. 1). His participation in Malinowski’s seminar left an enduring impression as well as friendships with fellow students E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Raymond Firth, later major figures in British social anthropology. Ginsberg’s teaching in sociology, while encyclopedic in scope, made a poor impression. It reified utilitarian concepts and lacked close analytic engagement with the empirical materials pertaining to specific situations or historical settings. When an opportunity arose to spend a year in Germany on a fellowship, Parsons gladly accepted the chance to study the historical school of economics. Parsons often said that his assignment to the University of Heidelberg and involvement with the scholarship of Max Weber was serendipitous. He had scarcely known Weber’s name before being placed at Heidelberg by the fellowship program. Arriving in Heidelberg, however, he found that Weber’s “ghost,” several years after the man’s death, still dominated local social science. Weber’s contributions were emphasized in lectures and in informal contacts with faculty. Parsons soon studied The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and was deeply moved by its analysis of the heritage in which he had been raised (Parsons 1977: ch. 1). He quickly became immersed in Weber’s writings, including the comparative studies of religious ethics and civilization, the theoretical schemes of Economy and Society, and the methodological essays. He then studied other scholars who provided essential background to Weber, including Rickert and other neo-Kantians writing on historical and social scientific methodology; key figures in German historical economics, especially Schmoller,

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Sombart, Below, and Brentano; Menger and the Austrian marginalist school; and Karl Marx. Methodologically, he was strongly influenced by Weber’s writings, the neo-Kantian movement, and a second thorough reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in Karl Jaspers’s seminar. During the 1925–6 academic year, Parsons learned that he could earn a doctorate at Heidelberg without unduly extending his stay in Germany. He focused his studies on the theoretical understanding of the first emergence of modern capitalism and planned a dissertation on the conceptual frameworks needed to interpret and analyze the historical materials. From the outset, Max Weber’s works were to be the centerpiece of his discussion. At the suggestion of his dissertation supervisor, the economic historian and social scientist, Edgar Salin, he concentrated on leading figures in the German literature, especially Weber and Sombart. After his year in Heidelberg, Parsons, extensive notes on his German readings in hand, returned to Amherst to serve as Instructor in Economics for the academic year 1926–7 while writing his doctoral dissertation. He taught a course on sociology as well as courses in economics. In the spring of 1927, he received an appointment as Instructor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University starting the next fall. The appointment brought sufficient economic security that he could marry Helen Walker, whom he had met when she was a fellow student of economics at LSE. They remained happily married until his death. They had three children, all born in the 1930s: Anne, who became an anthropologist with interests overlapping with her father’s, but whose contributions were cut off by depression and suicide in 1964; Charles, who has become a distinguished philosopher and logician, now professor emeritus at Harvard; and Susan, who became a bank attorney. In the summer of 1927, Parsons submitted his doctoral dissertation to Heidelberg. Its German title, according to official records, corresponded to “The Spirit of Capitalism in Weber and Sombart.” He successfully defended the dissertation before a committee of Jaspers, Alfred Weber (Max Weber’s brother), and Salin. His doctorate was awarded in 1929 after publication of his two articles on “ ‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber” (Parsons 1991) met the requirement of German universities that dissertations be published. Parsons’s appointment at Harvard rested largely on his representation of the perspectives of German historical economics. He later said that, though an Instructor, he regarded himself as a sort of advanced graduate student because his German degree had been gained with less study than was required for American doctorates. He accordingly audited the seminars in economic theory of such senior colleagues as Taussig and Schumpeter, and actively exchanged ideas with several junior faculty colleagues (Parsons 1977: ch. 1). He was aware that his training in German historical economics seemed overly specialized in American settings. To compensate, he studied the rapidly emerging American neoclassical economics, its background in Marshall and British marginalists, and Pareto. He also began to reframe his ongoing research in the terms of American economics, where synthesizing the institutional and neoclassical approaches would be a significant contribution (Camic, Introduction to Parsons 1991). His interests were also open toward sociology. He taught in the undergraduate program on Social Ethics along with other faculty members who held broad interests in social science and advocated the founding of a sociology department.

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POLITICAL VALUES AND INTERESTS When Parsons arrived at LSE, his political views were sympathetic to democratic socialism and optimistic that future economic systems could reduce the inequality and oppressive work conditions of major capitalist societies. However, his intellectual interests were stronger than his ideological tendencies. After a year of study at the LSE, he was disappointed by the lack of intellectual imagination and discipline he had found in the social and economic thought of the British left. In Heidelberg, he encountered in Max Weber’s writings a more stimulating imagination combined with uncompromising conceptual rigor. His later political and economic views were likely influenced by Weber’s scorn for every strain of utopianism. But he did not assimilate Weber’s pessimism about the institutional orders of modern societies or the conservatism that predominated in the German academic world. He was positively affected by many aspects of German culture. His sympathy for German culture as he had experienced it in the 1920s led later to a vigorous opposition to Nazism. In his early years at Harvard, if not before, Parsons’s residual commitment to socialism gave way to a growing appreciation that markets are essential to economic efficiency. He recognized that socialist planning could not substitute for markets without great losses in efficiency and the creation of wealth. This view was strengthened after World War II, when studies of the Soviet industrial system demonstrated the inefficiencies of its planned economy. By the early 1930s, Parsons looked to better regulation of capitalist production as a more promising path to social improvement than socialism. During the Great Depression, he became a firm supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its emphasis on overcoming the deprivations of poverty and ethnic or racial discrimination. For the rest of his life, he adhered to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and, as an academic, was particularly committed to the freedoms of conscience, speech, publication, and association. He looked to expansion of a prosperous middle class as the most effective way to pursue values of social equality. From the mid-1950s, he identified himself as a “Stevenson Democrat” or “academic liberal.” Yet he retained a sympathy for the ideals of democratic socialism and opposed the left only when he sensed that it had become authoritarian or radically utopian. His wife Helen’s sympathies remained farther to the left and more quickly sensitive to such movements as the opposition to the Vietnam War.

THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACTION In 1930, the Russian émigré sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin, who had served in the Kerensky government and later taught at the University of Minnesota, arrived at Harvard to chair a new Department of Sociology. Parsons transferred to the new department expecting a better fit for his long-term interests, but soon found himself in conflict with Sorokin, who disparaged his work and obstructed his advancement in academic rank. He remained an Instructor until 1934 and became a tenured associate professor only after The Structure of Social Action (SSA) had appeared in 1937 and the University of Wisconsin had offered him a full professorship. Even then, his

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promotion occurred only after the intercession of Lawrence J. Henderson, the renowned physiologist, who had developed an interest in sociology, taught in the new department, and appreciated Parsons’s contributions. Nevertheless, the new departmental setting liberated Parsons’s thought by legitimating his broad interests and shift to conceptual frameworks beyond both neoclassical and institutional economics. By the mid-1930s, Parsons’s main concerns encompassed the relationships between economic and all other social institutions, with a focus on theoretical tools needed to understand this vast empirical field. He had translated Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) and focused his scholarship increasingly on Weber rather than other figures in the German school. He had studied the theoretical systems of Marshall and Pareto and published important articles on their works (Parsons 1991: chs. 8 and 15). The article on Marshall long remained widely read among economists. He had also begun serious study of the works of Émile Durkheim, whose critique of utilitarian thought in The Division of Labor in Society ([1893] 1933) provided a key reference point for his own conceptual efforts. The new Department of Sociology attracted an exceptionally talented group of graduate students and Parsons soon emerged as its most influential teacher. Within a decade, he had established himself as sociology’s most important cultivator of student talent and had placed capable and productive students in leading departments across the country. His status as the central figure in American sociology in the decades after World War II followed the maturing of his early students’ careers as they returned to universities from military or government service. The flowering of Parsons’s thought in the setting of the new department also involved a significant turn toward empirical materials. He initiated a course on comparative institutional analysis, which he then taught many times down to the end of his career. The course built upon the inter-civilizational scope of Weber’s empirical writings. Parsons taught the theory that integrated the course, but during the 1930s and 1940s he invited distinguished specialists in many civilizations and historical epochs to teach the empirical materials on which they were expert. He forged intellectual relationships with many of these scholars and studied their writings and works they cited. His own conceptual schema was affected in its many phases by engagement with empirical materials covered in this course, as were his writings on the German class structure and the rise of Nazism, the expanding role of professions in American society, and, later, the nature of medieval European civilization and the civilizations of antiquity. Parsons began to formulate the foundations of his own theory in a series of essays that appeared in the early and mid-1930s. These included the essays on Marshall and Pareto, but also three essays that addressed in general terms the sociological elements embedded in economic theory. A 1935 essay entitled “The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory” was significant in three respects: it was the first major publication that centered on sociological theory rather than economic theory, thus signaling his shift in professional identity; it was the first essay to present aspects of the conceptual scheme that later became the core of SSA; and it outlined a bold argument about the importance of values as structural determinants of social action, staking out a position that Parsons continued to refine throughout his career (Parsons 1991: ch. 18).

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The conceptual scheme to which these essays pointed was presented comprehensively and in greater depth in SSA (Parsons 1937). In SSA, Parsons proposed a general, well integrated frame of reference that departed radically from the empiricism and positivism that predominated in American sociology. His conceptual scheme was based initially on a probing evaluation of leading European economists and sociologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and Marshall. The action frame of reference, as Parsons called it, was a careful synthesis of a small number of premises and categories that, he claimed, are fundamental to all sociological understanding. Parsons did not present his frame of reference as a complete or precise theory, but as a thoroughly justified, well balanced set of basic concepts essential to the development of more technical theory (Lidz & Bershady 2000, 2006). His claim was that each of the conceptual elements of the action frame of reference must be utilized in every social scientific analysis or the analysis will necessarily fail to capture key aspects of social reality. In this sense, the concepts are social scientific universals. He supported his claims for the action frame of reference empirically with a critical review of the evidence amassed in Weber’s comparative studies and in Durkheim’s major writings. As presented in SSA, the action frame of reference centers on the notion of the “unit act,” a hypothetical entity representing any and all instances of meaningful human social behavior. Parsons specified four essential elements of the unit act: ends, means, norms, and conditions. These four categories of elements (and, in some statements, a category of effort as well) are essential in the sense that no social action can exist without the presence of at least one instance of each. Every instance of social action, regardless of time, place, or cultural context, necessarily contains exemplars of each category. In developing his conception of the unit act, Parsons emphasized that the normative elements of social action have the same universal status as the more familiar elements of ends and means. An emphasis on the normative elements of social action, and on understanding the ways in which, when institutionalized, they become structural to society, remained central to Parsons’s writings throughout his career. Parsons limited the scheme of SSA to basic concepts in order to concentrate on justifying its premises and essential elements. The justification entailed thorough critiques of the works of Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber, focusing on implications for basic premises and concepts. Parsons claimed that his critiques of these four major figures demonstrated that, despite differences in their intellectual backgrounds, they had “converged” in emphasizing concepts that amounted in fundaments to the action frame of reference. Over the years, his argument has met with much skepticism by scholars who have documented many differences among the intellectual backgrounds and formulations of these theorists, especially Durkheim and Weber (e.g., Bendix & Roth 1971). For Parsons’s purpose, however, convergence meant principally that the four theorists had agreed that social scientific frames of reference must include normative elements as well as means, ends, and conditions. His argument has never been refuted, although it is too often ignored at the cost of theoretical error. Despite the controversies over the convergence argument, Parsons’s treatments of all four figures became touchstones for critical evaluations of theoretical works in the social sciences. More than 70 years later, they remain key starting points for

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assessments of the theorists addressed. Due to their rigor, the treatments of Weber and Durkheim remain especially influential, even though a great deal more is now known about their biographies, connections to other scholars, and ideological outlooks. Down to the 1960s, SSA was the most influential single work in defining the core of the sociological tradition. Yet its aims were concerned less with assessing the writings of other scholars than with establishing the elementary and universal importance of the action frame of reference. Substantively, Parsons maintained that only a focus on normative elements could enable social theory to “solve” the problem of social order that had been basic to social science ever since Hobbes’s Leviathan. In SSA and other early works, Parsons held that the Hobbesian problem of order was the essential and logically inescapable starting point for sociological theory. Thus, he emphasized that the two classic “solutions” — in Hobbes, the arbitrary authority of an absolute sovereign; in Locke, the positing of a natural harmony of interests — avoided actual sociological analysis of how members of society are able to live with one another — of how their conduct is sufficiently regulated to sustain orderly relations in society. He suggested that truly penetrating solutions to the problem of order started above all with two paradigmatic analyses, namely, Durkheim’s critique of Spencer’s theory of contract, which emphasized a need for non-contractual legal institutions regulating contractual relationships, and Weber’s analysis of religious ethics and their capacity to pattern the entire normative orders of whole civilizations. The theory of social action progressed from these basic starting points. As compared with earlier American theories, Parsons’s framework was distinctive in the extent of its emphasis on normative phenomena. Parsons held that normative elements are necessary to maintain a degree of order in any ongoing social relationships. In so far as the events of social life exhibit institutional continuity or coherence, the workings of normative elements, e.g., social values (ideals for relationships and institutions) and norms (rules of conduct), are necessary objects of sociological study. The normative components of a social system can be shared by its participants, and accordingly their goals, and the means they select to pursue their goals, can be regulated by the same standards of conduct. Values and norms constrain or limit actors in their choices of ends or means, and hence are regulative in a manner not true of ends or means themselves. Actors who share normative standards are able to develop reciprocal expectations of one another’s conduct. Concrete expectations often differ by social roles, but actors in different roles and pursuing different ends may yet agree on the expectations appropriate to each of the parties engaged in common relationships. By focusing on the shared elements of normative order and common grounds of expectation, Parsons was able to analyze the integration of social action in a way that is not possible for utilitarian theorists, behaviorists, or other positivists whose theories focus only on ends, means, and/or situational conditions as determinants of human behavior. The methodological foundations of SSA are important not only for understanding that work, but because with little change they shaped Parsons’s later work as well. Parsons’s methodological ideas had sources going back to his early studies of Kant (Bershady 1973), but were influenced by two senior scholars at Harvard in the 1930s: the physiologist, L. J. Henderson, and the philosopher, A. N. Whitehead, whose Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality Parsons valued

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(Lidz, in Klausner & Lidz 1986: ch. 6). For Parsons, Henderson’s “approximate definition of fact” as “an empirically verifiable statement about experience” (Parsons often Kantianized the definition to say “phenomena”) “in terms of a conceptual scheme” made an essential point. A fact does not inhere in a phenomenon itself. An event or phenomenon cannot, as Parsons often said, “speak for itself.” A fact is a statement about a phenomenon. It must be formulated by a person who conceptualizes cognition of the event or phenomenon. Stable statements of facts are not possible without a well ordered conceptual element. To generate and organize many facts about complex events, a carefully framed scheme of concepts is needed. Whitehead emphasized that all elements of scientific knowledge are, by logical necessity, abstract in some degree. He called the empiricist failure to recognize elements of abstraction in all kinds of scientific constructs, even (indeed, particularly) direct statements of fact, the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” In his view, the relations of scientific knowledge to empirical reality cannot be understood with precision unless the underlying abstractions are clear. He used the term frames of reference to designate the modes of abstraction that have guided the most important innovations in science. In Science and the Modern World (1925), he demonstrated that the great scientific revolutions of Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, and others depended on thoughtful revisions in basic frames of reference. This perspective is the key to SSA’s argument: Parsons sought to create a scientific revolution by establishing a frame of reference that would enable sociology to extend and deepen its understanding of all social facts. This frame of reference presents action as an emergent order among abstractly defined analytical elements that are also variables capable of forming relations with one another in indefinitely many empirical combinations. His major writings are all efforts to develop, elaborate, and clarify a central frame of reference for sociology and related disciplines.

AFTER THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACTION Even as he worked to complete SSA, Parsons accepted the advice of senior colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere that his next project should be empirical. He planned a participant-observer study of medical practice to explore the professional type of role relations. With the debates of the Great Depression years over economic systems as background, Parsons suggested that the structure of professional role relationships falls between the principles of self-interest in capitalism and collective interest in socialism (Parsons 1949: ch. VIII). The professional is expected to act in the interest of the client rather than out of self-interest. Pay for professional services is limited by ethical standards, and was then often modified on a “sliding scale” by what clients could afford, not set at whatever price a competitive market would bear. (Today, in the US, rates of pay negotiated between health insurers and medical providers rather than the practitioner’s sliding scale protect covered patients from overwhelming costs while compensating the professional.) Over more than a year, Parsons observed medical practitioners in their work at Harvard Medical School hospitals and in their private practices. As became typical of his later empirical studies, the main results were empirically informed theoretical essays. His empirical findings were never written up for publication. His interests encompassed resolution of

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theoretical problems with practical and empirical implications, but did not extend to thorough reporting of empirical observations. Parsons’s most important writing in the post-SSA years was a monograph, Actor, Situation and Normative Pattern (Parsons [1939] 2010), which he apparently completed in 1939 but held back from publication. While the reasons he did not publish it remain obscure, it is possible that he was not satisfied with the rudimentary arguments of some sections. He did use the monograph in his teaching until he had drafts of his major publications of 1951 to circulate. The content of Actor, Situation … includes innovations that show the late 1930s not to have been the fallow period in his intellectual development that the secondary literature has long supposed. Thus, Parsons replaced the unit act with a more dynamic and relational notion of the actor engaged in a social situation as the conceptual focus of the action frame of reference. Within the situation, the actor is conceived as engaged in reciprocal relationships with another actor or other actors. Normative patterning structures the relationships among actors, supported by the social control that the actors exercise on one another’s conduct. Parsons emphasized that social control is a universal of social life, as relationships cannot be stabilized without actors holding normative expectations of one another and supporting their expectations with sanctions. In Actor, Situation … Parsons also introduced distinctions among what he called the cognitive, affective, and teleological aspects of actors’ orientations to social situations. He thus portrayed actors as relating to their situations and one another in terms of independent complexes of knowledge, emotion or feeling, and normative principles or standards. The affective or emotional dimension of orientation captured the motivational aspect of action and asserted its intrinsic relation to processes of social action, substituting a better developed and more dynamic conception for the element of effort that had figured in SSA. Parsons also suggested that actors, when viewed as objects to the orientations of other actors, presented them with cognitive, affective, and teleological or normative modalities of symbolic meaning. Actors are thus objects of knowledge, of feeling or sentiment, and of moral or normative significance to the planned conduct of other actors. These formulations were elaborated, with some changes in terminology, in Parsons’s major publications of 1951. It is notable that Actor, Situation …, with its emphasis on the affective aspects of action, shows psychoanalytic thought to have influenced Parsons several years earlier than generally recognized in the secondary literature. Actor, Situation … also includes Parsons’s first formulations pertaining directly to the social system level of the organization of action. A brief section broaches the topic of functions of social systems, focusing on the systemic need for integration, especially of societies with diverse and potentially conflicting interests. Although the discussion of functions was limited, it opened the topic for further investigation. In the late 1930s, Parsons became politically active as a leader among Harvard faculty who organized public opposition to Nazism in Germany and Bund activities in America (Gerhardt 1993). He spoke out against Nazi violations of academic freedom in the German universities and their attacks on elements of German high culture. Later, he was active in opposing German militarism and expansionism, and became an early proponent of supplying military equipment to Great Britain and preparing the United States for war. His opposition to Nazism remained free of

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anti-Germanism, however, and he continued to acknowledge his intellectual debt to the Kantian and social scientific traditions of German academic culture. Too old for military service, Parsons remained at Harvard during World War II, teaching and continuing his research. From 1943 to the end of the war, he taught in a Harvard program to prepare military, intelligence, and diplomatic officers to operate governments in occupied territories, including Germany and Japan. He served as consultant to government agencies about matters of wartime policy, but remained less deeply engaged in the war effort than some of his Harvard associates. After the war, Parsons worked to secure inclusion of the social sciences in permanent government funding for the sciences. The Social Sciences Research Council asked him to prepare a document for use in lobbying Congress to include the social sciences in the mandate of the National Science Foundation. The model was to be Vannevar Bush’s report which had persuaded the Truman administration and Congress that the nation should continue the public investments in science initiated during the war. Parsons’s knowledge, interests, and professional connections seemed to make him an ideal advocate for the social sciences, but his report (in Klausner & Lidz 1986: ch. 2) was too long, too theoretical, and too turgid for use in lobbying. However, it discussed an extraordinary range of the applied social science conducted as part of the war effort and outlined a number of imaginative proposals for further development of social scientific techniques to benefit the nation in peacetime. During the postwar period, Parsons became increasingly active in the American Sociological Association (then the Society). He attended meetings, served on committees, and on several occasions gave influential talks. He served as President in 1949–50 and later for a number of years as Secretary, assuming substantial administrative burdens. Giving particular attention to opportunities to promote sociological research, he sought out government and foundation support, including for types of large-scale data collection and archiving he did not conduct himself. Developing communication with scholars in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere was another longstanding professional priority. With the first thawing of the Cold War in the mid1960s, he cultivated ties with Soviet, Hungarian, Czechoslovak, and Polish social scientists. He was pleased to learn that informal translations of chapters of The Social System (1951) had been circulating underground among Soviet social scientists despite government controls on all means of duplicating texts. During the Cold War years, Parsons served on the board of Harvard’s Russian Research Center (RRC). He took part in the Harvard administration’s early discussions with the Carnegie Foundation and the Department of State to plan the RRC and later in decisions about its staffing. Parsons was committed to the principle that, under Cold War conditions, the USA needed more scholarly knowledge of the Soviet Union. He remained on the RRC board until the mid-1960s when his wife, Helen, retired as administrative assistant to the Director. Many years later, Parsons was criticized for his participation in the RRC’s close relationships with the State Department and intelligence agencies. However, allegations that during a trip to Europe in the summer of 1948 he had tried to recruit Nazi war criminals and collaborators to the staff of the RRC are belied by the letters (found in the 1980s in the RRC archives by the Danish political scientist Jen Nielsen) he sent to Clyde Kluckhohn, then Director of the RRC, reporting with whom he had spoken and about what.

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Parsons’s major organizational venture in the postwar period was leading the establishment of Harvard’s interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations (Nichols 1998). The department originated in a collaboration among Clyde Kluckhohn in anthropology, Henry A. Murray and Gordon Allport in psychology, and Parsons in sociology. The myth of the department’s founding is that each of the principals believed his professional advancement was being improperly blocked by his chairman (Sorokin in Parsons’s case), so that founding the new department was a political coup creating new opportunities for themselves, especially Parsons, its first chairman. The myth captured some truth of the academic politics, but in fact Parsons had already succeeded Sorokin as chair of Sociology in 1944. Moreover, the formation of the department was part of a trend toward interdisciplinary collaborations in the postwar period. All of sociology moved into the new department along with the social and cultural anthropologists and the clinical and social psychologists. A curriculum was developed that combined training in each of the several disciplines with interdisciplinary proseminars and requirements that students take courses in at least one field outside their own discipline. Talented students flocked to the new department and the special opportunities it offered. For more than a decade, the new curriculum was taught with élan and accepted by most students with enthusiasm. The later work of such Social Relations students as James Olds, Renee Fox, Robert Bellah, Clifford Geertz, and Neil Smelser shows that the interdisciplinary curriculum had important and enduring effects. Due largely to Parsons’s commitment, the benefits accrued more consistently to sociologists than anthropologists and psychologists.

TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF ACTION AND THE SOCIAL SYSTEM Just as the founding of the Sociology Department had enabled Parsons to write SSA, the founding of the Department of Social Relations initiated the period of Parsons’s greatest and most self-confident creativity. The new department convened a faculty seminar (including Visiting Professors Edward A. Shils from the University of Chicago and Edward Tolman from the University of California at Berkeley) to evaluate the importance of interdisciplinary thought to sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Essays from the seminar were published in Toward a General Theory of Action (Parsons & Shils 1951). The volume included a manifesto, signed by most members of the seminar, on the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship for the social and behavioral sciences, and then separate individual contributions. Parsons’s contribution, in collaboration with Shils, was a long, dense essay entitled “Values, Motives and Systems of Action.” Building upon, but modifying the formulations of Actor, Situation …, this essay presented two cross-cutting dimensions for analyzing differentiation among processes of social action. One dimension pertains to the tendency of ongoing systems of meaningful action to differentiate into three independent but interdependent subsystems: culture, social systems, and personalities. This conception of the threefold differentiation of action systems became one of the most famous themes in Parsons’s work. The second dimension concerns the differentiation of elements of action into moral-normative, cathectic-affective, and cognitive gradients. The authors argued

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that cultural, social, and personality systems all differentiate along these three gradients and, indeed, connect with one another independently along each gradient. The new formulation of this second dimension of differentiation, a revision of the triad of Actor, Situation …, also became a famous theme in Parsons’s work. The new scheme’s emphasis on culture, social system, and personality was widely interpreted as referring to the domains of anthropology, sociology, and psychology, thus legitimating the new department’s commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration. The essay’s thorough exploration of the connections between the two dimensions of differentiation produced a more detailed analytical scheme than that of SSA, making it more useful for empirical research. “Values, Motives, and Systems of Action” was quickly followed by The Social System (Parsons 1951), a major work that explored the sociological aspects of the same analytical scheme. Manuscripts make clear that a work entitled “The Social System” had been in preparation since the early 1940s. After years of slow and unsatisfying progress, Parsons rapidly revised and enriched prior drafts after the conceptual scheme of “Values, Motives, and Systems of Action” crystallized. The Social System addressed basic issues of definition and clarification of the concept of social system, introduced ideas of social process and dynamics, and explored the functional analysis of social systems. In chapters that proved highly influential, it discussed processes of socialization and personality development, the classic problems of deviance and social control, and the relations between social systems and cultural belief systems. A particularly successful chapter combined observations from Parsons’s earlier study of medical practice with his new conception of the social system to analyze the sick role and doctor–patient relationship. The resulting discussion became a charter for the early development of medical sociology as a specialty. Its concepts continue to be influential. The volume’s key conceptual-theoretical innovation was a shift in analytical focus from the “unit act” of SSA and the actor-situation frame of the 1939 manuscript to the “social system.” Parsons defined social systems as consisting of interactive relationships among individuals. The conceptual framework for sociology was thus based on abstracting the dynamics of interaction from the more comprehensive processes of meaningful human conduct. Sociology became the study of factors of interaction that keep relationships in stable states (equilibria) or cause them to change. Parsons again identified shared normative standards as a principal basis of stability and continuity in social relationships. However, his normative emphasis was reformulated in more dynamic terms. He now accentuated normative expectations that specify general norms (or rules) to particular situations of interaction and their constituent role relationships. Individuals who interact hold expectations of one another based on the specific social roles each of them occupies. Each actor supports his or her expectations of others by using a variety of tactics to sanction the others. The sanctioning tactics may include offering rewards for compliance with expectations and threatening, or actually imposing, punishments for noncompliance. Actual sequences of interaction are shaped by the expectations and sanctions introduced by all of the parties. Parsons noted that a “double contingency” applies to even the most elementary relationships because decision-making by each party is independent. Although Parsons discussed deviance and social control in a separate chapter, his dynamic reformulation of how norms affect interaction emphasized again that social

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control is a universal of social relationships. The orderliness of interaction is always problematic and thus always requires social control through the assertion of expectations, implicit or explicit promises to employ sanctions, and, especially when expectations are violated, the actual employment of sanctions, whether positive rewards or negative punishments. These elements of social control are embedded in all ongoing relationships, whether everyday informal interaction among friends or members of a family, the interaction of co-workers or workers and bosses in workshops or offices, lawyers negotiating a contract or representing parties in court, political candidates competing for electoral office or attempting to articulate public policy, or nation-states attempting to maintain economic collaboration or conclude a treaty. Sanctions range from casual expressions of approval or disapproval of the conduct or planned conduct of another, to the formal sanctions of civil and criminal law, to warfare. One feature of Parsons’s conception of social systems runs sharply counter to common intuition: the personalities of individual actors are not parts of social systems, even such large-scale social systems as whole societies. Rather, personalities are outside social systems because they constitute another class of system of action. Parsons therefore took up the question of how social systems and personality systems relate to one another in ongoing processes of social action. With his characteristic emphasis on normative elements, he focused on a linkage between the institutional norms of a society and the superegos of individual personalities. He argued that the normative structures of a society and the superegos of its individual actors constitute the same moral-normative cultural content, but differently incorporated in the two kinds of system: internalized in personalities and institutionalized in social systems. This formulation opened up a way of understanding the relationships between “social structure” and “personality” by incorporating dynamic ideas from psychology and psychoanalysis as well as sociology. Yet it avoided the temptation to confound social dynamics with personality dynamics, as had in one way or another many other theorists, from Malinowksi to Erich Fromm to Abram Kardiner to Theodor Adorno. Parsons also highlighted a theme of the “institutional integration of motivation,” stating that the motivational systems of individual personalities can be coherent and directed to specific goals only in so far as they are supported by social institutions and relationships. Reciprocally, social institutions require concertedly motivated individuals if responsibilities associated with their constituent social roles are to be fulfilled. The Social System also introduced new formulations in functional analysis. Parsons hypothesized that all social systems, whether mere dyads or entire societies, must manage two fundamental problems, namely, resource allocation and social integration. Resource allocation involves processes enabling role incumbents to command means necessary to attain expected ends. The nature of the resources in question varies immensely by the type of social relationship in question. Particular kinds of tools, personnel trained in special skills, and financial means are frequently crucial. Economic markets are generally efficient mechanisms for allocating resources in response to the diverse needs of many units of a society. Parsons’s conception of resource allocation as a function of social systems thus addressed a boundary between sociological and economic modes of analyses. The need for integration is in the long run as urgent for social systems as the need for resources. Mechanisms of social

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control can ensure that actors respond to one another’s expectations and fulfill role obligations in reciprocal, mutually reinforcing ways. Large-scale social systems require formal methods of social control and dispute resolution, such as courts, legal procedure, and mechanisms of law enforcement. Parsons recognized that processes of resource allocation and processes of social integration often operate in tension or conflict with each other. Resource allocations that support efficiency in early stages of industrialization, for example, may engender conflicts among social classes that threaten integration of the society. In many societies, the solidarity of traditional family and kin groups has required distribution of financial resources that disperses business capital and undermines family-based enterprise. Both “Values, Motives, and Systems of Action” and The Social System addressed problems of classifying components of action systems, whether motivational patterns of personalities, social relationships, or cultural beliefs. Long unsatisfied with global terms used to classify relationships and institutions, especially Ferdinand Tönnies’s contrast between Gemeinschaft (person-to-person community) and Gesellschaft (impersonal society), Parsons proposed a multidimensional classification, which he termed the pattern variables or, occasionally, pattern alternatives. Five dichotomous pattern variables were presented. Two of the variables define choices in the ways actors orient themselves to objects in a situation. The first is affectivity versus affective neutrality, and defines whether an actor will seek direct gratification or adopt a stance of renunciation toward the object. The second pattern variable is universalism versus particularism, and defines the kind of value-standard to be engaged in the situation. A universalistic standard evaluates an open set of objects in terms of the same criteria, as when a teacher uses the same criteria to grade all students in a class. A particularistic standard invokes different criteria for each kind of relationship between actor and object, as between father and son, or among fellow citizens of a town versus outsiders. The third and fourth pattern variables concern modalities or characteristics of objects that an actor selects as significant for his or her conduct. The third pattern variable is ascription versus achievement or quality versus performance, and defines whether the object is significant for who or what it is or for what it does or can do. A person who obtains a job as a member of the employing family gets it by ascription, while a person who obtains it by prior training and experience gets it by achievement. The fourth pattern variable is specificity versus diffuseness, and defines the scope of the object’s significance for the actor. Does an actor relate to another only as a fellow employee, for example, or also as a close friend or family member whose overall well-being is of concern? The fifth pattern variable is self-orientation versus collectivity-orientation, and defines whether the actor pursues his or her personal ends or the ends of a collectivity (a sports team, research group, or nation) in relating to objects. All five pattern variables were presented as phenomenological dichotomies. At a given choice-point in a process of action, one term in a pattern variable must be chosen and the other rejected. However, planning complex courses of action may involve a sequence of decision-points, and an actor may choose first one term of a pattern variable and later its opposite, creating an appearance of having chosen a middle point. The five pattern variables, Parsons claimed, provide an exhaustive definition of basic alternatives for social action. Few critics have agreed with this claim, although most have agreed that the pattern variables capture basic options. As a set, they offer

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a conceptually powerful alternative to the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy. The combination of affectivity, collectivity-orientation, particularism, ascription, and diffuseness is a multidimensional characterization of Gemeinschaft, while the combination of affective neutrality, self-orientation, universalism, achievement, and specificity similarly characterizes Gesellschaft. Parsons claimed that a number of other pattern variable combinations are also important for characterizing the functional significance of various institutions within larger systems. The value of the pattern variables has been confirmed by many empirical studies in sociology, political science, and economics. Parsons presented The Social System as an authoritative and carefully considered successor to SSA. While it was creative and filled with suggestive leads for further investigation, many of its formulations were provisional. Only months after its publication, Parsons started work on a new foundation for functional theory, the “four function paradigm.” He then used the new functional concepts to reorganize practically the entire theory of social action. Because of the status claimed for The Social System, however, many sociologists who had been interested in his work failed to follow subsequent developments in action theory. Sociologists who continued to rely on The Social System for an overview of his theory often failed to grasp the importance of his later writings. When telling critiques of The Social System were published, whether focusing on its relatively weak chapter on social change, its brilliant but flawed discussion of deviance and social control, or its inadequate presentation of functional analysis, many social scientists remained unaware that Parsons’s thought had already moved far beyond the criticized formulations.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE FOUR FUNCTION PARADIGM After writing The Social System, Parsons’s major interest was to refine the concept of function in social systems. Building on the notions of resource allocation and integration, he strove to develop an abstract, generalized, and multidimensional scheme to address basic issues of how social systems are organized. His effort bore fruit with Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Parsons, Bales & Shils 1953), which introduced the four function paradigm. The four function scheme originated in Parsons’s collaboration with Robert F. Bales, who had conducted laboratory studies of interaction in small groups assigned specific tasks for discussion. To examine issues of leadership, authority, conflict, maintenance of task-focus, and group solidarity, Bales had devised a scheme of 16 categories to describe types of contribution to group process. He had demonstrated that he could observe groups, record the predominant category of contribution made by each participatory act of a group member, and later analyze the shifting emphases among the 16 categories of group interaction. Bales (1950) called these changing emphases in interaction “phase movements.” He argued that over time phase movements enable the interaction of group members to address various “needs” of task-oriented groups, for example the need for clear coordination to attain specific goals or the need for mutual positive feeling among members. Working together, Parsons and Bales grouped the 16 categories of interaction process into four more general categories representing fundamental “needs” of the groups.

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In their initial formulation, the four “functional” categories were presented as empirical generalizations about the needs of groups based on Bales’s studies of a particular kind of group. The four categories were claimed to demarcate the dimensions of social “space” within which “phase movements” occur. They were designated “functions” because the phase movements were thought to respond to enduring needs of groups. A bolder formulation emerged later in The Working Papers: that every social system needs to handle the same four general “system problems” in order to function. Parsons and colleagues argued that social relationships and institutions – or, more precisely, aspects of them – can be classified by how they contribute to managing one or more of the four “system problems.” Parsons soon referred to the system problems as “functions.” By the 1960s, the notion of function was presented less as a system problem than as an abstract dimension of social organization. The resulting “four function paradigm” became an explicit or implicit conceptual frame for practically every contribution to sociology, theoretical or empirical, that Parsons made after the mid-1950s. With the four function paradigm, he approached more closely the goal set early in his career of developing an abstract, formal, and universal ground for sociological analysis and explanation. The four system problems or functions are: ●

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Adaptation, the processes of gaining generalized control over conditions in the environment of an action system. Often, these processes involve generating new resources for, or allocating available resources more efficiently among, units of the system in order to gain new capabilities for future action. Goal attainment, the processes of organizing the activities of social units into a concerted effort to achieve a desired change in the system’s relationship to its environment. Other collectivities or societies may be parts of the environment and predominating over their interests may be a chief goal. Integration, the processes of adjustment to one another among units of the system. The processes may promote long-term attachment to the system and/ or mutual dependence among its units. Pattern maintenance, the processes of generating long-term commitment to shared values and other principles of action that distinguish the system of reference from other systems.

Particular processes of action may be located on all four dimensions, but generally they are able to specialize on any one dimension only at the expense of capabilities on the other three dimensions. Moreover, strength on one dimension during one phase of action typically requires an ongoing system to develop compensatory strengths on other dimensions during later phases. A system that emphasizes adaptation in one phase might generate strains that require emphasis on the integrative dimension soon afterward. To develop a capability to emphasize more than one function at a time, systems tend to generate differentiated structures. Highly differentiated systems, e.g., whole societies, tend to maintain separate structural complexes for serving each of the four functions. Because the four function paradigm was so abstract, many years of work were needed before Parsons’s earlier formulations could be thoroughly assimilated to it.

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Parsons never completed this task despite recasting many earlier ideas. Yet, the strengths and attractions of the four function paradigm were fundamental. Early “functionalist” theories, including formulations in The Social System, were open to the basic criticism that the number of functions was indefinite and their specific definitions were arbitrary. Empirical analyses often resulted in inconsistent or even ad hoc hypotheses about functions. These difficulties limited the appeal of early functional analysis as a strategy for theory construction. By contrast, the theory of four system problems constituted a definite a priori list of basic functions. The four function paradigm also led to interesting hypotheses about patterns of organization that obtain among social institutions differentiated in terms of function. These hypotheses were gradually clarified as Parsons applied the paradigm to wider ranges of empirical materials. In its last chapter, the Working Papers proposed that the four functions might be used to represent major dimensions of structural differentiation in society as a whole. This speculation forecast much of Parsons’s theoretical work over the next two decades, which gradually produced a theory of four functionally specialized subsystems of society. Each of the four subsystems was treated as a complex set of dynamically interdependent institutions that could in turn be analyzed along the same four functional dimensions. The new schema of societal subsystems (and subsubsystems) presented an approach to macrosocial analysis that, although never completely worked out, remains even today more comprehensive and analytically incisive than any alternative theory of societal organization. In outline, the four subsystems of society, as they came to be identified, are as follows: ●

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The economy is the subsystem that serves the adaptive function by developing and allocating basic resources for use by individual and collective units of the society. It consists of such institutions as markets for labor and capital, entrepreneurial roles, the legal complexes of property, contract, credit, and employment, processes of production, and the organizational structure of business firms. The polity is the subsystem of society that coordinates the attainment of collective goals. Governmental agencies at all levels, including the administrative, executive, legislative, and judicial arms of public authority, are the primary institutional components of the polity, although Parsons also emphasized various nonpublic organizations and especially the role of the citizen. The societal community is the subsystem specialized about the integration of society. Social classes, status groups, ethnic groups, groups that share elements of “lifestyle,” and other groups that maintain diffuse and enduring ties of solidarity contribute to a society’s manner of social integration. The dynamically interrelated phenomena of integration and conflict are shaped largely by institutions of class structure, status order, and “primordial” solidary ties, but also by law and the informal normative orders of community mores. The fiduciary system serves the pattern maintenance function and is the subsystem specialized about the transmission (or reproduction), maintenance, and development of a society’s enduring values and shared culture. The institutions of religion, family and kinship, and socialization and education are

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major constituents of the fiduciary system. Following the lead of Max Weber, Parsons emphasized that change in fiduciary systems, notably in religious ethics, have been the greatest forces toward large-scale, long-term social change. The theory of societal subsystems retained Parsons’s earlier emphasis on normative order. However, it achieved a new level of analysis of the forms that normative structures assume and the functions they serve in different institutional settings, such as economic exchange, relationships of political authority, solidary ties among members of a status group, or processes of socialization in family life. The four function paradigm thus opened a new approach to analyzing the articulations between normative orders and practical institutions of societal functioning, e.g., economic markets, political bureaucracies, class structures, or families. The new synthesis transcended in principle (not always in specific empirical discussions) the nineteenthcentury dichotomies between normative and interest-driven or ideal and material factors in social causation. Parsons argued that every effective social institution embodies an integration of normative and interest-driven, ideal and material factors. To be sure, the two dimensions can under practical circumstances be stripped apart, with relationships then formed on either ideal or contrary material grounds, even creating situations in which self-interest can be pursued only through violation of normative rules. Such anomic situations typically arise during periods of rapid social change and frequent conflict. However, effective long-term functioning of social institutions depends on normative regulation of material, interest-driven factors. Under such conditions, the pursuit of self-interest reinforces the controlling normative institutions, as when the ordinary conduct of business requires reliance upon the institutions of property, contract, and employment. From early in the development of the four function paradigm, Parsons sought to integrate it with the pattern variable schema. In Working Papers and two later essays (Parsons, in Black 1961; Parsons 1967: ch. 7), he described combinations of pattern variables that characterize social action related most directly to each of the four functions. Yet, these accounts did not bridge the essential differences between the logical starting points of the two schemes — phenomenological choices among value-pattern alternatives, on the one hand, and dimensions of the organization of systems, on the other hand.

THE MARSHALL LECTURES AND ECONOMY AND SOCIETY Parsons spent the academic year of 1953–4 at the University of Cambridge in England, where he delivered the first Marshall Lectures. When he accepted the visiting professorship, he understood that Cambridge, not yet having made a place for sociology on its faculty, was considering whether to do so. The social science faculty was dominated by economists and economic historians who were skeptical of sociology. Parsons hoped to advance sociology’s cause at Cambridge by demonstrating that the discipline could contribute innovatively to economic understanding. He thus planned to use the four function scheme of societal subsystems to analyze the relations between economic institutions and other major institutional structures of society.

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The Marshall Lectures (Parsons 1986) started with the idea that Keynes’s treatment of the twofold exchange between the aggregate of business firms and the aggregate of households (wages for labor; goods and services for consumer spending) could be treated as the dynamic boundary between the adaptive and pattern maintenance subsystems of society. Parsons then suggested that each of the four classic factors of economic production, labor, capital, organization, and land, could be treated as an input to the economy from an extra-economic source. Just as labor (meaning a trained and socialized capability to perform economically valuable work) was an input from the pattern maintenance system, so capital (financial means of controlling and allocating “real” economic resources) was an input from the polity, and organization (the capability to develop innovative relations of production and thus a concept incorporating entrepreneurship) was an input from the system of social integration with its class and status orders. All three of these factors – not only labor – entered the economy through twofold exchange relationships, which Parsons called “double interchanges.” When viewed in disaggregation, the double interchanges were clearly mediated by complicated, highly differentiated markets. The factor of land Parsons treated as a special case. He used the term “land” to refer to the commitment of resources to economic production rather than to other possible uses, e.g., political or cultural. Land thus represented a factor generated through the specification of general cultural values to the legitimation of economic institutions, activities, and use of resources. A related conceptual innovation in the Marshall Lectures was to use the four function theory to analyze the economy itself into subsystems (and later subsubsystems). Parsons aligned the double interchanges with the resulting scheme of subsystems of the economy: the labor for wages, goods and services for consumer spending interchange was treated as the boundary relationship of the economy’s goal attainment subsystem; the interchanges centering on capital markets were identified as the boundary relationship of the adaptive subsystem; the input of the factor of organization was placed in the economy’s integrative subsystem; and markets involving “land” were treated as part of the economy’s pattern maintenance function. An implication of Parsons’s treatment of the economy’s boundary relationships is that the four subsystems of society are joined together through six double interchanges, each of which is a dynamic mechanism enabling two subsystems to adjust to each other’s ongoing operational needs. In addition, each subsystem is regulated internally by a factor that, like “land” in the economy, represents the commitment of resources to a broad type of social process. In sum, by combining the four function theory with the theory of double interchanges, Parsons had developed a model for analyzing the ways in which functionally differentiated institutions adjust to one another’s changing operations and requirements. Parsons later suggested that the general equilibrium of a society could be analyzed in terms of the six dynamic interchanges. This vision of how social process might be analyzed in relation to institutional structure guided much of Parsons’s later work. While writing the Marshall Lectures, Parsons began a correspondence on their key ideas with Neil J. Smelser, who had studied with him as an undergraduate and was then taking courses in economics at Oxford. Smelser was able to relate some of Parsons’s Marshallian formulations to newer developments in Keynesian economics and to correct technical errors in Parsons’s early formulations. When Smelser

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returned to Harvard for graduate studies, he collaborated with Parsons in expanding the Marshall Lectures into Economy and Society (Parsons & Smelser 1956), which achieved greater analytical detail in its use of the four function and double interchange schemes than any of Parsons’s other works. It analyzed in depth the institutions that regulate each type of market involved in the various boundary processes of the economy and its subsystems. Economy and Society thus presented the most thorough demonstration of Parsons’s emphasis on the normative, institutional regulation of social process. In key respects, it achieved a level of specificity in these analyses that Parsons was not able to match in later discussions of the other subsystems of society. Nevertheless, Parsons understated the extensive differentiation in the various boundary-relation markets of the economy, e.g., labor markets, consumer markets, and capital markets, thereby conveying an impression of an overly facile analysis, too distant from the empirical details of economic life, and failing to underscore problems requiring further research on the parts of both economists and sociologists. Despite its brilliance and originality, Economy and Society failed to stimulate the interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical research for which Parsons had hoped. Smelser (1959) later examined the historical conflicts involved in the growth of the double interchange relationship between businesses and households in eighteenthand nineteenth-century England. In the years since, he has continued to be a major contributor to the literature in the sociology of economic life and institutions.

FAMILY AND SOCIALIZATION While working on Economy and Society, Parsons continued his collaboration with Bales. Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (Parsons and Bales 1955) discussed the American middle-class family of the postwar era as a social institution. It emphasized the emergence of the “nuclear” family made up of husband, wife, and children as the typical household unit, and as autonomous from extended kinship units in terms of organization and budget. It examined role structures within the family, noting the importance of both gender and generational axes of role differentiation. The core of the book analyzed the structure of the parent–child role relationship as it evolves during the lengthy process of socialization of children. Socialization was presented as a multi-stage, highly dynamic process of engaging children in more inclusive social relationships, starting with the mother–baby dyad, then progressing to inclusion of the father, then any siblings, then relatives, peers, and eventually others in the local community, and beyond. At the same time, children engage these relationships increasingly at the level of symbolic communication and in terms of affective investment as well as bodily drives and needs. Parental control of the process (the generational axis of role differentiation) is essential to children’s internalization of moral-normative standards of conduct as an integral part of their growing reliance on symbolic communication. Parsons argued that parental control requires maintaining a mutually supportive coalition between mother and father and consistency in normative standards when interacting with children. Family, Socialization … is the most thoroughly developed of Parsons’s contributions to the integration of sociological and psychodynamic theory. The work addresses,

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perhaps more insightfully than any recent study, the profoundly affectual or emotional make-up of relationships in the modern nuclear family, with an erotically based love relationship between parents, the non-erotic love of parents for children, and the love of children for parents that gradually transcends childhood eroticism in favor of more stably modulated and enduring affective ties. The emotional intensity of familial relationships often places them under great stress and leaves them vulnerable if normative standards are compromised. The family is also portrayed in dynamic terms, emphasizing rapid change in role relationships as children mature, parents grow older, and relations evolve with such entities as business firms, schools, and voluntary associations in the broader community. As a consequence of this broad analysis, Parsons and Bales viewed contemporary American family relationships as susceptible to failure despite a strong cultural valuation of family life. The potential for failure manifests itself in high rates of divorce and frequent disturbances in the socialization of children. Their discussion included a number of hypotheses about how disturbed relationships between parents and children result in longer-term emotional illness for the children. Family, Socialization …, sections of The Social System, and the collection of papers, Social Structure and Personality (1964), show that Parsons was among the most creative psychoanalytic theorists of his generation. Parsons has been criticized by feminists for his treatment of gender differentiation in the role structure of the family. There is little doubt that he reified the gender roles of the 1950s and did not anticipate later changes. But gender relations when he wrote were very different from today’s. He did not have the intent of restricting women’s roles that his discussion might appear to imply today. His characterization of the emotional and dynamic qualities of family life should not be rejected along with the reification of older gender relations. As Miriam M. Johnson (1988) argued in several essays, his analysis of differentiation in gender roles and in gender-related styles of interaction holds continuing importance for understanding family, socialization, and gender.

AMERICAN SOCIETY From the early 1950s, Parsons held the ambition of writing a work that would combine four function macrosocial analysis with interpretation of American society’s principal features in the light of current social scientific findings. In the late 1950s, he tried out his ideas in several long working papers. In 1961, he invited Winston White, who had just finished his doctoral dissertation in the Department of Social Relations and whose main interest was the interpretation of American society, to collaborate. Together, Parsons and White drafted several chapters, then reorganized their chapter outline and wrote several new chapters, all totaling over 600 pages (Parsons & White 1962). At that point, White left the profession of sociology and Parsons set the project aside without publishing any of their manuscripts, thus leaving a gap in the record of his developing thought, one that should soon be filled by publication of the key draft materials. With the emergence of the four function theory, Parsons had sharpened a theme in his writing that predated even SSA. This theme, rooted in Weber’s comparative studies, is that shared value orientations are a controlling factor among the many

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elements that make up institutional orders. Parsons had proposed that social structures can be analyzed into four kinds of elements, values (ideals), norms (rules), collectivities (organized groups), and roles (modes of individual participation in social relationships). These elements respectively serve pattern maintenance, integrative, goal attainment, and adaptive functions in the creation of structure. Parsons also suggested that these elements form what he called a cybernetic hierarchy, a concept derived from Norbert Wiener (1948). For Wiener, a cybernetic relation involves a well designed regulator guiding a more powerful mechanism, as when a thermostat, turning a furnace on and off, controls the heat it produces or a steering wheel guides the motion of a car. Parsons noted that Freud had made a similar point in comparing the ego’s relation to the id with a rider’s relation to a horse. Yet Freud had noted that riders can lose control with horses becoming runaways. Control relationships can break down and the more forceful mechanism can run free, having lost guidance. What Parsons proposed is that the relationships among values, norms, collectivities, and roles (or among ideals, practical interests, and material conditions) are cybernetic. Control or guidance is exercised through them, but may be placed at risk under conditions of stress. The manuscripts on American society emphasize the importance of a value system as a set of cybernetic controls guiding the long-term evolution and general characteristics of a society. Parsons had pronounced an emphasis on values in a number of writings, but had left it to the planned book on American society to argue the claim in detail. The draft materials spell out the conception of a cybernetically controlling value system in greater detail than any of Parsons’s publications. Parsons had in mind a complex system of many components, themselves hierarchically organized. They extend from abstract religious premises or grounds of belief, to religious ethics in Weber’s sense, to generalized secular moral beliefs (including, in American culture, the “law of nature” and “universal human rights”), to ideals of social organization, to more specific values that legitimate “land” factors in the economy and similar complexes in the other subsystems of society. Parsons argued that the most general elements of a value system tend to be highly stable, even over centuries of social change, while more specific elements change under the pressures of social movements and advances in institutional differentiation. Parsons’s manuscripts portray a unity of American values based on generalized religious premises that derive from the Puritan heritage of early colonial settlers and which he characterized as “instrumental activism.” Instrumental activism is the belief that everything in the human condition should be mastered by human will and energies and perfected to the extent possible. Its religious dimension is the effort to build “the kingdom of God on earth.” Yet many secular strivings derive meaning from the same premises of mastery. Athletes who train prodigiously, scholars who study intensely, and entrepreneurs who cultivate new production methods may all be responding to instrumental activism’s mandate for progressive improvement. At the level of collectivities, business firms, universities, and voluntary associations may all follow the same ideals of progressive mastery, yet be active in different domains of society and guided by different specific values of achievement. In this manner, Parsons accounted for functional, social class, ethnic, and regional variations in specific values, while also arguing that American society has shown since its early history a strong consensus around underlying principles of instrumental activism.

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THE POLITY, POWER, AND SYMBOLIC MEDIA OF INTERCHANGE After publishing Economy and Society, Parsons wrote a number of essays that together conceptualize the polity or political subsystem of society in terms parallel to his four function analysis of the economy. A notable essay (Parsons 1969: ch. 9) reinterpreted the findings of then recent survey research on voters and the electoral system in terms of a double interchange between the polity and integrative institutions. A later essay (Parsons 1969: ch. 13) presented a four function analysis of the primary subsystems of the polity. The most important essay, “On the Concept of Political Power” (Parsons 1969: ch. 14), reformulated the double interchange between the polity and the integrative subsystem in terms of a radically new conception of power. The essay argued that political processes in modern democracies involve double interchanges between the polity as goal attainment subsystem of society and the organized citizenry or “public” as a sector of the integrative subsystem. In the double interchange, the polity receives a factor of political process, analogous to economic factors of production, in the form of “interest demands,” or expressions of opinion about needed changes in public policy, from the public. The integrative system in return receives “policy decisions” as a factor for adjusting the lives of citizens to changing social circumstances. The polity also receives inputs of “political support” as a product of integrative processes in the public sector, the support taking the form of votes that, as aggregated under the electoral laws, bindingly determine holders of office. The public sector then receives, as product of processes within the polity, “leadership responsibility” as assurance that the well-being of the citizenry will be addressed through ongoing political processes. The double exchanges of, first, factors and, then, products between the two systems create a complex feedback mechanism promoting mutual adjustment between the polity and the integrative subsystems of society. The political double interchange shares certain characteristics with the double interchange between business firms and households. As an equilibrium process, it contains significant capabilities to absorb and adjust to changing social conditions. It also has capabilities for growth and expansion, as when new types of interestdemands enter the political arena and eventually lead to new policies and perhaps legislation, potentially increasing the effectiveness of political action. Parsons suggested that a well ordered polity is capable of long-term expansion similar to the growth of modern economies. Expansion should benefit the citizenry through increased levels of attainment of the society’s collective goals. However, Parsons also noted that polities can contract, reducing the level of effective political activity and harming the collective well-being. Contractions in public trust can restrict the scope of interest-demands acceptable in the polity and/or of leadership responsibility acceptable among the citizenry, thus precipitating a sort of political depression. He cited the McCarthyism of the 1950s as an example of a deflationary political force and later suggested that the Watergate events during the Nixon administration similarly contracted confidence in the polity, reducing its capacity for innovation. In demonstrating the possibilities for political expansion and contraction, Parsons raised the question of whether political life involves a mediator of process similar to money’s role in the general equilibrium of the economy. Keynes had shown imbalances

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in the circulation of money as wages and as consumer spending to be sources of depression. Hypothesizing that political process must have an analogue of money, Parsons proposed to treat power as a circulating medium for political relationships and a measure of political efficacy, much as money is both medium of economic exchange and measure of economic value. If power is viewed as a capacity to make formally binding decisions on behalf of a collectivity, it can be seen as something expended with every political decision, just as money is expended with every purchase. In expending power, officials must anticipate ways of gaining new incomes of power. Parsons argued that binding decisions issued by public authorities amount to a form of calculated investment designed to attract new power through future electoral support. The new conception of power departed from established ideas in political science. In the conventional view, an authority exercises power over others and often as means of frustrating their pursuit of goals. Power relationships are regarded as zerosum, such that power of one person is held at the expense of others. Power has also typically been portrayed as a diffuse resource, as involving any means of attaining ends over the wishes of others. Parsons noted that influential figures from Machiavelli to Weber to his own contemporaries favored this conventional view. He argued, however, that power is a specialized resource that enables duly authorized officers to make binding decisions on behalf of a collectivity, whether a nation, state, city, or private agency or business firm. The binding quality of power distinguishes it from other means of pursuing ends, such as expenditures of money or personal influence. Parsons acknowledged that power can be exercised over others, as in court decisions or military orders, but also noted that it is often used impersonally and in some circumstances becomes binding only by aggregation, as when the votes of a majority elect an official. He also argued that power, when properly regulated, can benefit the public and bring advantages, including greater power, to the citizenry as well as public officials. Power should not be viewed as intrinsically zero-sum, but as zerosum only in certain limited circumstances, such as political competition. Finally, Parsons suggested that power, like circulating currency, is a symbolic entity. Previous literature had linked power closely with force, but Parsons argued that actors typically resort to force when their power has been challenged and their ability to command is uncertain (Parsons 1967: ch. 9). Power is a quality of commands that renders them duly authorized and likely to be obeyed. It is linked to the situated procedures through which it is issued, and its symbolism, as in the forms of court orders, military commands, or legislative enactments, is intrinsic to its efficacy. In this respect, it is like legitimate currency, which derives its value from its precise printed form and the situations of its use. Parsons’s conception of power led him to the insight that money as circulating symbolic medium is not unique, but one of a class of media. He soon argued that each of the primary subsystems of society must have its own circulating medium. An essay on influence (Parsons 1969: ch. 15) as capacity to persuade treated it as the circulating medium of the integrative system. Although unsatisfactory in certain respects, the essay capitalized on the body of research on personal influence and reference group relationships by Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert K. Merton, and their colleagues. Parsons later completed his scheme of media of societal subsystems with a less thoroughly developed essay on value-commitments as the medium of the fiduciary system (Parsons 1969: ch. 16).

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There have been two common sources of confusion about Parsons’s writings on power, influence, and value commitments. One derives from the observation that we commonly think of money in terms of its physical embodiments, that is, as circulating coins and bills, but there are no “power chits,” “influence vouchers,” or “commitment coupons” circulating in everyday society. Yet, a preponderance of the money in modern economies exists only as entries in accounts at financial institutions. Money is routinely transferred between institutions without ever being represented by coins or bills. The lack of physical representation is therefore not a characteristic that distinguishes power, influence, and commitments from money. A more basic issue is that power, influence, and commitments do not exist in the discrete quantities in which we think of money. We can calculate the precise quantities of the money in our bank accounts, even if their real purchasing power changes over time. Goods and services we buy have prices, designated quantities of money needed for their purchase. Power, influence, and value commitments do not share this precise quantitative form. There are not definite “power prices” for resolving particular issues of public policy, nor are public policies promulgated by expending specific numbers of units of power. But we do commonly view power, influence, and commitments in quantitative terms. We speak of high officials as exercising a great deal of power, of leaders in a profession as highly influential among their peers, or of a person who has taken on too many responsibilities as overcommitted. We understand that systems of authority are built on methodical allocations of power among officials, and we know that a new office, such as Secretary of Homeland Security, can affect an entire structure of powers. We expect high officials to have greater power than their formal subordinates. Parsons also seems correct when he argues that a public official who expends power to promulgate a major policy places at risk his or her ability to command sufficient power to resolve future issues. If the policy proves successful and popular, the official may acquire greater power, but if it fails, he or she loses power. Parsons suggested that differences in quantitative form among the media are functionally related to the kinds of social resources or capacities they represent. While power, influence, and commitments have quantitative aspects, their uses would be compromised if, like money, they circulated in definite quantities. We can understand this point easily with respect to commitments. Commitments circulate in the form of promises to undertake courses of action that others can rely upon in planning their own activities. A professor may commit to teaching specific courses so that students can rely upon obtaining instruction in areas essential to their studies. However, the amount of effort needed to fulfill a commitment often changes with unanticipated circumstances. The professor may find that there is new research that he or she must master in order to convey a competence in the subject matter to students. Or the students may be less well prepared to study the course materials than anticipated. In such cases, more work may be needed to teach the class than the professor had planned. Often actors know that they have made large commitments without knowing just what efforts will be needed to fulfill them. Yet a commitment may be valueless to others if they cannot count upon its fulfillment despite changed circumstances. The theory of generalized symbolic media has been controversial from its first formulation. Some have regarded it as among Parsons’s most brilliant ideas, while

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others have argued that it is basically confused. That Parsons and his colleagues have proposed significant changes in formulations concerning the set of the media has likely amplified these differences of opinion. Lidz (2001) has reviewed and partially reframed the theory of the media.

THE THEORY OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION In late 1962, Alex Inkeles, a departmental colleague, asked Parsons to contribute to a new textbook series and suggested that he update The Social System in terms of the four function paradigm, double interchanges, and societal media. Parsons, however, chose to address materials he had been teaching in his course on comparative institutional analysis, which he had revised to emphasize a perspective of social evolution. In the proposed book, he planned to analyze a number of historical societies that differed in institutional differentiation and complexity and in basic cultural patterns. He also sought to develop a theory of social change that would place the understanding of societies and institutions on the basis of a universal dynamic comparable to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Parsons did not complete the social evolution project until after 1970. By then he had written two textbooks, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966) and The System of Modern Societies (1971). The first presented a broad typology of primitive, archaic, historic, and “seed bed” societies. The chapter on “primitive” (nonliterate) societies drew upon a range of anthropological materials on Australian, African, South American, and Asian “tribal” peoples. It discussed the religious, kinship, political, and economic institutions of several societies. It also explored differences in levels of institutional complexity among nonliterate societies. However, Parsons’s discussion of how simpler societies have evolved into more complex ones did not successfully integrate theoretical analysis with available empirical materials. In discussing the archaic type of society, Parsons compared the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations of antiquity. The type is defined in terms of a number of interdependent criteria: literacy on the part of craft specialists; central cults where priests monopolize the rituals and interpretation of religious beliefs; written codes of law; a class system secured by legally codified discriminations among aristocrats, commoners, and slaves; a central administrative apparatus; consolidation of authority around an institution of kingship; intensive agriculture; storehouses for essential goods; local markets for craft and agricultural produce; and concentration of non-agricultural populations in towns. Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations both included all of these elements, yet differed in basic ways. Egyptian society emphasized religious and political institutions while assimilating them to one another in the cult of a divine pharaoh. Mesopotamian societies emphasized economic and integrative institutions while giving greater autonomy to extended household units for agricultural and craft production. Their legal systems were more highly developed, their social class systems more flexible, and trade among city-states more active. Egypt established a unified society with a stable core territory over thousands of years. Mesopotamian civilization spawned many independent states, endemic rivalry and warfare, mixing of populations through trade and conquest, and repeated rise and fall of empires.

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Parsons’s discussion of “historic” civilizations covered the classical Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Roman empires. All these civilizations extended over vast domains and included populations of many ethnicities. Their cultural foundations rested on religio-philosophical belief systems with transcendental conceptions of sources of value and of legitimation for social institutions. Their class systems included honored status groups as the primary interpreters and proponents of their religio-philosophical traditions. Parsons followed Weber in focusing on the social make-up and privileged lifeways of the key status groups. His comparison between the Confucian mandarins in China and the Brahmin priests of India, for example, highlighted differences between the two civilizations that affected practically all of their respective social institutions. The Confucians sought worldly honor by cultivating genteel ways of life, participating in the affairs of the patrimonial state, gaining wealth from land rents, and exercising leadership for their extended families. The Brahmins sought to flee everything that represented worldly attachment. In terms of the “caste system” (a Western term), the Brahmin order included many independent kin-based groups of essentially local importance which nevertheless shared the prestige of priesthood. They typically lived off fees for performing rituals for many other “castes,” and sometimes off land rents or service as literate advisors to ruling households. Their positions in the “caste system” prevented them from participating directly in major economic or political roles and from accumulating great wealth or power. Their prestige rested on a monopoly of priestly “magic” and mastery of classic religious writings and ritual processes. Parsons analyzed each of the major “historic” civilizations in terms of general concepts derived from the four function paradigm. He attended to economic production through the organization of agriculture, the crafts, and trade; political life through institutions of patrimonial authority, administration, territorial control, and military organization; integrative institutions through class systems, status groups, inter-ethnic relations, and institutions of law; and religious traditions and cult practices. By using a common scheme to analyze the several radically different civilizations, Parsons made a significant contribution despite the brevity of his discussion. Parsons termed ancient Greece and Israel “seed bed” societies because their religious and philosophical cultures became important for later civilizations, despite their archaic size, wealth, and power. Greek philosophy was the ultimate source of ideals of objective reason that became essential to early and medieval Christian theology, Renaissance philosophy, Enlightenment rationalism, and modern science. Greek ideals of the polis or politically autonomous city-state, mediated by Roman tradition, became the cultural source of late medieval and Renaissance political ideals and modern republican traditions. The Hebraic conception of a transcendent, but personal and jealous God who enters history to reward and punish peoples for their human achievements and failings became the key source of Christian theodicy and religious ethics. Hebrew sacred writings became sources of ethical renewal for Western civilization in many epochs, especially the Reformation, with the later prophets, notably Isaiah, being particularly important. For sociology, an interesting problem is to understand the mechanisms that enabled elements of ancient cultures to stimulate basic cultural and institutional innovations over millennia down to our time.

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The System of Modern Societies presented the modern form of society as a distinctive evolutionary type that originated in Western civilization, but has since developed worldwide effects. Parsons’s analysis of why modern society originated only in the West started by emphasizing distinctively dynamic institutions that emerged centuries before modernity. Western Roman authority fragmented after the invasions of warrior “tribes” migrating from central Asia, resulting in the emergence of many small, overlapping, yet competing societies, often both tribal and feudal. Medieval civilization then developed through several consolidating forces: Christian religion with a partly universalistic priesthood and church hierarchy; the heritage of Roman imperium, with ideals of effective law and unitary authority; a class system centering on a feudal-military nobility; political authority based in fortified manors, but aggregated into hierarchies through ties of vassalage; agricultural production based in peasant villages; and active commerce and craft production centered in towns and country manors. From the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new European civilization emerged through changes that involved: the Church, with the growth of monastic orders, literacy, scholarship, systematic theology, and “bureaucratic” organization; the larger political domains of France, England, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire; consolidation of the nobility as a privileged status group; extension of trade across the continent and to the Near East and Asia; cultivation of republican traditions dating from antiquity among independent cities; and rapid evolution of craft production and guilds. Through these changes, European civilization evolved institutional patterns distinct from those of antiquity, bounded (except for Spain) against Islamic Asia, Africa, and the Near East, and growing in cultural and technical sophistication. This civilization was then transformed by the cultural movements of the Renaissance, with its secular turn in the arts, technology, and moral culture, and the Reformation, with its redirection of fundamental religious beliefs and ethics. Following Weber, Parsons emphasized the Calvinist ethic of inner-worldly asceticism against a background of other movements in the Reformation. The two centuries following the Reformation were a period of intense social conflict and repeated efforts to create new social foundations. The societies where ascetic Protestantism came to predominate, e.g., Geneva, Holland, England, and the North American colonies, developed stringent religious ethics and an impetus to break with traditional institutions. By the eighteenth century, ascetic Protestantism began to accommodate secular as well as religious ethical reasoning. Its stress on worldly activities gave rise to modern elements of a “Spirit of Capitalism,” in Weber’s term, emphasizing creative entrepreneurship and efficient use of secular energies and resources, including disciplined labor and financial credit. The economic forces that created the Industrial Revolution were set loose first in England, then in the Low Countries and the USA, and later throughout the North and West of Europe. Within decades, the Industrial Revolution produced a growing and increasingly self-confident “middle class,” generating pressures to displace aristocracies and democratize political orders. Starting with the American and French Revolutions, and proceeding through the nineteenth century, but differently in each nation, electoral institutions that enfranchised common citizens and promoted competition among political parties shifted power from privileged groups to popularly elected representatives.

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The USA institutionalized a combination of Industrial and Democratic Revolutions more rapidly and thoroughly than any other society. It was also the most radical in raising a middle class without ascriptive privileges to prominence in the class system. Its legal system firmly but flexibly protected new forms of property, contract, and employment. By the first decades of the twentieth century, American society had developed the largest, most efficient industrial system combined with a highly differentiated occupational structure. These changes were soon complemented by what Parsons called the Educational Revolution, a radical upgrading of popular education. After the mid-twentieth century, a large majority of the population was completing secondary education, with more than half receiving some higher education. At the same time, university-based research and advanced training of personnel in the sciences and other technical fields were transforming the workforce and the economy’s capacity for innovation. In his chapter on American society, Parsons argued that institutionalization of the Industrial, Democratic, and Educational Revolutions together had created a new evolutionary type of society by the mid-twentieth century. In succeeding chapters, he discussed the different patterns of institutionalization of such “modernity” among European nations, the Soviet Union, and Japan, and examined the prospects for its spread, in partial or complete forms, to other societies. His discussion predicted, still early in the Brezhnev regime, that the Soviet Union could not sustain its highly authoritarian political system in a world where democracies predominate, and hence would give way to more democratic institutions. Parsons’s two small books provide an incisive introduction to comparative and historical analysis in sociology. The evolutionary types of society are presented comprehensively, yet with sharp delineation of their chief institutional elements. The discussions of institutional change, both emergence of more highly developed types and processes of decline of civilizations, are well integrated with four function analysis. In these respects, the books importantly advanced the theory of social change. Despite his ambition of outlining a theory of social evolution parallel to Darwin’s theory, however, Parsons did not identify a dynamic truly analogous to natural selection and hence did not succeed in creating an authentic theory of social evolution (Lidz 2005). A view that the dynamics of evolution apply to biological systems, but that meaningful systems of action follow autonomous dynamics is more consistent with fundamentals of the theory of social action. In this view, the human species and thus human societies are evolved entities that have emerged through natural selection, but changes in systems of human social action, including societies and civilizations, follow a different type of historical dynamics, though conditioned by continuing biological evolution of the species.

THE GENERAL ACTION SYSTEM In a 1970 essay, Parsons used the four function paradigm to develop a new analysis of the primary subsystems of social action. His previous classification in terms of culture, social system, and personality was replaced with a scheme that emphasized differentiation and functional alignment among four subsystems. Culture was treated as pattern-maintaining due to the effects of core beliefs, values, and symbolic

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complexes in establishing templates for the entire action system. The social system was treated as integrative, due to the effects of normatively established intersubjective reality and actual interpersonal attachment among actors who participate in common relationships and milieux. The personality was treated as goal-attaining due to the effects of motivational structures in developing agency to implement action. Parsons introduced the concept of behavioral organism to stand for the adaptive subsystem. The behavioral organism consists of the aspects of the individual actor as organism that facilitate physical implementation of action. The senses, the ability to speak, the capacity for coordination of fingers and hands, and the intelligent capabilities of the brain are necessary facilities for human social action. With the new functional subsystems identified, Parsons proposed a more radical innovation: to treat the four subsystems of action as dynamically related to each other through interchange processes. He identified a symbolic medium for each of the four subsystems: definition of the situation for cultural systems, affect for social systems, performance capacity for personality, and intelligence for the behavioral organism. He argued that each of the six interfaces between pairs of the subsystems should be analyzed as double interchanges. He then proposed two pairs of input and output categories for each of the six interchanges. He made clear that his proposals regarding media and interchange categories were subject to change following critical evaluation. The essay is one of the boldest of Parsons’s technical writings, although its formulations built upon ideas he had been developing for a decade in discussions with colleagues and research assistants and in working papers. The essay’s technical appendix notes that some of its formulations were included despite strong arguments in favor of alternatives. The essay also left ambiguous the empirical relationship between processes of the general action system and processes within social systems, including the societal interchange processes, and the other subsystems of action. Parsons continued discussion of alternative formulations for the general action system down to just weeks before his death.

THE AMERICAN SOCIETAL COMMUNITY During the 1970s, Parsons worked intermittently on a lengthy book on the integrative subsystem of American society. His plan for the book had two sources. One was his old commitment to write an interpretive work on American society. The other was a realization that his concepts for analysis of societal integration were comparatively undeveloped, even after he had identified the societal community as the central subject matter of sociology. He accordingly planned a last major book as both a case study of the American societal community and a presentation of concepts for analyzing social integration. After years of intermittent work, Parsons finished a draft of the book, some 800 typescript pages, the day before leaving on the trip to Germany during which he died. The manuscript has now been published as American Society: A Theory of the Societal Community (Parsons 2007), edited by the Italian sociologist, Giuseppe Sciortino. Its readers must remember that Parsons left only a draft that he planned to revise extensively. The version he left is an unusual combination of abstract theory, general discussion of problems of social

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integration, summary of historical information, review of data from other sociological studies, and personal reflection. The volume’s general theoretical framework is presented in a chapter on the relations between the societal community and its major environments, including the other three subsystems of society, the societal communities of other nations, and the three nonsocial subsystems of action. Parsons then discussed features of historical experience that have affected the specific institutional patterns of the American societal community: the activistic value system, the multiethnic population, the traditions of individualism, and the prevailing culturally grounded discomfort with ascriptive class and status hierarchies. Subsequent chapters address ethnic and primordial ties of solidarity, the forms of class solidarity and cleavage, the principal institutions, such as the law, that protect impersonal, Gesellschaft-type relationships, the social foundations for collective action in relations between the societal community and polity, and the distinctive protections for individuality and individualism in American society. The final chapter, on individualism, addressing in part themes suggested by François Bourricaud (1981), summarizes Parsons’s lifelong perspective on American society.

THE HUMAN CONDITION Parsons retired from active teaching at Harvard after the spring semester of 1973. In the following academic year, he began to teach courses at the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with several members of the department who shared his interests. He also joined an informal faculty seminar to discuss new developments in the theory of action. The discussions started with consideration of Parsons’s response, in a brief memorandum, to questions that had been raised about his conception of the behavioral organism as the adaptive subsystem of action. Lidz and Lidz (1976), in a pre-publication version, had argued that the notion of behavioral organism violates the idea of a system constituted of meaningful action because it is made up of aspects of the human organism. They had proposed the concept of a behavioral system, constituted by cognitive schemas in the sense of Jean Piaget, as a stronger formulation of the adaptive subsystem of action. (More recently, the present author has proposed the term “mind,” in a sense deriving from George Herbert Mead’s usage, for the system of cognitive schemas.) In his memorandum, Parsons accepted the new proposal, but argued for a need to examine how systems of social action overall are related to environing systems. Discussion of the memorandum, its implications, and successive formulations continued in the faculty seminar for several years. The deliberations resulted in Parsons’s essay, “A Paradigm of the Human Condition” (Parsons 1978: ch. 15), his last revision to the theory of action. In brief, Parsons argued that the human condition, as experienced by actors, involves relationships between the system of action and three other systems. In four function terms, systems of action serve the integrative function of the human condition as system. As such, they operate in relation to three orders of environing systems: the physico-chemical environment (adaptive), the human organic and ecological environment (goal-attaining), and a telic or transcendental environment

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(pattern-maintaining). With these system identifications worked out, Parsons suggested tentative terms for subsystems, media, and interchange categories. The idea of a telic system has been controversial. Parsons did not posit that a God or Divine Principle sets the most general pattern or direction for human action, but rather that all systems of action are intrinsically open with respect to ultimate principles. Any given system of action – at the most inclusive level, a civilization – follows specific ultimate principles of action. Its characteristic principles are not the only possible principles, however, as the radical differences among the major world religion-based civilizations make clear. Yet, Parsons argued, there are limited possibilities for changes of principle. Weber’s concepts of inner-worldly and other-worldly, mysticism and asceticism, he proposed, demarcate the dimensions of transcendental possibilities for principles of action. The telic order presents the limited parameters for ultimate principles that stand above, beyond, and in implicit tension with the actual principles of action maintained in the culture, especially the constitutive symbolic frames of religious culture, of any given people, society, or civilization. In times of deep cultural stress, as in the Reformation, pressures arise to change the society’s principles of action. As the individual and collective members of a society encounter problems of meaning sufficiently troubling to erode attachments to their prior beliefs, the alternative orientations implicit in the telic order emerge as potential sources of new meaning and new direction for social action. Parsons treated action systems as integrative to the human condition because particular systems of action serve to interrelate elements of all three environments (physico-chemical, organic-ecological, and telic) in terms of their own characteristic meaning-patterns. A system of action thus provides the anthropocentric basis of the integration of the human condition, which is different, as Parsons often said, from the fish (or horse or ape) condition. Moreover, the human condition has different experiential meaning for Americans, ancient Greeks, premodern Chinese, etc., and for various status groups within any of these societies. Commentators have noted that the breadth and philosophic quality of the essay on the human condition suited a final statement from a great theorist. The essay is also representative of Parsons’s work in opening large issues, proposing insightful and suggestive answers, yet leaving significant problems unresolved. Like so much else that Parsons wrote, its systematic quality did not close off problems, but helped to define the scope of work for other scholars to carry out. For example, additional work is needed to clarify the relationships between Darwinian natural selection in the domain of human organic and ecological systems and socio-cultural process and change in systems of social action.

APPLIED WRITINGS The primary importance of Parsons’s work derives from the distinctive conceptual schemes he developed, but he also wrote many essays on specific empirical problems and matters of public policy. The secondary literature, following the subtitle of his first collection of essays (Parsons 1949), conventionally distinguishes between his contributions to “pure” theory and his “applied” essays. But there was no sharp

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division in his thought. Addressing applied problems was for Parsons a way of evaluating the insights generated by his theory and he often redirected his theoretical efforts in order to strengthen empirical understanding. Several of his empirical studies animated formulations that he later presented at the level of “pure” theory. Some of the key innovations of The Social System grew out of empirical inquiries into processes of socialization and social control and the institutions of medical practice. Some critics have argued that it was inconsistent for Parsons to write essays on questions of social policy if he prized the objectivity of his theory. But Parsons adhered to Max Weber’s position that every authentic contribution to empirical knowledge combines the pursuit of objectivity with an effort to capture relevance to contemporary practical values (Parsons 1967: ch. 3). The scientist or scholar seeks to meet the standards of objectivity (in logic and statistical inference, for example) established in his or her discipline when making an argument or demonstration. Yet decisions about what problems to investigate necessarily fall back on extra-scientific standards, often ones provided by political and ideological discourses of the era. Parsons’s “academic liberalism” led him to concern with First Amendment freedoms, civil rights, academic freedom, democratic sharing of power, and world peace. The following discussion addresses only portions of his applied writings, focusing on essays that convey his social and political views. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Parsons wrote several essays, collected in Gerhardt (1993), that sought to explain the rise of Nazism in Germany. His analysis focused on the late but rapid industrialization of Germany and the many social strains it engendered, the comparatively late political unification of the nation, the pressures placed on enduring institutions of local Gemeinschaft, and the particularly bitter conflicts among social classes. Unlike most Americans writing on Germany in that era, Parsons expressed his distaste for Nazism without generalizing it into opposition to German arts, philosophy, and scholarship. He explicitly maintained his respect for German traditions of high culture and scholarship. As visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in 1953, Parsons found that many English intellectuals believed Senator Joseph McCarthy to be emerging as the “American Hitler.” They talked of preparing Europe for an American decline into fascism. Parsons wrote the essay “Social Strains in America” (reprinted as Parsons 1969: ch. 7) to demonstrate that McCarthyism was a limited political movement with poor prospects for gaining control of the nation. He argued that the social base for McCarthyism was largely in the small towns and among proprietors of small businesses, groups that had suffered economic decline during the rise of large industry and big government. They saw trends in the larger society as false to their ways of life and were receptive to McCarthy’s extravagant allegations that the leaders of big government included many traitors. Writing before the Senate hearings in which attorney Joseph Welch successfully confronted McCarthy, Parsons argued that the McCarthy movement was a “bubble” phenomenon and would disappear rapidly after McCarthy was challenged directly. At the peak of the Cold War, Parsons wrote essays on American foreign policy in relation to the system of international relations (Parsons 1967: ch. 14; 1969: ch. 12). At the time, most political scientists as well as public leaders advocated uncompromising prosecution of Cold War policies to gain every possible advantage over the

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Soviet Union as adversary. Parsons, by contrast, suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union shared strong interests in limiting conflict to protect against a nuclear “hot war.” He emphasized the American interest in developing greater confidence in the international order on the part of the Soviet Union. Constraints imposed on the pursuit of national aims by international institutions could protect against war. Parsons later participated in the early Pugwash Conferences, where scientists from the United States and Soviet Union started discussions on collaborative control and destruction of nuclear weapons. In the mid-1960s, with the first thawing of the Cold War, he made contacts with Soviet sociologists at international meetings, visited the Soviet Union to promote professional relationships, and invited Soviet and East European scholars to the United States and Harvard. With the rise of the civil rights movement, Parsons sought to contribute to its cause by clarifying sociologically its importance to the nation. His essay “Full Citizenship for the Negro American?” (reprinted as Parsons 1969: ch. 11) started with the theoretical question of what part civil rights play in the integrative institutions of modern societies. Parsons also addressed the question historically by examining major stages in the development of Anglo-American institutions of civil rights. Adapting the analysis of the English sociologist T. H. Marshall, he distinguished three separate complexes of citizenship rights: the legal, involving autonomous courts and equal protection of the laws; the political, involving the franchise and the ability to exercise influence in the political process; and the welfare, involving health, education, and welfare policies to ensure that citizens have the capabilities to participate in competitive modern economies. Parsons also reviewed the historical processes by which various religious, ethnic, and racial groups have gained more complete citizenship rights following earlier exclusion from full community membership. Until the immigration of Irish Catholics escaping famine, the USA had been overwhelmingly Protestant and, aside from slaves and the few freed blacks, white and Anglo-Saxon. From the 1840s to the 1920s, the population became much more diverse with immigration from Ireland, Central Europe, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and Italy. Negative feelings toward new ethnic and religious groups were often strong. Catholics and Jews especially were in many ways excluded from the communities of American life. Parsons traced the social changes that led to the inclusion of these groups on an equal (or nearly equal) basis, often after decades of discrimination and deprivation. He proposed that these processes of inclusion provided partial models for the inclusion of African Americans. He also noted that full inclusion under legal rights, a process advanced by Brown v. Board of Education (and after he wrote by the 1960s civil rights acts), would create abilities for African Americans to press in the courts for recognition of other rights. He was optimistic that establishing voting rights for African Americans throughout the country would produce favorable political changes. Elected leaders would then have political needs of their own to respond to the interests of African American citizens. Parsons predicted that difficult struggles would ensue before African Americans would attain equal status with respect to welfare rights. He doubted that African Americans would achieve complete equality as citizens until they had benefited for a substantial period from equal educational opportunities, equal health care, and equal welfare support. His predictions have been largely correct, although

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the struggles for sufficient welfare rights now face even greater political obstacles than he had anticipated, as became apparent in the racial overtones of public discussion during the “welfare reform” of the 1990s. In the late 1960s, Parsons, with Gerald M. Platt as collaborator, conducted an empirical study of faculty roles in American colleges and universities. When student demonstrations created a crisis at many universities, Parsons and Platt redirected their research into a broad analysis of academic institutions. The American University (Parsons and Platt 1973) is a comprehensive analysis, focusing on research universities and their specialized role of producing, preserving, and transmitting intellectually disciplined knowledge. Contrary to common perceptions, Parsons and Platt argued, undergraduate as well as graduate education had been strengthened by the growth of research activities. They also discussed undergraduate education as a dynamic process involving important elements of personal change. The modern university is ideally a stimulating yet supportive environment that frees students to explore new intellectual and personal interests. Aside from curricular challenges, students often encounter new extracurricular opportunities in the arts, in politics, in moral and religious subcultures, and in community service. Students often enter friendships with people from religious, ethnic, racial, or social class backgrounds different from their own. Parsons and Platt noted that college students often undergo great stress when new types of experience challenge their former life-orientations. The stress tends to be especially great for students whose families have not previously experienced higher education, hence might not understand or support new decisions regarding fields of study, extracurricular interests, political causes, friendships, or future careers. A generation of rapid expansion in higher education had greatly increased the numbers of students who were the first in their families to attend college, thus probably increasing student stress. The expansion of the universities also produced significant institutional dislocations. With larger student bodies, student–faculty relationships had become less personal. The formation of student friendships had become more complicated as student bodies grew more diverse in regional, ethnic, racial, social class, and cultural backgrounds. With larger academic departments, relationships among faculty colleagues also had become more impersonal and often more competitive. The vast growth in administrative structures created difficulties in dealing with students in non-bureaucratic ways, a problem symbolized by student ID numbers and computerization of academic records. The crisis of the 1960s and 1970s had thus been precipitated by rapid change, weakened social integration of university life, and resulting stresses on students. In response to student demands for change, Parsons and Platt recommended a number of reforms, but warned that higher education should not surrender its many gains of the postwar years. If the benefits of the Educational Revolution were to be fully preserved, the special institutional make-up of research universities had to be protected. Recalling the damage done to the University of California by state officials reacting to student demonstrations, they noted the dangers of reforms that politicize the universities. In terms of both academic freedoms and commitments of public resources, reaction from the Right posed a greater threat to the universities than student activism.

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Some of the reforms proposed by Parsons and Platt were: to increase the “relevance” of curricula by modestly expanding programs in the arts and the applied social sciences; to improve university officials’ communication with student leaders; to strengthen informal relations between faculty members and students; to add student members to some university committees to ensure attention to student views; and to upgrade administrative services for students. However, Parsons and Platt did not expect such changes to have large or rapid consequences. They maintained that the life-stage of “studentry” was intrinsically a time of personal change and stress. During periods of national political turmoil, the stress on students was simply prone to creating problems for universities. They were confident that with time the turmoil would abate and university life would be normalized. In the meantime, the principal duty of educators was to protect the freedoms of thought, speech, inquiry, and association that are essential to academic life. The American University illustrates the close connection between Parsons’s “pure” theorizing and his applied studies. The study applied the “general action” paradigms, including four function analysis of subsystems, double interchanges, and symbolic media, but equally tested and revised specific formulations. The most interesting innovation was the idea of the “cognitive complex” that consists of cultural, social, personality, and mental elements that together contribute to the genesis and maintenance of scientific and scholarly knowledge. A theoretical implication is that there must be several other “general action complexes” drawing together elements from each of the primary subsystems of action to generate specialized forms of social action.

CRITIQUES OF PARSONS’S THEORY From publication of SSA to the present, Parsons has been a controversial figure. His work has stimulated continual professional criticism, although its content has changed over time. Several generations of sociologists have defined their intellectual positions in part by their stances toward Parsons. It is impossible to review all the significant controversies here, so I focus on a number of prominent ones. In 1940, Alfred Schutz sent Parsons a laudatory but critical essay he had written on SSA (in Grathoff 1978). Parsons must have been pleased by the respectful and serious discussion of his work. However, Schutz put Parsons in an uncomfortable position by saying that he would publish his essay only if Parsons agreed “in principle” with his criticisms. The difficulty for Parsons was that he could not agree with Schutz’s key points. Schutz proposed that the methodology concerning frames of reference and categories of analysis should be presented in the terms of a philosophical epistemology, not in non-philosophical, social scientific terms. He also proposed to revise basic concepts, including subject of action, object of action, rational action, and normative orientation, in terms of his own phenomenological theory. In doing so, he focused almost entirely on face-to-face and person-to-person relationships, leaving aside the institutional and macrosocial analyses fundamental to Parsons. The divide between Parsons and Schutz was too wide to be readily bridged, and their correspondence ended in mutual discomfort. An impression has lasted in

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sectors of the profession, unfairly, I believe, that Parsons prevented Schutz from publishing a stringent critique. In the late 1940s, Robert K. Merton developed the view that theory construction in the then current condition of sociology should concentrate on problems of the “middle range.” The middle range was set off against descriptive studies of particular settings developed without the guidance of theory and against Parsons’s research program, which Merton characterized as “Grand Theory.” Merton’s emphasis on the value of such middle range concepts as reference groups or the two stage flow of influence was persuasive. He established the scientific validity of his approach, and most sociologists since have been more comfortable with a middle range methodology. However, Merton mischaracterized Parsons’s approach. Parsons’s primary goal was not to develop macroscopic causal generalizations about large-scale institutions or society as a whole (Grand Theory), but to clarify basic premises and categories as antecedents to precise analysis at any level of social organization (Parsons 1953: ch. 17). Questions of the appropriate frame of reference for sociology, as articulated in SSA, were the distinctive focus of Parsons’s methodology. His empirical studies, e.g., discussions of the professions, social control, the family, or processes of socialization, were middle range as often as macrosocial. In later years, Parsons suggested that his debate with Merton had created a false opposition: sociologists had no need to choose between the two approaches. Both he, pursuing a general conceptual framework, and Merton, focusing on middle range theories, had made large contributions despite differences in methodology. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lewis Coser (1956), Ralf Dahrendorf (1959), and others developed the criticism that Parsons’s theory could not deal with phenomena of social conflict. They argued that Parsons’s emphasis on systems, functional “contribution” to systems, and integration of systems obscured the social reality of conflict in a haze of social harmony. Thus, they claimed, “system theory” requires a complementary “conflict theory” in order to capture the full range of social phenomena. As a corollary, they argued that, lacking a theory of conflict, a systems theory also could not come to terms with social change. Only a complementary conflict theory could open systems theory to the analysis of social change. However, Parsons’s writings exhibit a great deal of attention to empirical conflict and change. Both conflict and change are treated at length in SSA, especially in the discussions of Weber’s and Pareto’s work. Parsons’s essays on Germany and the rise of Nazism also deal extensively with conflict and change. Although Dahrendorf and Coser were particularly critical of The Social System, that work, too, treats phenomena of conflict, but primarily under the categories of stress and strain in relationships or institutions. The difference is less in perception of conflict than in the ways conflict is conceptualized and related to change. Dahrendorf and to a degree Coser failed to recognize conflict and change in The Social System because of its terminology and analytical themes. Dahrendorf was looking for a Marxian analysis centering on class conflict as the driving force for social change. Coser, too, was misguided by Marxian preconceptions, but was also disturbed by Parsons’s neglect of Simmel’s treatment of conflict as a basic social form. Parsons sought to maintain Weber’s multidimensional analysis of change in terms of religious ethics, routinization of charisma, rationalization, and bureaucratization as well as conflict among classes and estates. For Parsons, the task was to

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synthesize these elements of a theory of change in terms of a theory of system dynamics, including social strain. To accept a bifurcation between system theory and conflict theory would, for Parsons, have been to betray his commitment to a unified frame of reference. During the ideological turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of figures associated with the New Left broadened the conflict theory criticisms into an ideological attack. In the New Left view, Parsons ignored conflict and change while extolling an ideal of perfect system integration and social harmony because he was a spokesman for the Establishment. The methodology of “value-freedom” was interpreted as a smokescreen hiding partisanship on behalf of the dominant classes and social order. Parsons’s status as a senior professor at Harvard was often cited as sufficient proof of his role as Establishment spokesman. In an influential version of this argument, Alvin Gouldner (1970) stressed the conservatism of L. J. Henderson and the “Pareto Circle” at Harvard as evidence of Parsons’s politics. Gouldner’s account of Parsons’s theoretical work was hardly more than a caricature. As we have seen, Parsons’s political outlook was more ambivalent to the social order of his times and based on specific value-judgments, not a general social harmonism. In a later work, William Buxton (1985) interpreted Parsons’s corpus as a defense of the “capitalist nation-state.” Buxton’s interpretation is far more nuanced than Gouldner’s and incorporated significant archival research on Parsons, but it overemphasizes the institutional forms of nation-state and capitalism, about which Parsons was in certain respects ambivalent. Buxton underemphasizes universalistic law, citizens’ rights, representative democracy, and competitive elections, which were more central to Parsons’s valuation of American political institutions. A thoughtful and penetrating criticism of Parsons’s theory of action was developed in the 1950s and 1960s by Harold Garfinkel. The criticism pertains to the understanding of how normative order regulates the conduct of individual actors. Garfinkel (1967) argued that Parsons underestimated the complexity of subjective processes involved in an actor’s judgment regarding how to interpret and whether to observe normative rules. The applicability of specific norms to an actor’s conduct in a given social situation rests on many implicit typifications that define the situations – typifications of social settings, characteristics of actors, their interests and intentions, their previous experience, and expectable events – all of which Parsons had not explored. To be sure, Parsons himself argued that norms are not self-actualizing. He understood that a set of norms requires the actors in a situation to communicate their expectations to one another, and frequently threats of sanctions as well. Only with the support of give and take regarding expectations and sanctions is a normative order able to regulate actual conduct in the situation. Although Parsons saw the “double contingency” in the normative guidance of actors’ conduct, Garfinkel contributed a deeper understanding of the intricate judgment that each actor must use to define the situation and clarify the applicability of norms to his or her own conduct. Parsons himself never grasped Garfinkel’s critique or its importance, but some of his protégés have accepted the need to reconstruct the understanding of how normative orders are actually implemented in interaction. As we have seen, Parsons consistently maintained that theoretical propositions in sociology must be analytic in form and deal with abstractly conceived aspects or qualities of social objects, not concrete objects. He criticized Weber’s ideal type

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methodology for stopping halfway between concrete description and fully analytic theory. Consistent with this critique, Parsons built his later theory of subsystems of society in terms of abstract propositions about analytically defined aspects of institutions and relationships. Reinhard Bendix (e.g., in Bendix and Roth 1971) criticized Parsons’s foundation for system theory by arguing that Weber’s ideal type methodology is sharply at odds with Durkheim’s functionalism as precursor of system theory. Bendix conducted a number of important historical and comparative studies by elaborating Weber’s ideal types. He expressed skepticism that analytical schemes based on system theory could be as insightful as an ideal type methodology. Indeed, abstract system theory is difficult to use for original comparative-historical research. Parsons’s studies of German social history predate his formal system theory and are basically ideal-typical. His late comparative and historical writings were largely syntheses of evidence developed in previous studies. They used the system theory mainly as an analytical framework for integrating the works of other scholars. Sociologists such as Robert N. Bellah (1957), Neil J. Smelser (1959), S. N. Eistenstadt (1963), and Mark Gould (1987) have successfully used analytic systems theory for historical research, but the respects in which their studies actually transcend ideal type analysis in organizing empirical evidence have perhaps not been fully assessed. Ideal type analysis may be regarded as a proven empirical method in historical sociology, and intellectually conservative critics may doubt Parsons’s claim for the empirical superiority of analytic system theory. A related consideration pertains to Parsons’s stance toward the methods of analysis developed by the German idealist-historicist school. Parsons accepted the method of interpretive understanding or Verstehen as it figured in Weber’s methodological and empirical writings. He understood that a theory of meaningful social action requires a method of Verstehen as its empirical complement. Yet, he did not perceive the procedures by which historical knowledge is developed to be closely related to theoretical issues in sociology and did not seek himself to advance the methodology of Verstehen. He also distanced himself from the German historicists who provided a key background to Weber’s writings on Verstehen, believing that they had generally insisted on a need for different categories and procedures of understanding for each historical epoch and thereby undermined the grounds for comparative analysis and generalization. On this basis, he failed to build on such contributions as Dilthey’s and Simmel’s writings on interpretation and historical knowledge. One result is that Parsons tended to invoke knowledge of historical settings without carefully evaluating the methods by which historians had synthesized knowledge of them. In the 1980s, Parsons’s corpus received major scholarly evaluations by Jürgen Habermas and Jeffrey Alexander. Habermas (1987) portrayed Parsons’s work as the one theoretical system in recent sociology that remains essential background to any future general theory. His critical assessment focuses on aspects of the theory of action that are directly relevant to his own theory of communicative action. Of particular interest to Habermas are, first, the conception of social action as a situated process engaging particular actors, and, second, the formal system theory. The crux of his argument is that, contrary to Parsons’s claim, these two perspectives were not adequately integrated. Habermas maintains that the two are in fact independent frames of reference, and he appears to argue that in principle the two cannot be authentically integrated. He reviews elements of both formulations in detail, but

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concentrates on the conception of social action and its relations to his own theory of communicative action. The system theory, especially its four function version, appears less valuable to him, a judgment related to his longstanding rejection of German system theories. The present author finds it unfortunate that Habermas focused so much of a frequently penetrating discussion on one sweeping, and largely forced, conclusion. Alexander (1983) presents Parsons’s work as a culmination of the classical tradition and the pre-eminent contribution since Durkheim and Weber. He provides the most comprehensive and detailed review of Parsons’s formulations available in one publication, and thus his study is an indispensable source. He follows the evolution of Parsons’s thought through its early, middle, and late stages, and outlines the major late-stage formulations, including the four function paradigm, the double interchanges, and the symbolic media. His discussion focuses particularly on inconsistencies among different presentations of the late system theory and often alleges confusion when the actuality is that Parsons revised or supplemented formulations. He rejects the use of the four function interchange models for systems of action other than social systems, although he does not fully explicate the grounds for doing so. As an overall criticism, he alleges that Parsons’s basic formulations overemphasize ideal factors in social organization while underemphasizing material factors. This point can be conceded for many – not all – of Parsons’s empirical writings, but Alexander does not demonstrate that the criticism applies to the chief theoretical propositions. For some years, Alexander led a “neofunctionalist” movement that sought to build upon the basic thrust of Parsons’s functionalism without becoming entangled in its complicated formulations. Alexander succeeded in attracting a number of other sociologists to his neofunctionalist program and some interesting empirical studies resulted from their efforts. However, the movement did not produce the clear and penetrating formulations for reestablishing functional analysis that it had sought. The prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann developed a systems theory that he intended as a successor to Parsons’s theory of social action. After a first career as a civil servant, Luhmann spent a year studying with Parsons before launching his academic career. In developing his own theory, Luhmann often took Parsons’s ideas as a foil, critiquing them in order to clarify issues to be addressed by his own formulations. He thus affirmed systems theory, functional analysis, and attention to the differentiation of autonomous systems and subsystems as key analytic approaches, but rejected the four function paradigm and the claim that structural differentiation tends to follow specific functionally defined patterns as societies evolve (Luhmann 1982, 1995). His use of the concept of function thus tended to fall back on ad hoc lists of functions, and his identification of differentiated systems within modern societies was similarly ad hoc. He took over Parsons’s idea of interpenetration among differentiated systems, but used the concept in a less specific way, because he did not follow Parsons in viewing normative institutions as the key source of social structure. Impressed by Parsons’s idea of generalized symbolic media, and particularly the analysis of political power, Luhmann emphasized that every differentiated social system, economy, polity, religion, etc., requires a specific “communications medium” for exchanges of information with other systems. His proposals about the identities and characteristics of the media differ from Parsons’s, but are the most creative

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elements of his theory. Despite the differences in their theories, Luhmann perhaps remains the independent theorist who pursued the farthest Parsons’s goal of developing a technically precise and elaborated general theory in sociology. A number of collections of essays by various contributors over the years have included fresh evaluations, applications, and extensions of Parsons’s theory of action. A volume edited by Black (1961) grew out of a faculty seminar at Cornell University devoted to the evaluation of Parsons’s theories. A Festschrift edited by Barber and Inkeles (1971) includes essays by students, protégés, and collaborators who were then senior figures in the profession. Loubser, Baum, Effrat, and Lidz (1976) edited a two-volume Festschrift of contributions written mostly by more junior social scientists. Schluchter (1980) edited a volume of essays presented at the conference in Heidelberg celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Parsons’s doctoral degree. Corsi (1993) edited an initial issue of an Italian journal around evaluations of Parsons’s contributions to sociological theory. Barber and Gerhardt (1999) compiled papers from a Heidelberg conference that initiated what has become a fruitful series of conferences devoted to Parsons’s theory of action. Pollini and Sciortino (2001) edited papers from a conference in Trento; Staubmann and Wenzel (2000) and Staubmann (2006) published papers from a conference in Innsbruck. Kiyomitsu Yui has posted papers from two conferences in Kobe on the World Wide Web. Trevino (2001) edited a volume of papers deriving from a session at an annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. In recognition of the centennial of Parsons’s birth in 2002, Japanese sociologists held a conference in Tokyo; Renee C. Fox, Victor Lidz, and Harold J. Bershady (2005) edited contributions to a simultaneous centennial conference in New York. Since then Chris Hart has held a major conference in Manchester, England for which publication is still pending. Among many book-length studies of Parsons’s theory, some of the most important not already mentioned are Mitchell’s (1967) overview of the schema of political analysis, Bershady’s (1973) critique of the neo-Kantian emphasis on a priori categories of analysis, Bourricaud’s (1981) discussion of the theme of institutionalized individualism, Holton and Turner’s (1986) re-examination of the analysis of economic institutions and processes, Holmwood’s (1996) criticism of the attempt at a generalized system theoretic approach to functional analysis, and Gerhardt’s (2002) intellectual biography with its focus on political values and activities. Diverse applications of Parsons’s conceptual scheme in its various phases of development include, among many others, Levy’s (1952) synthesis of structural concepts for macrosocial analysis and his application of the same concepts to understanding of developing nations (1966), Fox’s (1959) study of doctors and patients engaged in investigational medicine, Smelser’s (1959) study of the Industrial Revolution and the experience of working families and his general theory of collective behavior (1963), Gould’s (1987) study of the Puritan Revolution in England, Johnson’s (1988) collected essays on women’s roles and on the family as institution, and Tanner’s (2006) study of the first emergence in classical times of art criticism grounded in aesthetic theory. S. N. Eisenstadt’s (1963) study of the political systems of historic empires and many of his other works adapt conceptions of structure, system, and processes of institutional change from Parsons’s formulations. There have been several important edited volumes of selected writings by Parsons, including Gerhardt’s (1993) collection of his essays on Germany and National

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Socialism, Camic’s edition of Parsons’s pre-SSA essays (Parsons 1991), and Trevino’s (2008) compilation of his writings on law. Mayhew (1982), Hamilton (1983), and Turner (1999) have edited selections of Parsons’s writings intended as general introductions to his works. Holmwood (2006) and Lidz (forthcoming) have edited selections from the critical literature on Parsons and the theory of action. Staubmann and Lidz have initiated a series, Studies in the Theory of Action, to bring out previously unpublished works of Parsons, including Actor, Situation and Normative Pattern (Parsons [1939] 2010), as well as current contributions to the theory of action. Renee C. Fox, Robert N. Bellah, Neil J. Smelser, and Mark Gould have continued to publish extensively on rich veins of scholarship shaped in part by their studies and close association with Parsons. Fox’s “ethnographic autobiography” of her long career in the sociology of medicine and bioethics appeared in 2010, and Bellah’s masterwork on religion and social evolution, a product of more than 40 years of scholarship, will appear in 2011.

PARSONS’S LEGACY In May 1979, Parsons traveled to Heidelberg for a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his doctoral degree. The occasion was a success. He enjoyed the papers presented by a distinguished group of German scholars and his own talk was well received. He and his wife Helen then went to Munich. In an active day at the university, he gave a seminar talk and a public lecture, both again well received. That evening, he died of a massive stroke. To have died after twice engaging students and colleagues in the excitement of recent ideas was a fitting last day for the 76-year-old sociologist. Parsons’s legacy can be summarized at three levels. At a first level, his methodology of seeking a scientific revolution by concentrating on the essential ideas of a frame of reference is his most important contribution. His commitment to critical study of frames of reference was complemented by a dedication to establishing technical standards for the evaluation of theoretical work. Contrary to volumes that have been written about his alleged biases, Parsons’s chief intellectual commitment was to set ideological attachments and previous theoretical formulations aside and follow logic and evidence wherever they might lead in refining sociological concepts. The frequency with which new research and fresh reflection persuaded him to overturn previous ideas is a clear index of this commitment. His focus on fundamental theoretical issues provides a weighty model for future sociologists, particularly in the USA, where empiricist styles of thought predominate. The model is all the more powerful because it strikes out against the cultural grain and, in America, will be followed by only a handful of sociologists in any generation. Parsons himself realized that his personal commitment to theoretical work was built on unusual speculative abilities, a dispassionate (affectively neutral) manner of critiquing and evaluating ideas, and the patience to examine and re-examine ideas over years and decades. He understood that only a few could or would work in this manner. At a second level, Parsons’s legacy consists of major concepts and themes that appear to be enduring contributions: the action frame of reference, the limits of economic theory, normative order and social control, the concept of social system, the

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idea of functional analysis focused on the concept of system, the conception of social institutions, the institutional integration of motivation, the professional role relationship, and the notion of generalized symbolic media of interchange. These are all fundamental ideas that social scientists today and for the foreseeable future can adopt and modify for their own studies. Many of these ideas are so fundamental to the analysis of social life that it is hard to conceive of a sociology that does not make routine use of them. It is also hard to envision a future sociology that will not be strengthened by studying Parsons’s writings to learn how he used these ideas and synthesized empirical and theoretical insights with them. At a third level is the Parsonian theory of action as a formally integrated theoretical system – the action frame of reference; system theory and the four function paradigm; sociological application of cybernetic theory; the primary subsystems of society and their constituent sectors; the symbolic media, double interchanges, and the interchange categories; and the analysis of social institutions as structural elements of society. This theory was projected in bold and methodical terms, albeit with gaps, oversights, conflicting formulations, and occasional mistakes. Despite the many shortcomings in its presentation, it is a uniquely powerful theory. No other theorist in the history of sociology has had Parsons’s level of commitment to developing a technically refined theory. No figure since Weber and Durkheim has had his courage to exploit fundamental sociological insights so thoroughly and boldly. The result is that the theory of social action, despite its lacunae, partial formulations, and errors, presents uniquely rich opportunities for scholars who will undertake its further development.

Reader’s Guide to Talcott Parsons For initial exposure to Parsons’s writings, the selections in Turner’s The Talcott Parsons Reader (1999) or Mayhew’s Talcott Parsons on Institutions and Social Evolution (1982) are excellent. For broader and deeper engagement with Parsons’s theory of social action, careful study of his major – and difficult – works is essential. These include The Structure of Social Action (1937), The Social System (1951), Working Papers in the Theory of Action (1953), Economy and Society (1956), and essays reprinted in Politics and Social Structure (1969) and Action Theory and the Human Condition (1978). They may be read as listed in chronological order or in any order that matches a reader’s interests. The difficulties of engaging them can be moderated by interspersed reading of Parsons’s more applied or descriptive writings in Essays in Sociological Theory (1949) and Social Structure and Personality (1964) and in Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966) and The System of Modern Societies (1971). Leading secondary works on Parsons are Bourricaud’s The Sociology of Talcott Parsons (1981) and Bershady’s Ideology and Social Knowledge (1973). Gerhardt’s Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography (2002) is an appealing work on Parsons’s career and politics. Classic studies applying Parsons’s theory include Fox, Experiment Perilous (1959), Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (1957), Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959), and Gould, Revolution in the Development of Capitalism (1987), all of which originated as doctoral dissertations supervised by Parsons. Alexander’s The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons (1983; volume 4 of Theoretical Logic in Sociology) and Habermas’s Lifeworld and System: A Critique

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of Functionalist Reason (1987; volume 2 of The Theory of Communicative Action) undertake to legitimate contemporary theories by grounding key formulations in critiques of Parsons’s theory of action. Recent collections of essays by diverse authors which evaluate, apply, or modify the Parsonian theory of social action include Trevino (ed.), Talcott Parsons Today, Fox, Lidz, and Bershady (eds.), After Parsons, and Staubmann (ed.), Action Theory: Methodological Studies.

Bibliography Writings of Talcott Parsons 1930 (trans.). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber, translated by Talcott Parsons from the original German of 1903–4. New York: Scribner’s. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: McGraw-Hill. [1939] 2010. Actor, Situation and Normative Pattern. Ed. V. Lidz and H. Staubmann. Vienna: LIT Verlag. 1949. Essays in Sociological Theory: Pure and Applied. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1951 (ed. with E. A. Shils). Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1953. Essays in Sociological Theory, rev. edn. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1953 (with R. F. Bales and E. A. Shils). Working Papers in the Theory of Action. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1955 (with R. F. Bales). Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1956 (with N. J. Smelser). Economy and Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1962 (with Winston White). Manuscripts on American Society. Unpublished. Talcott Parsons Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG (FP) 42.45.2 boxes 7 and 8. 1964. Social Structure and Personality. New York: Free Press. 1966. Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. 1967. Sociological Theory and Modern Society. New York: Free Press. 1969. Politics and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. 1970. “Some Problems of General Theory in Sociology.” In J. C. McKinney and E. A. Tiryakian (eds.), Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1971. The System of Modern Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1973 (with G. M. Platt). The American University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1977. Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory. New York: Free Press. 1978. Action Theory and the Human Condition. New York: Free Press. 1986. The Marshall Lectures. Ed. R. Swedberg. Uppsala: Research Reports from the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University. 1991. The Early Essays. Ed. C. Camic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2007. American Society: A Theory of the Societal Community. Ed. G. Sciortino. Boulder: Paradigm Press.

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Alexander, J. C. (1983) Theoretical Logic in Sociology, vol. 4, The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bales, R. F. (1950) Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley. Barber, B. and U. Gerhardt (eds.) (1999) Agenda for Sociology: Classic Sources and Current Uses of Talcott Parsons’s Work. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Barber, B. and A. Inkeles (eds.) (1971) Stability and Social Change. Boston: Little, Brown. Bellah, R. N. (1957) Tokugawa Religion. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Bellah, R. N. (2011) Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bendix, R. and G. Roth (1971) Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bershady, H. J. (1973) Ideology and Social Knowledge. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Black, M. (ed.) (1961) The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Bourricaud, F. (1981) The Sociology of Talcott Parsons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (original French edition 1977). Buxton, W. (1985) Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-state. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Corsi, G. (ed.) (1993) Teoria Sociologica 1(1). Special Issue on Talcott Parsons. Coser, L. A. (1956) The Functions of Social Conflict. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Dahrendorf, R. (1959) Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Durkheim, E. ([1893] 1933) The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. G. Simpson. New York: Macmillan Co. Eisenstadt, S. N. (1963) The Political Systems of Empires. New York: Free Press. Fox, R. C. (1959) Experiment Perilous. New York: Free Press. Fox, R. C. (1997) “Talcott Parsons, My Teacher.” The American Scholar 66: 395–410. Fox, R. C. (2010) In the Field; A Sociologist’s Journey. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Fox, R. C., V. M. Lidz, and H. J. Bershady (eds.) (2005) After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Russell Sage. Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Gerhardt, U. (ed.) (1993) Talcott Parsons on National Socialism. New York: Aldine DeGruyter. Gerhardt, U. (2002) Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Gould, M. (1987) Revolution in the Development of Capitalism: The Coming of the English Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gouldner, A. W. (1970) The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. Grathoff, R. (1978) The Theory of Social Action: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Habermas, J. (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon Press (originally published in German, 1981). Hamilton, P. (1983) Readings from Talcott Parsons. London: Tavistock Publications.

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Holmwood, J. (1996) Founding Sociology? Talcott Parsons and the Idea of General Theory. London: Longman. Holmwood, J. (ed.) (2006) Talcott Parsons. London: Ashgate. Holton, R. J. and B. S. Turner (1986) Talcott Parsons on Economy and Society. London: Routledge. Johnson, M. M. (1988) Strong Mothers, Weak Wives: The Search for Gender Equality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klausner, S. Z. and V. Lidz (1986) The Nationalization of the Social Sciences. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Levy, M. J., Jr. (1952) The Structure of Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Levy, M. J., Jr. (1966) Modernization and the Structure of Societies, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lidz, C. W. and V. Lidz (1976) “Piaget’s Psychology of Intelligence and the Theory of Action.” In J. Loubser, R. C. Baum, A. Effrat, and V. Lidz (eds.), Explorations in General Theory in Social Science, 2 vols. New York: Free Press, pp. 195–239. Lidz, V. (2001) “Language and the ‘Family’ of Generalized Symbolic Media.” In A. J. Trevino (ed.), Talcott Parsons Today: His Theory and Legacy in Contemporary Sociology. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Lidz, V. (2005) “ ‘Social Evolution’ in the Light of the Human Condition Paradigm.” In Renee C. Fox, Victor M. Lidz, and Harold J. Bershady (eds.), After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the 21st Century. New York: Russell Sage. Lidz, V. (ed.) (forthcoming) Talcott Parsons and the Theory of Social Action. London: Ashgate. Lidz, V. and H. J. Bershady (2000) “Convergence as Method in Theory Construction.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie (Special Issue): 45–106. Lidz, V. and H. J. Bershady (2006) “Parsons’ Tacit Metatheory.” In H. Staubmann (ed.), Action Theory: Methodological Studies. Hamburg: Lit Verlag. Loubser, J., R. C. Baum, A. Effrat, and V. Lidz (eds) (1976) Explorations in General Theory in Social Science, 2 vols. New York: Free Press. Luhmann, N. (1982) The Differentiation of Society. New York: Columbia University Press. Luhmann, N. (1995) Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mayhew, L. (ed.) (1982) Talcott Parsons on Institutions and Social Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. C. (1967) Sociological Analysis and Politics: The Theories of Talcott Parsons. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Nichols, L. T. (1998) “Social Relations Undone: Disciplinary Divergence and Departmental Politics at Harvard 1946–1970.” The American Sociologist 29: 83–107. Parsons, C. (2004) “Some Remarks on Talcott Parsons’s Family.” The American Sociologist 35: 4–22. Pollini, G. and G. Sciortino (eds.) (2001) Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action and Contemporary Debates. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Schluchter, W. (ed.) (1980) Verhalten, Handeln und System. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Smelser, N. J. (1959) Social Change in the Industrial Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smelser, N. J. (1963) Theory of Collective Behavior. New York: Free Press. Staubmann, H. (ed.) (2006) Action Theory: Methodological Studies. Vienna: Lit Verlag. Staubmann, H. and H. Wenzel (eds.) (2000) “Talcott Parsons: Zur Aktualität eines Theorieprogramms,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 6 (Special Issue).

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Tanner, J. (2006) The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Trevino, A. J. (ed.) (2001) Talcott Parsons Today. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Trevino, A. J. (ed.) (2008) Talcott Parsons on Law and the Legal System. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Turner, B. S. (ed.) (1999) The Talcott Parsons Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Whitehead, A. N. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan. Whitehead, A. N. (1979) Process and Reality, 2nd rev. edn. New York: Free Press. Wiener, N. (1948) Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: Wiley.

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18 Theodor W. Adorno HARRY F. DAHMS

To appreciate Adorno’s overall contribution to social theory, his related writings must be seen within the larger context of the many books, articles, and reviews he wrote, and the lectures he gave, as a philosopher, a sociologist, a social psychologist, a music theorist and critic, a composer, a public intellectual, and finally, and most importantly, as a critical theorist. It is not surprising, therefore, that many interpretations and criticisms of Adorno’s theoretical writings have suffered from more or less well-intended misconstruals of aspects of his thought, tools employed, theoretical moves made, the scope of his undertaking as a whole, or the status or purpose of particular publications within the latter. The ubiquity of misinterpretations may be greater for Adorno than for most other social theorists, not least – but, as will become apparent, far from primarily – because of the sheer range of his interests and the uncompromising character of his position. Since his work as a whole is characterized by a high degree of internal cohesion, moreover, and since his varied contributions elaborated a consistent thread from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, it is necessary to grasp how every publication, how every piece of writing or lecture, was directed at making tangible, and developing as fully as possible, the implications of the motifs that inspired his efforts and achievements. In a nutshell, Adorno’s objective was to conceive of the kind of mind set and rigorous reflection that is a necessary precondition for theorizing reality at a multiplicity of socially pertinent levels, in ways that are guided by the endeavor to “do justice” to the nature of the object of study at hand. The latter can be the totality of societal patterns and relations, or minute details of everyday life. Adorno’s objective is in contrast to what he regarded as the common practice and priorities in the social and natural sciences, which are purported to facilitate necessary and desirable kinds of understanding, to assimilate the study of any phenomenon to standards that are taken to be set. Yet, without critically examining whether and in what ways the The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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pursuit of truth shaping research may be a function of the field of tensions and contradictions inherent to modern societies, social theorists in particular are in danger of concealing not only those tensions and contradictions, but especially their central role in framing reality in the modern age. Concordantly, illuminating the societal circumstances under which established priorities characteristic especially of mainstream approaches in any discipline came about, particularly in the social sciences, and how those approaches reflect concrete socio-historical conditions, is indispensable not just for critical theory, but for the process of theorizing modern society generally (see Adorno et al. [1969] 1976: 1–67, esp. 15; also Wellmer [1969] 1971: 121–39, esp. 134–7). In refining his perspective and crystallizing his theory over the course of almost four decades – efforts that culminated in his own rendition of dialectical thinking: negative dialectics – Adorno relied on and combined diverse aspects of the thought and works of an array of philosophers, theorists, social scientists, and artists. He did so in the interest of more effectively apprehending how the warped history of modern societies went hand in hand with ongoing transformations that keep reshaping the linkages between the material basis of human existence, forms of social organization, the relationship between society and nature, and the structure of thought itself. In the process, his grasp of the contradictory nature of modern society and corresponding challenges for theorizing the modern condition reached ever greater depths, as a necessary precondition for confronting the myriad experiences of cognitive dissonance – to use psychologist Leon Festinger’s concept (see Cooper 2007). Even though it appears that Adorno never used the term, if applied to life in modern society, it aptly describes the experiences that have been proliferating, and thus burdening and even overwhelming human existence, to an ever-increasing extent, especially since the early twentieth century – experiences whose explicit acknowledgment and theorization Adorno regarded as essential for the kinds of social research and social theory that are conducive to critical reflexivity as it is becoming less and less common, and more and more important: The only totality the student of society can presume to know is the antagonistic whole, and if he is to attain to totality at all, then only in and through contradiction…. That the gift of specifically psychological insight almost always goes hand in hand with an irrational or at least anti-systematic moment is itself no psychological accident but can be traced back to its object, the dimension of split-off irrationality that complements the prevailing rationality. (Adorno [1955] 1967: 74)

A DAMAGED LIFE Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno was born on September 11, 1903 in Frankfurt, to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, and brought up under the primary care of his mother and her sister. It soon became apparent that he was a highly gifted, sensitive, and promising child. Growing up in Frankfurt, at the time one of the most liberal and culturally progressive cities in Germany, he was exposed from early on to the world of letters and arts, especially music, as his mother and aunt had been trained and active as professional musicians. He attended concerts, learned to play the piano, and

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became familiar with the practice, in his parents’ household, of discussing the quality of performances and the importance of composers and their works. Well into adulthood, Adorno was torn between a career in music and a career as an academic, for both of which he had been showing a continuously growing and definite potential. Adorno spent the first half of the 1920s, during the early years of the Weimar Republic – whose duration (December 1918 until January 1933) coincided with one of the most intellectually, politically, and artistically interesting time periods in Europe during the twentieth century, with advances in the increasingly important social sciences, and a willingness to experiment in social policy – studying philosophy, sociology, psychology, and musicology at the University of Frankfurt. After obtaining his doctoral degree in 1924 with a dissertation on Husserl, he spent part of 1925 in Vienna studying under the composer Alban Berg, one of the three main representatives of the “Second Vienna School,” and the pianist Eduard Steuermann. He also met the other two representatives of the school, Arnold Schönberg and Anton von Webern, as well as one of the founders of Western Marxism, the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács. After his return to Frankfurt, he began working on his Habilitation – a second, more ambitious dissertation required of those intent on pursuing an academic career – on Kierkegaard, which he defended in 1931, but which was not published until 1962, after the manuscript acquired a history of its own (see Hullot-Kentor’s foreword in Adorno [1962] 1989). He began to teach at the university the same year. Between 1928 and 1931, he also worked as the editor of an Austrian journal on music. During this time period, he had become acquainted with Walter Benjamin, his future wife Gretel Karplus, and especially Max Horkheimer. Although he knew several of the figures who played important roles at the Institute of Social Research (founded in 1924) after Horkheimer (who would later coin the term critical theory [Horkheimer [1937] 1972]) had become its director in 1932, including especially Friedrich Pollock and Herbert Marcuse, Adorno was only loosely connected, and did not become a member of the “Frankfurt School” until the late 1930s (see Wiggershaus [1986] 1994). While the Jewish heritage and influence represented by his father undoubtedly had left a mark (secondary though it was compared to the Catholicism of his mother and aunt) during the first three decades of Adorno’s life, and though he never denied or rejected it in any form, there is evidence suggesting that he did not begin to fully confront this dimension of his identity until the rise to power of Hitler in early 1933, and Adorno’s subsequent removal from the university. Soon after the National Socialist take-over, Horkheimer moved the Institute, first to Geneva, and then to New York, via Paris. Adorno stayed in Germany, hoping that National Socialism would be a passing aberration, and continued to publish. Still, in 1934, he moved to Oxford to enroll at Merton College as an advanced student and instructor. In 1937, he married Gretel Karplus in London, and the following year the two emigrated to the United States and joined the Institute of Social Research in New York. While Adorno lived in England, he returned to Germany on several occasions. After arriving in New York, Adorno became a formal member of the Institute, began working on the Princeton Radio Research Project directed by Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, and changed his name to Theodor W. Adorno. In 1941, he moved to Los Angeles with Max Horkheimer, where they began work on what would appear as Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

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([1947] 1998), which added to the critical concepts of the Hegelian-Marxian tradition – alienation (Hegel and the early Marx), commodity fetishism (the Marx of Kapital), and reification (Lukács) – the important concept of instrumental reason. He also supported Thomas Mann’s work on his novel, Doctor Faustus; Mann later appreciatively described his reliance on Adorno’s knowledge of musical history and theory, relating to atonality and 12-tone music (Mann 1949: esp. 42ff.), and though he did not recognize Adorno as a collaborator, it is documented that he incorporated passages written by Adorno directly into the novel (see Wells 2009). While in California, Adorno also developed friendships with the composer Hanns Eisler and the film director Fritz Lang (Drake 2009). In 1949, Adorno returned to Frankfurt, where Philosophy of New Music ([1949] 2006) was published. The following year, the collaborative studies on The Authoritarian Personality (1950) appeared in the United States, where his reputation as social scientist largely remained tied to this work during the 1950s and 1960s. That year, the Institute of Social Research was re-opened in Frankfurt, in a new building, with Adorno as Acting Director and a professor at the university (the first building had been destroyed during air raids close to the end of the war; the new building was co-financed by the Rockefeller Foundation). In 1951, Adorno published Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life ([1951] 1978). From late 1952 to late summer 1953, Adorno was Research Director of the Hacker Foundation in Beverly Hills – his final stay in and visit to the United States. From 1957 on, he was permanent full professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt. After Horkheimer’s arrival in Frankfurt in the early 1950s, Adorno remained actively involved in the direction of the Institute, and his publication rate, already at a high level, increased even further, with the publication of several books, collections, and many articles and printed versions of public speeches and radio addresses, on a broad range of topics. It was during this time that he started to employ the concept of identity thinking, as the reference point of choice for his social and cultural critique. In 1963, he was elected President of the German Sociological Society. In his most explicit engagement with sociology as an academic discipline, during the early 1960s, he was a key participant in the “positivist dispute in German sociology” (Adorno et al. [1969] 1976), with Karl Popper, his former student Jürgen Habermas, and others; he edited the proceedings and wrote a lengthy introduction which can be viewed as his most comprehensive statement on the link between critical theory and sociology. The pinnacle of his philosophical writings appeared as Negative Dialektik (1966). He died after a strenuous mountain hike in the Swiss Alps, on August 6, 1969, after a stressful year during which, among other issues, he was prevented by student activists from teaching or lecturing in public. What many consider his magnum opus, Aesthetic Theory ([1970] 1997), was published posthumously, edited by Adorno’s wife, Gretel Adorno, and the editor of his collected writings, Rolf Tiedemann. With the publication and translation of three biographies in recent years, detailed accounts of the entwinement of his life and work have become available for the first time; they draw attention to the formative experiences of Adorno’s early life (Claussen [2003] 2008; Jäger [2003] 2004; Müller-Doohm [2003] 2005). This unusual emphasis on a thinker’s childhood and its theoretical significance, which has been repeated

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and emphasized many times, is indicative of Adorno’s equally unusual childhood. Using Adorno’s own theoretical frame, one could argue that for most individuals, socialization represents processes that acquaint the child with alienated and reified social conditions and practices, in order to associate with the latter the feeling of normalcy, and to provide the child with an identity that is compatible with, and functional in, those conditions. By comparison, Adorno’s experience, as he described on numerous occasions, resembles rather a model of how socialization would occur in a non- or less alienated world. Recognizing this difference, however, does not necessarily relativize the gravity and significance of his contributions; rather, his uncommon childhood must be understood as the basis from which Adorno formulated his perspective on the promise modern society ought to represent. This promise points toward a socio-historical environment configured so as to enable individuals to investigate, recognize, and pursue gifts and talents that are the necessary precondition for advancing the goal of a social world in which humanist values provide the standards by which to judge the circumstances in which individuals are forced (or enabled) to “make a living.” Instead, individuals are compelled to serve the inhuman strategies and forms of organization that prevent the taking hold of those values, as is the case in modern society, contrary to the ideology it maintains of itself, and compels individuals to internalize (see Morgan 2007). In many ways, Adorno was prototypically the cultured person, whose socialization and education were dedicated to refining the senses, amplifying gifts and talents, and acquiring skills that are most conducive to actualizing an individual’s potential. Knowledge of Adorno’s life is important for appreciation of the thrust and evolution of his thought, but it is not possible to reduce the latter to circumstances of the former; if anything, the former was a fitting conduit for the latter – especially Adorno’s way of confronting the vicissitudes of his life, and of life in the twentieth century in general. Thus, Adorno’s life provided the stage for his lifelong determination to recognize and confront, rather than avoid, experiences of cognitive dissonance.

THE MAELSTROM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Adorno spent his childhood in the final decades of the Prussian-dominated German Reich, under the Hohenzollern dynasty. The remainder of his life would be characterized by the uncertainties of accelerating social, political, and cultural change. At the beginning of World War I, he had not yet reached the age of 11. It ended two months after he had turned 15. The Russian Revolution had occurred one year earlier, and the capitulation and ultimate collapse of the German Empire were accompanied by a democratic revolution in Germany that led to the establishment of parliamentary democracy, as the initial result of events and struggles that would continue until 1923 (Broué [1971] 2006). Although the years immediately following the end of World War I were characterized by a high degree of political instability, the so-called “Golden Twenties” saw an unprecedented explosion of cultural, intellectual, governmental, and social scientific activity in Germany – developments in which Frankfurt played an important role. At the same time, however, there was a latent potential for political violence, as the parliamentary democracy that had been established formally in 1919 lacked the support of a majority of Germans. As it

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turned out, the working class as a whole – even though the strongest and best-organized in Europe at the time – was not only not particularly revolutionary, it also was not especially supportive of democracy. Partly, this was due to the fact that the republic had been demanded by the Western allies, especially by Woodrow Wilson, as a precondition for the rebuilding of Germany’s largely destroyed industrial infrastructure. More importantly, though, most Germans were not sufficiently familiar with a democratic mind set, with the importance of a well-functioning democratic culture, and with the advantages and disadvantages of democratic politics, for the collapse of the monarchy to translate into a strong and well-functioning parliamentary democracy. Still, for most of the following decade, the political center held sufficiently well for the Weimar Republic to provide at least the semblance of the social and political stability that is the precondition for economic expansion – and all the social and political benefits that tend to accompany the latter. At the same time, however, as the decade wore on, there was increasingly open conflict between the extreme Left and the extreme Right. Culturally, on the other hand, as well as in terms of public policies, the 1920s were a highly productive and creative time period in Germany, and characterized by a peculiar mix of political instability and the promise of qualitative social, political, and economic change. The transformation of capitalism was an imminent possibility. The Weimar Republic was an age of reforms, cut short by the Great Depression and the subsequent rise of the National Socialists. To the surprise of many, not only did the Great Depression not spark much of a response on the Left that was critical of the capitalist order that caused the crisis, but significant segments of the working class were more attracted to right-wing and authoritarian responses, and were active participants, between 1933 and 1945, in the reconstruction of Germany along fascist lines, the war effort, and the atrocities that occurred throughout this time period. Adorno’s awareness of and sensitivity to the influence exerted by both history and social structure on ways to conceive of and relate to reality had started to become evident during his twenties. Throughout his life, he would continue to pursue an ongoing interest in the link between human civilization and nature, and related implications for processes of individual identity formation and for how to think the world, within the confines of bureaucratic, “late capitalism” (Adorno [1968] 2003). As an immigrant in America, furthermore, he persistently reflected on his existence in exile in general, and in America specifically, at a high level of rigor – a practice that continued after his return, after World War II, to Frankfurt, which had become part of West Germany. Probably for Adorno more than for any other social theorist, the challenge of confronting the rise of National Socialism was a guiding motif. The fact that World War II and the Holocaust had been caused by his society of origin – a technologically, economically, and culturally highly advanced, but politically backward society – would play a major role in his theoretical efforts for the rest of his life. As a scholar dedicated to illuminating the modern condition in as uncompromising a manner as possible, he persistently focused on related social, political, and intellectual challenges, and on implications for the responsibility of the social sciences to illuminate societal conditions where their illumination matters – or matters most. Rather than resting with the appearance of fulfilling this responsibility, as is compatible with the configuration of power, ideology, social structure, and culture in modern politics, society, and economy, social scientists must function as the mirror

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that forces modern societies, and their members, to face what they want to see least – that, as Adorno stated in one of his last interviews, the world is not in order (Adorno [1969] 2010: 232). The combination of having grown up and lived for his first three decades in Germany, as one “extreme” version of modern society with unique features (what has been called the German Sonderfall, or “special case”), and having acquired a degree of intimate familiarity with the United States during his decade there, as another extreme (i.e., “exceptional” modern society), followed by two decades in West Germany, provided Adorno with a perspective on the modern condition that itself would have been quite unusual, for an intellectual concerned with the theory of modern society. Despite the oft-repeated contention that Adorno never “had become comfortable” in the United States and that, presumably for this reason, his perspective on the latter was warped in a highly problematic manner (e.g., Offe 2005: 69–92; also Jay 1984), this contention has become highly contested (Jenemann 2007; Rayman 2009; Wheatland 2009). The contention tends to be put forth by writers who have never spent more than a few months at a time in a society other than their own – and who, more specifically, have not acquired the kind of familiarity with American society that can result only from long-term stays. After all, the US is a modern society with well-documented difficulties to engage in and tolerate rigorous and systematic critical self-reflexivity, especially in terms of nation and national identity. Expressions of frustration with and vocalizations of discontent about sociocultural trends, as they are a common feature of American public life and inspired less by the prospect of qualitative social change, than by visions of an idealized past, are an inadequate substitute for social and cultural critique. As a person who tried to live life with the utmost critical self-reflexivity, Adorno saw himself as both an active subject and the object of social forces, and as the subject and object of study at the same time. It is not surprising, therefore, that he made the problematic nature of everyday life an ongoing theme, as exemplified most clearly in Minima Moralia ([1951] 1978) – a collection of vignettes and aphorisms describing, theorizing, and critiquing instances and features of the damaged life.

THEORIZING REIFIED CIVILIZATION The contexts of Adorno’s life experiences alone, both geographically and politically, would have provided a very real and perfectly compelling set of incentives for his willingness to confront cognitive dissonance, so much so that it is surprising that others with similar stories and circumstances were not as willing to recognize the inherently contradictory character of modern society and its significance for social theory and social research, within and across several societies (e.g., Karl Popper, Adorno’s opponent in the “positivist dispute”; Paul Lazarsfeld, with whom Adorno collaborated unsuccessfully after arriving in the United States; and Karl Mannheim, whose sociology of knowledge Adorno found to be less than convincing [Adorno [1967] 1981]). To be sure, Adorno’s proverbial fellow travelers in the tradition of critical theory, the Institute, and the Frankfurt School displayed a determination comparable to his to confront modern contradictions and the difficulties reason had in asserting itself in the twentieth century, especially Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal,

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but also Erich Fromm, who left the Institute when Adorno arrived in New York, and especially Walter Benjamin, as well as Siegfried Kracauer and Ernst Bloch, none of whom were formally linked to the Institute. These fellow travelers, all of whom – to use Robert Merton’s phrase – stood on the shoulders of such giants as Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Max Weber – along with acquaintances like Georg Lukács (who was not fond of the works of the Frankfurt School), Alban Berg, and other musicians to whom Beethoven and other nineteenth-century greats were as real as many early twentieth-century composers and artists they knew personally – constituted the reality that Adorno saw himself as part of. They literally were his peers; he existed, wrote, worked, and communicated with them in mind. Yet, starting in the early 1930s, Adorno recognized that philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and artistic production and art criticism could not remain unaffected by the socially condoned, constructed, or perpetrated catastrophes that occurred during and after the rise of National Socialism in Germany, accompanied as it was by similar developments elsewhere, especially in Italy and Japan, with their own versions of fascist state power, and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Instead, those intellectual and artistic endeavors became mutually supporting and reinforcing areas of human activity. They represented the potential of human civilization to circumscribe the ethical standards and requirements that in his view had to go hand in hand with life in modern society as the nodal point of promises relating to intellectual enlightenment, political emancipation, economic well-being, technological advances, and personal safety and security – in short, the promise of a rational society (Cook 2004: esp. 140–50). The tension between inert and inherently contradictory empirical conditions and the promise and potential of modern societies to engender and sustain qualitative change informed Adorno’s thought about how to theorize in an ethically grounded manner the travesties human beings are capable of perpetrating on each other. He consistently was concerned with the need to grasp the paradox that an array of institutions and organizations at the same time tend to undercut and promote efforts to grasp the vicissitudes of the modern age. As a consequence, modern societies appear as fields of tension between what human existence could and should be, and what it is, under reified and reifying conditions. Among Adorno’s many associates, his relationship to Horkheimer requires special mention, as it was both comparable in intensity to the Marx–Engels friendship, and peculiar in its own right. On the one hand, there appears to be a general consensus that their collaboration was a major source of motivation and inspiration for Adorno; on the other hand, the latter was superior to Horkheimer in intellect and sophistication, especially as far as the history of philosophy was concerned, and even more so regarding music and the arts more generally. Also, Adorno was much less prone to the kinds of sweeping judgments that Horkheimer the materialist philosopher tended to make. For instance, while Horkheimer referred to Max Weber as an “arch-positivist,” Adorno’s view of Weber was much more nuanced – and appreciative. In fact, Weber’s influence on the Frankfurt School, and the affinity between the two, was more in evidence in Adorno’s thought and writings than in those of any other core member of the Institute of Social Research during the 1930s, such as Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm, and Pollock. At the same time, Adorno was notoriously willing to defer to Horkheimer’s judgment on many occasions, as continued to be evident into the 1960s.

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In sum, the intellectual context in which Adorno’s thought emerged and became ever more refined and focused provided the incentives needed to fine-tune the sensitivity required to sustain rigorous non-conformism in a productive and systematic manner (see Demirovic´ 1999: esp. ch. 5).

ADORNO’S CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY The three main motifs that inspired Adorno’s efforts and achievements were: (1) the contradictory process of enlightenment in the modern age, and strategies to reflect on this process in philosophy, sociology, and music; (2) the challenge of responding to the phenomenon of National Socialism, as indicative of key features of modern society; and (3) the need to situate socially and historically efforts to identify and theorize the defining features of the societal context in which efforts to illuminate and scrutinize modern society are being undertaken. The overall and unifying vanishing point of the pursuit of these motifs is the prospect of a societal reality that has been “pacified” (befriedet), where suffering will be the exception rather than the rule, where endeavors to pursue both rational and reasonable solutions to imminent social problems will not be impaired by barriers that are historically specific features of social order, and where individuals are being encouraged and enabled to recognize and refine their gifts and talents, rather than being steered so as to fulfill the skill and identity requirements of the politically and economically tailored social structure. Finally, in such a society, material survival no longer will be contingent on submission to authority. Adorno’s objective was to think through, as rigorously as possible, the implications that result for attempts to theorize social reality in its totality, in order to affirm, as the standard for advancing the project of a theory of society capable of tackling the contradictions of modern society, precisely those values whose concrete pursuit and actualization modern societies claim as their distinguishing achievement. In terms of how purportedly enlightened societies engender loyalty among their members, compliance with prevailing norms and laws, and cooperation within established forms of organization, pursuit of those values provides institutions and organizations with the most important basis of political, economic, and cultural legitimacy, and members of some societies with the sense of superiority over other forms of social, political, and economic organization. In essence, these values are the same as those that inspired Marx’s social theory – the values of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity (or, to give the latter a more contemporary rendering, solidarity) – and Adorno’s related theoretical moves are similar, although the value of freedom explicitly appeared in and oriented his writings to a greater degree, both compared to Marx, and as opposed to equality or solidarity (Adorno [1964/5] 2006, Hearfield 2004). Yet, on the other hand, rather than accepting and subscribing to the notion that change in modern societies follows such guiding principles as democracy, social justice, freedom, and equality, Adorno dedicated his energy and time to scrutinizing how the continuous reinforcement of the view that related principles guide social change in the modern world is a necessary precondition for the stability and functioning of “late-capitalist” societies (Adorno [1968] 2003). Despite the tendency in academic assessments of Adorno’s continuing relevance in the twenty-first century, especially in the United States, to emphasize his philosophical

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writings, to neglect or ignore his sociological writings, and to affirm or reject the currency of his work accordingly, his philosophy – just as his sociology – was intrinsically entwined with, and finally culminated in, his cross-disciplinary social theory. One of the distinguishing features of his social theory, and his version of critical theory more specifically, is that it relied on the sustained and direct engagement with the concrete, ongoing historical processes of changing forms of social, political, and cultural life. In fact, efforts to address effectively the thrust and purpose of his social theory necessitate explicit consideration of how it was concerned with the many ways in which the historically dynamic contradictory nature of modern society influences, shapes, and undercuts both social research, and attempts to illuminate persistent theoretical as well as philosophical questions and challenges. This contradictory nature of modern society in its specificity not only is grounded, manifested, and sustained in a multiplicity of ways in empirical circumstances, but it also undergoes continuous transmutations whose impact both on social life and on attempts to study it requires focused and persistent attention. To try to delineate Adorno’s social theory qua philosophy, without recognizing his rigorous interest in concrete forms of social life, would be seriously deficient; moreover, such an attempt would miss the central dimension of his overall project and endeavor. To do justice to the latter, it is necessary to focus on why Adorno must be recognized as the most profound, consistent, and sophisticated first-generation representative of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and how his œuvre constitutes a high point in the history of social theory, an achievement comparable, within and beyond the social sciences, with the achievements of Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, and a threshold that is not likely to be surpassed within the foreseeable future, despite frequent claims to the contrary. Indeed, Adorno’s social theory is both uncompromisingly radical and characterized by such a degree of internal consistency that it ties the breadth of his concerns and the resulting insights together like an oscillating dialectical mosaic, designed to render discernible the dynamic paradox as which he endeavored to expose the totality of modern social life. Inevitably, however, to many, facing this mosaic is far more difficult than taking a look at the contributions of Marx, Darwin, Freud, or Einstein, partly because doing the latter is possible without the kind of critical reflexivity regarding the link between self and society that Adorno worked to engender – as Müller-Doohm ([2003] 2005, Part IV) put it: “thinking the unconditional and enduring the conditional.” Relating to the above-mentioned motifs, Adorno’s guiding concern pertained to three central issues of equal importance, above all. First, he endeavored to spell out the quandaries and burdens that result from individuals’ efforts to find a place and to lead an authentic life in what he came to refer to, during the 1960s, as the “totally administered world.” Secondly, he focused on the socio-historically conditioned impediments social scientists and theorists must strive to recognize as well as overcome, in order to achieve the depth of understanding required to capture how exactly the problematic nature of modern societies must be traced to its very core, with pressing implications for theoretically informed assessments of the form and role of culture, social science, politics, and, especially, ideology. Thirdly, he worked to circumscribe the necessary social, cultural, intellectual, psychological, and especially theoretical preconditions for the kind of practices, at all levels of social life, that would be immune to replicating alienated and reified patterns of existence, in order

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to amplify the capacity for critical self-reflexivity – whether the “self” is an individual, a group, an organization or institution, a society, or the human species – without spelling out concretely what exactly these practices would look like or be.

Reading Adorno Almost from the very beginning of his academic career, his inaugural lecture, “The Actuality of Philosophy” ([1931] 2000), to his magnum opus, Negative Dialectics ([1966] 1973), the end of his life and beyond, Adorno has remained a most controversial thinker. Despite varying degrees of appreciation in different areas of intellectual labor and scholarship, such as literary studies, philosophy, musicology, and sociology, and in light of countless efforts to “re-present” the core concerns of his thought and his key contributions to the history of social and philosophical thought in a manner that both is accessible to a broader readership and can be applied in each of the above disciplines, the body of his work continues to be mystifying to most readers. Efforts to elucidate his philosophy, for example, encompass entirely convincing and consistent interpretations of his dialectics as “negative” (stressing the importance of experience and the concrete applied critique of appearances [O’Connor 2004]) or “positive” (stressing the utopian moment in his thought [Sherratt 2002]). However, such seemingly mutually exclusive takes on the substance and significance of his thought highlight the need to recognize that what matters most is not nomenclature and particular concepts, as if their meaning and content were independent of their use, but how the dialectical use of language facilitates the movement of thought, the process of dialectical theorizing. Impediments to comprehending the gravity and substance of Adorno’s contribution to social theory are not located within his theory, but in the paradoxical nature of thought in the modern age in general, and in the decades following the end of World War II, in particular. As a consequence, assessments of the status and importance of his writings depend to a larger degree than for many other theorists on the willingness of readers to entertain the possibility that his work has merit, despite the fact that the thrust of his thought is directed explicitly against the basic presuppositions and official grounds of common sense and “rational thought” today, especially regarding philosophy and social science. The form and substance of Adorno’s thought explicitly and radically went against the grain of traditional as well as mainstream thinking (see Dahms 2008), as his position presented as a profound problem and theoretical challenge that which most readers took for granted: how the sciences – natural, social, and humanities – reflect and extend the ever more problematic configuration of modern social life and organization. To Adorno, the boundaries between disciplinary practices in the humanities and the social sciences are fluid, as insights gained in one traditional area of theory and research correspond with the potential of gaining insights in other areas, and vice versa, making it nearly impossible for readers to identify precisely the usefulness of Adorno’s contributions to a specific discipline. Yet, the desire to construe strategies to confront the challenge of developing a social theory of the modern world that is both conducive to simplifying the complexity and contradictory nature of the social world today, theoretically and practically, and sufficiently suitable to facilitate insights that are positively related to the stated goals – be they qualitative social

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change, more narrowly defined policy objectives, or the continuation of legitimate philosophical and theoretical projects – merely further aggravates the frustration that all such efforts inevitably produce.

Social Theory as Critical Theory of Society Above all, Adorno’s writings take the form of social theory as critical theory. The emphasis in recent years on critical theory as philosophy (especially since Habermas, and perhaps even more so since Axel Honneth, both of whom are professional philosophers) neglects the importance of relying on contributions from other disciplines and discourses for the meaningful advancement of critical social theory. Confining critical theory to philosophy, for instance, is likely to increase the emphasis on paradigm shifts and, once successfully enacted, on holding on to the new paradigm, and advocating it persistently, at the expense of potentially more important developments – both in critical theory, and in the social world of which critical theory was, and should be, the highest level of critical reflection. Yet, critical theory must neither be reduced to nor focused on any one paradigm; rather, it is the productive exchange between several competing paradigms whose concurrent tension facilitates that which distinguishes critical theory from more traditional approaches. (In this sense, Habermas is not a traditional critical theorist, but rather a critical traditional theorist.) Adorno was the most important traditional critical theorist, and his relevance and privileged position in the tradition remains uncontested, despite such dismissal of Adorno, in Rolf Wiggershaus ([1986] 1994), “as a bitter, hyperemotional complainer, monotonously prejudiced in his views, irresponsibly protean in his thought, and unable to formulate testable hypotheses,” as Robert Hullot-Kentor (2006: xx) put it. First of all, a key conceptual clarification is necessary: the term generally used in German to denote “critical social theory” is kritische Gesellschaftstheorie. However, in common usage, social theory on its own does not translate into Gesellschaftstheorie, as the latter term has tended to be used either synonymously with critical social theory, or with Theorie der Gesellschaft (theory of society), which usually applies to theories of society as a whole, which may or may not refer to critical theories of society, as it often is applied to the frameworks, for example, of Parsons, Luhmann, Giddens, and Habermas. As a consequence, there is not a term in German that would be entirely equivalent to “social theory.” By contrast, sociological theory (soziologische Theorie) usually describes non-critical theories. Incidentally, Adorno did more to introduce the term Gesellschaftstheorie into German sociological terminology than Horkheimer, for systematic reasons that were entirely consistent with his use of “critical theory” (see also Wellmer [1961] 1971). (For instance, a recently published overview of social theories, by Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl [[2004] 2009], was titled Sozialtheorie in the original, clearly in an effort to avoid connotations that might have suggested, incorrectly, proximity with critical social theory – although Joas and Knöbl included a chapter on “Habermas and Critical Theory,” in whose context Adorno is mentioned in passing. See also Müller-Doohm [2003] 2005, and especially 2004, where “social theory” often is meant to refer to critical social theory.) For Adorno, theories of society that are not critical with regard to the subject matter cannot aspire to being adequate theories of society, if the society or societal

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form theorized is problematic in a manner that has a bearing on the analysis and theorizing of society or the societal form. Theories of society that are not, in principle, willing to critically examine their subject matter in a systematic manner tend to replicate and perpetuate that which is to be analyzed and scrutinized, in an unacknowledged manner, from within society. Non-critical, traditional theories of society tend to regard society as a given and, thus, as entities that are not subject to critique: they start out from the position that social processes and forms of organization are to be studied, as it were, on their own terms, rather than as the product of concrete history and social change. For Adorno, non-critical theories of society are hypothetical in the sense that they treat the study of society as if it were possible to engage in the latter on the assumption that its features are non-problematic, without examining how, and even against evidence that, all societies (both traditional and modern) are bound to be problematic – at the very least with regard to how they balance the relationship between facts and norms, but also in the sense that concrete formations are the preliminary result of the interplay of different sites and competing forms of power. To the point, non-critical, traditional “theories of society” provide kinds of knowledge that are more likely than not a function of the functioning and constitutional logic of society, without the link between the two being acknowledged and scrutinized in a rigorous manner. Such is precisely the kind of knowledge of society that critical theory of society is working to illuminate as inherently flawed, and ideological in ways that sustain and protect the existing socio-historical order against qualitative improvements that are more than adaptations necessitated in order to maintain the functioning and order of advanced capitalist societies (for instance, in this light, the expansion during the Cold War of welfare states in the West in retrospect was less an achievement than a function of competition between actually existing capitalist and socialist societies, even though, for decades, social scientists framed welfare states as evidence of progress). The kind of knowledge that traditional theories of society endeavor to produce, however, does provide data about how society “sees itself,” which is especially useful for the study of modern society. In this sense, the difference between non-critical theories of society and critical theories is that the former, as they do not include at the systematic level the critique of how society is exceedingly problematic, constitute condensed and exceedingly sophisticated representations of the kind of perspectives that are prevalent in society in a multiplicity of ways, pertaining to such issues as the relationship between individual and society, between state and economy, between democracy and self-actualization, and between education and emancipation.

Contributions The development of Adorno’s thought combined the overall project of his social theory with the other dimensions of his work, especially philosophy and sociology, and also aesthetics and music. It is not possible even to begin to “re-present” Adorno’s social theory, which to grasp even in outline form requires persistent and in-depth engagement with his writings. Ultimately, the work most important and, if carefully interpreted and applied, most valuable to social theorists is Negative Dialectics ([1966] 1973), the book that has barely begun to be recognized outside of philosophy, and which has been neglected almost entirely among sociologists, especially in

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the United States – like so many of his contributions – due in part to the fact that the translation that is available is notoriously inadequate. (Robert Hullot-Kentor, the highly acclaimed translator into English of several other books by Adorno, has been working on the translation of Negative Dialektik which, once available, is likely to receive greater attention, from philosophers as well as social scientists.) Any discussion of Adorno’s contribution to social theory must begin, without any doubt, with the book he co-authored with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1947] 2002), whose revised translation is vastly superior to the one that had been available for decades. Dialectic of Enlightenment may be one of the most misunderstood books of the twentieth century. Even Habermas ([1985] 1987: 106) referred to it as Horkheimer and Adorno’s “blackest book,” in which its authors joined with “the ‘black’ writers of the bourgeoisie, foremost among them Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche … to conceptualize the Enlightenment’s process of self-destruction. On their analysis, it is no longer possible to place hope in the liberating force of enlightenment.” Habermas’s assessment has been proven to have been quite mistaken, as it is based on a literal reading that is especially questionable with regard to Adorno’s perspective on enlightenment, which – like much of Adorno’s writing – it is not possible to appreciate based on literal interpretation, but must be recognized as a set of rhetorical moves, directed at emphasizing particular points made, within a dialectical frame. As Lambert Zuidervaart (2007: 131) put it with reference to a famous aphorism from Minima Moralia ([1951] 1978: 50) that inverted a Hegelian dictum: What Adorno articulates more eloquently than his successors is that “the whole is the false.” In the long run, we cannot resist the repression of desire and the destruction of nature unless we dismantle economic exploitation. What he needed to say more vigorously, however, and with greater nuance, is that the whole is not wholly false. This is the valid point to Habermas’s otherwise overwrought critique.

Once it is recognized that Adorno’s critique of positivist thinking, including especially in philosophy and the social sciences, entails a rejection of nominalist and literal readings, interpretations of his writings as if they could be read like artifacts of traditional thought and theorizing are revealed to be rather deficient. The point of Adorno’s writings was precisely to stress the fallacies that result from the assumption that language and texts adequately represent reality, at any but the most basic and limited level (see Jarvis 1998: 177–8). This also applies to Dialectic of Enlightenment, which only appears to advocate a rejection of enlightenment thought, while it actually constitutes a sustained argument for the need to radicalize the kind of enlightenment that is compatible with bourgeois society, and which the latter employs to protect itself against qualitative social change. The fact that the book was written during World War II, and completed in 1944 in a version that later was cleansed of class-based language, does not limit its validity, but provided it with the kind of urgency, sharpness, and focus that “normal circumstances” would not allow for. If anything, Horkheimer and Adorno’s basic thesis, that “[m]yth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology” ([1947] 2002: xviii), is an insight that is as important today as it was then – if not more so. The understandable desire that this not be so bears no relationship whatsoever with whether or not it still

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applies. In fact, to suggest that what they identified as the dialectic of enlightenment ceased to apply during the postwar period would be synonymous with claiming that developments during the last 65 years or so have been radical and far-reaching indeed. Although such a reading would appear to be consistent with the self-legitimating needs of so-called democratic polities, arguably it would be rather difficult to demonstrate that qualitative changes have taken place that might justify such a reading. It is key to appreciating Adorno’s writings that he strongly cautioned against there being a definite link between the history of human civilization and the inevitability of continual progress. Indeed, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, he and Max Horkheimer contended that this link does not necessarily exist at all, merely the contingent appearance of such a link, which rather resembles a misinterpretation of prior history. The enlightenment ensured that the tensions between societal reality and interpretations of societal reality would reach an ever higher pitch, to the point of becoming inaudible to humans, unless determined efforts are being made to guarantee (or increase the likelihood) that enlightenment will be real enlightenment, rather than an illusion of enlightenment that in fact is myth. The best known and probably most discussed chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment is entitled “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” ([1947] 2002: 94–136). Here, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that culture deteriorated into the mass-production of commodities, in ways that erode the idea of culture and the ability to experience art, thus not only depriving works of art of their critical edge, but also destroying the possibility of actual communication between the artist and the audience, and thus making the projection of culture a key culprit in dehumanization. The culture industry engenders passivity through repetition of the ever-same in slightly different garb, in ways that are oriented above all toward consumption. The chapter, which is likely to have been more an expression of Adorno’s thought than Horkheimer’s, is one of the places where the critique of jazz, of Hollywood movies, and of the entertainment industry generally was spelled out early on. It also has provided a frequent occasion for misinterpreting the thrust of Adorno’s thinking, especially regarding his rejection of jazz. Between the original publication dates of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) and Adorno’s most social-theoretically relevant work, Negative Dialectics (1966), he produced a body of work that is not only truly overwhelming, but it still keeps expanding with the continuing publication of his lectures, many of which have not been translated into English yet. For instance, his lectures from the early 1960s, on “philosophical elements of a theory of society” ([1964] 2008), which are especially relevant in any discussion of Adorno’s social theory, are still to be made available to readers in the English-speaking world. From the social-theoretical viewpoint, the writings that continue to be most important are Philosophy of New Music ([1949] 2006); Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life ([1951] 1978); his empirical and empirically oriented studies, especially The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which included the famous and somewhat notorious F scale (measuring inclination toward fascist world views), and the recently published work he did in connection with and at the time of the Princeton Radio Research Project, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory ([1938–41] 2008), as well as his contributions to qualitative social research – The Stars Down to Earth ([1952/3] 1994), The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’

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Radio Addresses ([1943] 1975), and the recently translated Guilt and Defense ([1955] 2010); the essays included in a volume in German entitled Soziologische Schriften I (Sociological Writings I, 1972), many of which are available in English; Critical Models ([1963, 1969] 2005); Introduction to Sociology ([1968] 2000); Introduction to the Sociology of Music ([1962] 1976); The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology ([1969] 1976); and Prisms ([1967] 1981). Among the many shorter pieces, aside from those included in Critical Models (especially pp. 37–40, 59–60, 89–122, 143–60, 191–204, 215–93), the following warrant special mention: “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? The Fundamental Question of the Present Structure of Society” (Adorno [1968] 2003: 111–25) and the conversation, “Education for Maturity and Responsibility” (Adorno [1969] 1999). As mentioned earlier, a consistent theme throughout these books and essays is that it is not possible to adequately engage in sociology or philosophy, and especially not in social theory, without confronting explicitly, systematically, and consistently the contradictions and internal irreconcilability of the modern age. A truly ethical life in the Hegelian sense of Sittlichkeit is likely to be an “objective impossibility,” in the absence of the kind of qualitative social change that would be conducive to the taking hold of such Sittlichkeit. In its absence, there is the threat of the continuous deterioration of common standards and shared values in mass democracy. Explaining this deterioration is a major challenge for social theorists: is it inherent to modern societies, or is it a product of the particular social structure characteristic of modern societies, and of patterns of inequality whose persistence is socially constructed in the sense that it is not “natural,” but expressive of concerted efforts to maintain the existing order, and to prevent public debates addressing their socially constructed nature? Which brings us to Adorno’s theoretical magnum opus, Negative Dialectics. A necessary precondition for confronting the social tensions inherent to modern societies is reliance on dialectics. However, while Hegel’s dialectic, as the first modern incarnation of dialectical theorizing, relied on the supposition that history was the result of a process of the mind’s self-liberation, and thus compelled to take the form, in the long run, of qualitative improvements, Adorno’s “negative dialectics” is grounded in the suspicion that the tasks of philosophy, as well as especially of theory, relate directly to the effort to confront the possibility of qualitative improvements as a contingency – as one possibility among many. The process of theorizing is much more important than the formulation and enumeration of basic propositions, or core themes, which would not serve well as the basis for reconstructing the broad outlines and purpose of Adorno’s theory. His theory not only cannot be reduced to propositions and themes, but (1) the meaning of theory itself is not compatible with such reduction, and (2) the entire framework is designed precisely against engendering the kind of theorizing that results from fixation on propositions. To differing degrees, this is true for most theories, but it is especially true of Adorno’s theory, and while it may be less destructive to various other theories to condense their contribution to a set of propositions and themes without distorting their purpose, it would not be possible to reduce Adorno’s theory without turning it inside out, as it were – without the understanding that the meaning and weight of any statement emerges in relation to other, related statements. The gravity of insights manifests itself in the tension between statements, rather than in

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particular statements that stand on their own. Adorno’s thought thus exemplifies a kind of theorizing that presents a radically different alternative, as it is driven by the determination to be true to its stated goals and overall purpose. Adorno regarded “negative dialectics” as the sole appropriate response to the state of social, political, and cultural affairs under conditions of late-capitalist production and organization. While it would be entirely justified to consider Hegel’s dialectical “method” as an attempt to stress the problematic nature of all methods – as they encourage the delegation of responsibility for thought to disembodied analytical strategies – and thus to regard Hegel’s approach as an “anti-method” method, Adorno went one step further, to propose a form of dialectics designed to be immune to the danger of being turned into a method, and of becoming, as ideology, complicit with the existing, reified social order. His notion of identity thinking must be seen as integral to his agenda of critical reflexivity regarding the prevalence of alienation and reification, as well as the emphasis on disembodied methods. Identity thinking corresponds to the control function of thought, as a kind of thinking that collapses the potential complexity of a concept (in the Hegelian sense of Begriff) into the simplicity of a term, attaches this seemingly unambiguous and unproblematic term to an object, and posits that all the dimensions of the object can be adequately expressed on the basis of this term. According to Adorno, every such step constitutes nothing less than a violation of the object of study or consideration at hand, especially if the object is not a simple, straightforward thing to be used for specific and clearly delimited purposes, but a historically emergent form, such as a human being or a form of social life (e.g., “democracy”). Identity thinking reduces the multi-faceted nature of an object to one (or a small set of) commensurable, controllable dimension(s), excluding those aspects that represent the potential of impunity, contradiction, resistance, and transcendence. Although there are concepts that do refer to objects which do not harbor potentialities that point beyond their specific utility in actually existing societies, due to the ubiquity of practices in modern societies that reduce the possibilities most objects entail toward a better form of social, political, cultural, and economic life to their utility within – and for the purpose of protecting – actually existing societies in their specificity, it is exceedingly difficult to determine which objects are adequately captured with available concepts (Rose 1978). Adorno used language in a manner that may not have enabled him to cut through the alienating and reifying character of language, but he was determined to minimize the extent to which he himself perpetuated the reifying dimension of language under conditions of ever more advanced (and ever less escapable) capitalist production. Although Adorno certainly did not reject the notion that it is possible to identify objectively important features of social reality or any of its aspects, he also did not adhere to a conventional correspondence theory of truth in any form (see Jarvis 1998: 114), since we cannot meaningfully talk about truth as long as we engage in identity thinking, thus truncating what we cannot hope to grasp conceptually, and presume the identity of concept and object. Or, to put it differently, as long as we engage in identity thinking, we systematically exclude consideration of the possibility of the object’s “other,” as that which (1) cannot be captured by means of socially sanctioned thought, due to its brittle nature, as far as its utilization is concerned; (2) would not submit, if it were fully recognized; (3) would express its disagreement

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and alternative interpretation if given a voice; and (4) would teach us that there is more to the world than the powers that be would have us “think.” As Simon Jarvis (1998: 170–1) summed it up exceedingly well, Hegel is … the primary source for Adorno’s unusual attitude to contradiction. Contradiction testifies that thought and being are not identical. Negative dialectic, accordingly, does not aim to resolve all contradictions in a final non-contradictory position. It is easy to misunderstand Adorno’s “immanent critique” as a generalized application of the law of non-contradiction as a means of discovering contradictions in criticized texts. This, though, would be the epitome of that formal identification which Adorno takes as the “Ur-form of ideology.” Rather, negative dialectic seeks to make visible, as contradiction, the real antagonisms which are masked by philosophy’s striving for logical identity. The aim of negative dialectic is not the liquidation of contradictions in logic, but the reconciliation of antagonisms in reality. This end cannot be served by imposing an illusory and formal non-contradictoriness, but only by showing how logical contradiction is embedded in, and dependent upon, the experience of antagonism. It is in this context that the contradictions of negative dialectic itself, contradictions which are so often used in an attempt to dispatch it, must be understood. The deployment of Hegel against Kant and of Kant against Hegel is not sceptical. The set of contradictions which are thus displayed testify to natural-historical antagonisms. Any attempt to overcome the appearance of scepticism by adopting an invariant standpoint would be ideological in the sense that it would conceal, not display, these real antagonisms.

IMPACT To date, Adorno has had the greatest impact in philosophy, followed by the humanities more broadly, and finally, sociology. Important social theorists who were influenced by Adorno are Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Claus Offe, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson, Douglas Kellner, Gillian Rose, and many others. There are notable differences in his influence by country, however. In Germany, Adorno is almost a household name, synonymous with critical theory, and critique more generally, both positively and negatively. In German sociology, research and theories inspired by Adorno’s work are quite common, one of many ways of studying social reality. By contrast, in the United States, Adorno’s influence in sociology has continued to be very limited, a situation that is likely to persist. Still, after a few decades of relative neglect, Adorno undoubtedly has been experiencing a revival of sorts. Although the members of the early Frankfurt School, including Adorno, appear to have been more or less authoritarian and even sexist, Adorno’s writings (along with Marcuse’s) have influenced feminist thought to a growing extent. Judith Butler (2005) has been influenced by Adorno. Maggie O’Neill’s (1999) collection provides similar evidence of compatibility between Adorno and feminist theory. Relating to the culture industry concept and the critique of mass culture, efforts continue to update the role and influence of commodification processes in mass culture, and to re-evaluate the concept, as well as the meaning of the critique of particular areas of mass media consumption, including jazz and film (Paddison 1996; Witkin 1998, 2000, 2003; Miklitsch 2006). Adorno’s more empirically oriented, qualitative

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research also keeps drawing attention, and is being applied and developed further (Dandaneau & Falcone 1998; Apostolidis 2000). Finally, a growing number of authors have been examining Adorno’s politics (Hammer 2006; Holloway, Matamoros & Tischler 2009).

ASSESSMENT Adorno’s efforts as a social theorist were directed at circumscribing as clearly as possible the problematic features of modern societies, as a precondition for identifying explicitly the challenges that go hand in hand with the project of conceiving of a theory of society. Making explicit the latter challenge directly leads to the acknowledgment of the need to determine whether – and if so, how – modern society may channel efforts to analyze and understand any aspect of social and natural reality in ways that from the outset distort our understanding and appreciation of what is to be analyzed and understood, so as to feed back directly into how modern society functions, in its specificity. The purpose of Adorno’s critical social theory was to engender a mode of reflection that identifies and examines carefully and critically how specific features in modern capitalist, industrialized, bureaucratic societies that change over time, and from place to place, are likely to influence efforts to grasp and understand any aspect of society. This influence could be problematic in ways that are detrimental to the advancement of social theory, if unrecognized. The primary purpose of critical reflection, then, is not to produce empirically accurate representations of modern social reality, but to engender social research whose standards are oriented toward attaining a level of objectivity that is conducive to actively reflecting on the societal context whose potentially problematic features are to be observed, identified, and overcome. This kind of objectivity can be furthered by insistence that the positive claims about the social, political, cultural, and especially economic conditions modern societies purport to embody – especially regarding unique opportunities for selfactualization, from the level of the individual to the species – serve as the firm standard by which to assess and scrutinize societal realities. Social research that does not rely on critical theory as a resource is likely to “reveal” facts about social reality whose status is potentially questionable, as those “facts” may be expressions precisely of the kinds of patterns whose detection is contingent on rigorous critical scrutiny; focus on such “facts” may conceal and perpetuate problematic patterns, even if their illumination was meant to facilitate qualitative social change. Adorno’s thought and writings may be more relevant today than during his century because his theory highlights like no other the persistent contradictions and paradoxes of the modern condition, and because it demonstrates how critically important confronting those contradictions and paradoxes is, in a multiplicity of ways. In order to grasp the nature of social processes, the developmental trajectories they represent, and the relationships between individual and society as well as between social science and society, reflecting explicitly on the prevailing contradictions and their central role to the modern age is a necessary precondition for not replicating those contradictions in social research, in everyday practices, and in theoretically oriented efforts to explain what effectively may be inexplicable, with

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available conceptual and methodological tools. It is more important than ever to acknowledge how the functioning of modern societies both sustains and relies on the unwillingness and inability of many inhabitants to move beyond credulity and ideology, and their eagerness to employ both as the primary means for “explaining” experiences in the social world, and for constructing purportedly meaningful life histories. In light of the warped character of current conditions, even Marx’s theory would have been inadequate for attempts to grasp the contradictions of the modern age, not least because his perspective was based on the presumption of socially, politically, and economically enlightened societies having the capacity to work out problems, without first fostering a socially grounded, radical revolution in consciousness, to prevent further reliance on bourgeois ideology. Adorno’s critical social theory provides a wealth of insights relating to the persistence and proliferation of forms of social, cultural, and political regression in purportedly enlightened societies, and how those societies may rely on forms of regression as resources for maintain and protecting patterns of inequality that are in conflict with the goal, and even the possibility, of promoting solutions to social problems that would be rational as well as reasonable.

Reader’s Guide to Theodor W. Adorno While, for many years, the quality of translations of Adorno’s writings has been wanting, in recent years it has been improving dramatically. New editions and translations of several of his books and articles have appeared. One of the consequences should be a decline of the misinterpretations that were due, at least in part, to the poor quality of translations available – the issue being more the interpretations of Adorno’s thought that informed them, than purely linguistic issues. Especially for social theory, the importance of a high-quality edition of Negative Dialectics cannot be overestimated. Moreover, the number of excellent interpretations and summaries of Adorno’s thought that are available in English has been growing continuously (Jarvis 1998; Bernstein 2001; O’Connor 2004; Hullot-Kentor 2006; Zuidervaart 2007). Among the biographies now available, those by Claussen ([2003] 2008) and MüllerDoohm ([2003] 2005) are especially recommended. There are also now available a large number of collections on various dimensions of Adorno’s thought and contributions (Gibson & Rubin 2002; Huhn 2004; Gerhardt 2006; Burke et al. 2007; Cook 2008; Richter 2010; and especially Delanty 2004).

Bibliography Writings of Theodor W. Adorno [1931] 2000. “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Trans. B. Snow. In B. O’Connor (ed.), The Adorno Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 23–39. [1938–41] 2008. Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory. Ed. R. Hullot-Kentor. Cambridge: Polity. [1943] 1975. The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses. In Soziologische Schriften II.1. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 7–141. [1947] 2002 (with M. Horkheimer). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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[1949] 2006. Philosophy of New Music. Trans R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1950 (with E. Frenkel-Brunswick, D. J. Lieberson, and R. N. Sanford). The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Row. [1951] 1978. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso. [1952/3] 1994. The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture. Ed. S. Crook. London: Routledge. [1955] 1967. “Sociology and Psychology.” New Left Review 46 (November–December): 67–80. [1955] 2010. Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany. Trans. and ed. J. K. Olick and A. J. Perrin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [1962] 1989. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [1962] 1976. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Trans. E. Jephcott. New York: Seabury Press. [1963, 1969] 2005. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Trans. H. W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press. [1964] 2008. Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft. Ed. T. TenBrink and M. P. Nogueira. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. [1964–5] [2001] 2006. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964/65. Ed. R. Tiedemann. Trans. R. Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity. [1966] 1973. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum. [1967] 1981. Prisms. Trans. S. and S. Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [1967] 1981a. “The Sociology of Knowledge and Its Consciousness.” In Prisms. Trans. S. and S. Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 35–50. [1968] 2003. “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? The Fundamental Question of the Present Structure of Society.” In Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader. Ed. R. Tiedemann. Trans. R. Livingstone and others. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 111–25. [1968] 2000. Introduction to Sociology. Trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1969. “Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno.” Trans., ed., and with an Introduction by G. Richter. In G. Richter (ed.), Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 227–38. [1969] 1976 (with H. Albert, R. Dahrendorf, J. Habermas, H. Pilot, and K. R. Popper). The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby. London: Heinemann. [1969] 1999 (with H. Becker). “Education for Maturity and Responsibility.” History of the Human Sciences 12(3): 21–34. [1970] 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Trans R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1972. Soziologische Schriften I (Sociological Writings I). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. 2003. Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader. Ed. R. Tiedemann. Trans. R. Livingstone and others. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2003. Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings), 20 vols. Ed. R. Tiedemann, with G. Adorno, S. Buck-Morss, and K. Schultz. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

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Apostolidis, P. (2000) Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bernstein, J. M. (2001) Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Broué, P. ([1971] 2006) The German Revolution 1917–1923. Trans. J. Archer. Chicago: Haymarket. Burke, D. A. et al. (2007) Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Claussen, D. ([2003] 2008) Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Trans. R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Cook, D. (2004) Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society. London: Routledge. Cook, D. (ed.) (2008) Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts. Stocksfield: Acumen. Cooper. J. (2007) Cognitive Dissonance. Fifty Years of a Classic Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dahms, H. F. (1998) “Beyond the Carousel of Reification: Critical Social Theory after Lukács, Adorno, and Habermas.” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 18: 3–62. Dahms, H. F. (2008) “How Social Science is Impossible Without Critical Theory: The Immersion of Mainstream Approaches in Time and Space.” In No Social Science Without Critical Theory, ed. H. F. Dahms. Current Perspectives in Social Theory 25. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 3–61. Dandaneau, S. P. and M. Falcone (1998) A Wrong Life: Studies in Lifeworld-Grounded Critical Theory. Stamford, CT: JAI Press. Delanty, G. (ed.) (2004) Theodor W. Adorno (Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought), 4 vols. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Demirovic´, A. (1999) Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle: Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Drake, R. (2009). “Devices of Shock: Adorno’s Aesthetics of Film and Fritz Lang’s Fury.” Telos (Special Issue: “Adorno and America”) 149 (Winter): 151–68. Gerhardt, C. (ed.) (2006). “Adorno and Ethics.” New German Critique 97. Gibson, N. and A. Rubin (eds.) (2002) Adorno. A Critical Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Habermas, J. ([1985] 1987) “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.” In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. F. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 106–30. Hammer, E. (2006) Adorno and the Political. London: Routledge. Hearfield, C. (2004) Adorno and the Modern Ethos of Freedom. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Holloway, J., F. Matamoros, and S. Tischler (eds.) (2009) Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism. London: Pluto. Horkheimer, M. ([1937] 1972) “Traditional and Critical Theory.” In Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Trans. M. J. O’Connell. New York: Herder and Herder. Huhn, T. (ed.) (2004) The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hullot-Kentor, R. (2006) Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press. Jäger, L. ([2003] 2004) Adorno: A Political Biography. Trans. S. Spencer. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Jarvis, S. (1998) Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. Jay, M. (1984) Adorno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jenemann, D. (2007) Adorno in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Joas, H. and W. Knöbl ([2004] 2009) Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Th. (1949) Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus. Amsterdam: Bermann-Fischer. Miklitsch, R. (2006) Roll Over Adorno: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media. Albany: State University of New York Press. Morgan, A. (2007) Adorno’s Concept of Life. New York: Continuum. Müller-Doohm, S. ([2003] 2005) Adorno: A Biography. Trans. R. Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity. Müller-Doohm, S. (2004) “The Critical Theory of Society as Reflexive Sociology.” In T. Huhn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 279–301. O’Connor, B. (ed.) (2000) The Adorno Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. O’Connor, B. (2004) Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Offe, C. (2005) Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States. Trans. P. Camiller. Cambridge: Polity. O’Neill, M. (ed.) (1999) Adorno, Culture and Feminism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Paddison, M. (1996) Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music. London: Kahn & Averill. Rayman, J. (2009) “Adorno’s American Reception.” Telos (Special Issue: “Adorno and America”) 149 (Winter): 6–29. Richter, G. (ed.) (2010) Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity. New York: Fordham University Press. Rose, G. (1978) The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. London: Macmillan. Sherratt, Y. (2002) Adorno’s Positive Dialectic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wellmer, A. ([1969] 1971) Critical Theory of Society. Trans. J. Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder. Wells. J. (2009) “Doctor Faustus’s Portrait of Theodor Adorno: Instrumentalized Aesthetics and Fascism.” Telos (Special Issue: “Adorno and America”) 149 (Winter): 69–86. Wheatland, T. (2009) The Frankfurt School in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wiggershaus, R. ([1986] 1994) The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance. Trans. M. Robertson. Cambridge: Polity. Witkin, R. (1998) Adorno on Music. London: Routledge. Witkin, R. (2000) “Why Did Adorno Hate Jazz?” Sociological Theory 18(1): 145–70. Witkin, R. (2003) Adorno on Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Zuidervaart, L. (2007) Social Philosophy after Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Index

a priori: Comte, 37; Du Bois, 430; Hegel, 382; hermeneutics, 383; “I” and “me” theory, 403, 416; Parsons, 528, 552; pragmatism, 416; romantic idealism, 381, 382, 383, 385, 403, 415; Saint-Simon, 52 Abaza, Mona, 19 Abbott, Andrew, 412 Abbott, Edith, 81 'Abd al-Qa¯dir, 21 abortion, 294 Aboulafia, Mitchell, 373, 411, 419 Abrams, Philip, 170, 179, 180 “Absolute Spirit,” Hegel, 120 absolutism, 115, 124 abstraction, Whitehead, 519 achievement: Mannheim, 475; Parsons, 525, 526 action: communicative, 550–1; Mannheim, 482, 486; Parsons, 540–1; Schumpeter, 456, 462; Schutz, 490, 493, 494, 495, 496, 500–1, 504; Weber, 306, 314, 315, 331–3, 335, 341–3, 347–8, 359, 383, 492, 493, see also affectual action; collective action; means-end rational action; social action; traditional action; value-rational action

action frame of reference, 517–18, 520 Action Française, 55 activism: instrumental, 533; romantic idealism, 384 Adams, Bert, 274 adaptation, four function paradigm, 527, 528, 530, 533, 541, 542 Addams, Jane, 286, 295, 406 adequacy, postulate of, 504 Adie, Thomas, 285 Adler, Friedrich, 453 Adler, Max, 453 Adorno, Gretel, 561, 562 Adorno, Theodor, 559–81; assessment of, 577–8; contradictions, 2, 9, 560, 565, 567, 568, 576, 577–8; critical theory, 1–2, 9, 567–76, 577; culture industry, 9, 573, 576; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 572–3; identity thinking, 9, 562, 575; impact of, 576–7; intellectual context, 565–7; Negative Dialectics, 9, 569, 571–2, 573, 574–6; negative dialectics, 9, 560, 569, 571–2, 573, 574–6; personal history, 560–3; political and social context, 563–5; social dynamics, 524 aesthetics: Comte, 37, 38, 44, 48; Simmel, 8, 207, 221–2, 228, 229–30

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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index affectivity, 525, 526 affectual action, 317, 320, 327, 334, 335, 341 Africa: colonialism, 429, see also Algeria African Americans, 426–30, 431–2, 435–42, 545–6 agency: Du Bois, 433–4, 440; idealism, 382; Kant, 381; Mead, 382, 401, 404, 415, 416–17, 418; pragmatism, 385, 386, 415; romantic idealism, 385, 386, 415; Simmel, 216; voluntarism, 433–4 Ahmed, Akbar S., 25 Alatas, Syed Farid, 7, 20, 21, 22, 25 Alatas, Syed Hussein, 19 Albrow, Martin, 361 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 276, 277, 412, 413, 550, 551, 554 Algeria, French colonization, 7, 96, 97, 98, 107–8 alienation: Adorno, 562, 563, 575; Du Bois, 441; Hegel, 119, 562; Lukács, 231; Marx, 125, 158–9, 562; Schumpeter, 462 Allen, Judith A., 10, 284, 286, 287, 288, 291, 292, 294, 295, 297, 298 Allen, N.J., 277 Allen, R.L., 453, 465 Allport, Gordon, 522 Almohads, 13, 18, 21 Almoravids, 13, 18, 21 altruism: Comte, 33, 34, 39, 43, 45, 52, 55; Durkheim, 264, 265–6, 268; Spencer, 167, 177, 178 ambivalence, Simmel, 230 American Revolution, 355, 539 Amigoni, David, 83, 84–5 anarchy, Comte, 31, 35, 39, 43 ancien régime, 96, 103 Andersen, E.S., 464, 465 Anderson, Elijah, 443 Anderson, Kevin B., 156 Anderson, P., 154 androcentric culture, 283, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294 animal rights, 416 animal-magnetism, 79 animism, 269 Annandale, Ellen, 83 L’Année Sociologique, 236, 239, 257, 270 anomie, Durkheim, 55, 250, 264, 266–8

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antagonistic relationships, 337, 338, 340–1 anthropocentrism, 310, 313 anthropology: Durkheim’s influence, 275; positivism, 55 Antonio, R.J., 3, 4, 115 Apel, Karl-Otto, 419 Apostolidis, P., 577 appresentation, 501, 502 Arbuckle, Elisabeth Sanders, 73, 85 Arena, R., 465 aristocracy: Puritan perception of, 325; Spencer’s hostility, 166; Tocqueville, 96, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105 Aristotle, 256 armed forces, suicide, 266 Arni, Caroline, 88 Arnold, Matthew, 80 Aron, Raymond, 49, 58, 491 Arrighi, Giovanni, 156, 463 art: Comte, 44–5, 48; Simmel, 221, 227–8 artificial somnambulism, 79 'as.abiyyah, 15–16, 18–19, 22–3, 24 Al-Asad, Hafez, 23 ascetic Protestantism: Parsons, 512, 539; Weber, 306, 308, 310, 325, 328, 344, 345, 351 asceticism: Parsons, 512; Simmel, 218 ascription, 525, 526 aspiration, Mannheim, 473–4, 476–7, 478, 479 assembly-line technology, 406 associational politics, 100, 101 associationism, 79 astronomy, Comte, 31 Atkinson, Henry George, 76, 80, 81 Atkinson, John Maxwell, 264 attachment, Durkheim, 259 Augello, M.M., 463 Austrian School of economics, 448, 452 Austromarxism, 453 authoritarianism, 152 authority, Protestant sects, 326 authority systems, Parsons, 536 automated production, Marx, 144, 145, 147, 156 autonomy: Durkheim, 248, 258, 259, 264, 266, 268, 269; Schumpeter, 460; Weber, 305, 308, 315, 342, 347, 352, 354, 355

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584 Avezac-Lavigne, C., 73 Avineri, Shlomo, 158, 159 Ayer, A.J., 56 Baali, Fuad, 19 Backhaus, J., 465 Bacon, Francis, 31, 51, 62, 79 Balakrishnan, G., 156 Baldwin, James, 383, 384 Baldwin, John, 374, 419 Bales, Robert, 412, 413, 526–7, 531, 532 Balibar, Etienne, 159 Barber, B., 552 Barber, Michael D., 490, 491, 493, 501, 507 Barnes, Harry Elmer, 19 Barry, Robert M., 374 Barthes, Roland, 275 Baudrillard, Jean, 4–5, 38 Bauer, Bruno, 117, 118 Bauer, Otto, 449, 453 Baum, A., 552 Bauman, Zygmunt, 505 Baumgarten, Ida, 308 Baxter, Richard, 323, 324, 329 Beam, Lura, 294 Beatty, Bessie, 294 Beaumont, Gustave de, 97, 98, 101, 102, 106 Beauvoir, Simone de, 299 Bebel, August, 284 Beck, Naomi, 169, 171, 181 Becker, Carl H., 480 Becker, Howard, 19, 411 Bederman, Gail, 297 Bedouin groups, 15–17 Beecher, Henry Ward, 284 Beecher, John, 284 Beecher, Lyman, 285 Beecher, Mary Foote, 284 behavior: Martineau’s US study, 65, 67; Mead, 396–7; Veblen, 189, see also collective behavior behavioral organism, Parsons, 541, 542 behaviorism, 316–17, 386, 395 belief systems, carrier strata, 336 beliefs, religious, 269, 270 Bellah, Robert, 277, 522, 550, 553, 554 Bellamy, Edward, 55

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index Below, Georg von, 514 Bendix, Reinhard, 361, 517, 550 Benhabib, Seyla, 160, 576 Benjamin, Walter, 561, 566 Berber tribes, 18, 21 Berg, Alban, 561, 566 Berger, Peter L., 9, 502, 505 Bergmann, Werner, 419 Bergson, A., 463 Bergson, Henri, 217, 238, 490, 492, 493 Berle, Alfred A., 146, 147 Bernard, Claude, 56 Bernasconi, Robert, 435 Bernstein, J.M., 578 Bershady, H.J., 512, 517, 518, 552, 554, 555 Berthelot, Marcelin, 56 Besant, Annie, 82 Besnard, Philippe, 262, 277 Best, Shaun, 266 Best, Stephen, 440 Bichat, Marie François Xavier, 52 Bierstedt, Robert, 409 Billings, Elizabeth Storrs, 374–5 biology: Comte, 31, 51–2; Mead, 390, 391, 396; Spencer, 9, 166–71, 172, 173–4, 176, 180; Veblen, 188, 189–90 birth control, 168, 283, 291, 293, 294 Bismarck, Otto von, 349, 350, 353, 367n, 429 Black, M., 529, 552 black nationalism, 435 black people see African Americans; race Blair, Tony, 153 Blaug, Mark, 85, 88 Bliss, W.D.P., 375 Bloch, Ernst, 231, 566 Bloch, Marc, 275 Blokland, H., 455, 465 Blumer, Herbert, 410–11, 412, 413–14 Boas, Franz, 432, 439, 441 Bobbio, N., 154 Bodkin, Ronald G., 83, 84, 88 body: Mead, 385, 398; pragmatism, 385 body–self relationship, 79, 81, 401–4, 416 Boesche, Roger, 110 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 449, 453 Böhringer, H., 221 Bolshevism, 378

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index Bombach, G., 463 Bonald, Louis, 53, 273 Booth, Charles, 55 Bös, D.A., 463 Bosanquet, Bernard, 169 Botting, Eileen Hunt, 84, 110 Bottomore, T., 233, 463 Boucher, Daniella, 83 Bourdeau, Michel, 57 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 506 Bourgeois, Leon, 169 bourgeois ideology: Adorno, 578; Marx, 137, 140 bourgeois society: antagonism with proletariat, 128, 132; development of, 98; Marx, 118, 119, 122, 123–5, 126, 132, 134, 137, 140–1, 150, 151, 457 Bourricaud, François, 542, 552, 554 Boutroux, Émile, 238, 239 Bradley, Ann, 187 Brahmins, 538 brain: Martineau, 79, 81; Mead, 385, 391, 396, 417; Parsons, 541; Spencer, 167 Bramhall, D.F., 463 Braunstein, Jean-François, 38, 47 Brazil, positivism, 54 Brenner, R., 156 Brentano, Lujo, 514 Brogan, Hugh, 110 Brontë, Charlotte, 80 Broué, P., 563 Brougham, Lord, 77 Broussais, François, 51–2 Brown, David J., 412 Brown, George, 513 Buber, Martin, 225 Buckle, Thomas, 55 Burawoy, M., 156 bureaucracy: corporate capitalism, 455, 460; Marx, 118, 124; Weber, 124, 334–5, 338, 350, 351, 352–3, 355, 357, 368n bureaucratic functionary, 332 Burger, John S., 419 Burger, Thomas, 361 Burgess, Ernest, 410, 415 Burke, D.A., 578 Burke, Kenneth, 409 Burns, Tom, 275

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Bush, Vannevar, 521 business: conflict with industry, 187–8, 194, 197–8; corporate capitalism, 455, 460 business cycle: Schumpeter, 449, 458; Veblen, 187–8 business enterprise, Veblen, 195 Butler, Judith, 576 Buxton, William, 549 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges, 52 Cabet, Etienne, 49 Cairns, Dorion, 491 Calhoun, Craig, 160 Calvin, John, 323 Calvinism, 539 Camic, C., 514, 553 Canada, Tocqueville’s study, 96, 97 Cantner, U., 465 capital: neoclassical economics, 195; ownership of, 195–8; Parsons, 530 capital goods, 195, 196, 197 capitalism: Adorno, 564, 567, 575; colonialism, 98; Comte, 34–5; Du Bois, 440, 443; Durkheim, 253, 273; Engels, 136; Germany, 564; growth in Maghreb, 13; Martineau, 4, 63, 80, 86; Marx, 3, 116, 117–19, 120–2, 123–7, 128–9, 131–2, 134–5, 136–47, 159, 448, 449, 457, 461; Marxism, 244; Parsons, 514, 515, 519, 549; Protestant ethic, 323–4, 325, 326, 329, 345, 364n, 539; religion, 345–6, 364n; resurgence of, 153–5; rising opposition, 450; Schmoller, 309; Schumpeter, 5, 448, 449, 451, 452, 453–4, 455, 456–64; Smith, 127; Spencer, 4, 168, 170; Tocqueville, 109; values, 321; Veblen, 195; Weber, 136, 322–4, 325, 326, 329–30, 345–7, 350, 354, 364n, 449, 450, 451, see also corporate capitalism; industrialization; late capitalism; market economies capitalist accumulation: Marx, 126, 137, 139, 140–1, 144, 147; neoliberalism, 136 Carayannis, E.G., 465 Carey, James T., 412 Carlyle, Thomas, 79, 85, 174, 175, 434, 439

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Carnap, Rudolf, 56 Carnegie, Andrew, 187 Carpenter, Edward, 284 Carré, Olivier, 20, 21, 24, 25 carrier strata/groups, 312, 329, 336, 341, 342 Cartesianism, 255 Cashdollar, Charles, 58 Cassirer, Ernst, 502 caste system, 306, 346, 406, 538 Castle, Helen, 377 Castle, Henry, 375, 376 categorical imperative, 242, 381 Catholicism: Comte, 39, 53; Confession, 326; French Third Republic, 54; suicide rates, 265; Weber, 365n Catt, Carrie Chapman, 294 causality: Durkheim, 261; German academics, 472; Simmel, 209; Weber, 306, 307, 312, 316, 321, 330, 337, 343–5, see also multicausality causation theory, 79 central nervous system, Mead, 396, 417 Ceplair, Larry, 299 ceremony: Durkheim, 270–1; Spencer, 166 Chabert, George, 57 Channing, Grace Ellery, 285, 286 Chapman, Maria Weston, 76 charismatic rulership, 332, 333, 334, 335, 338, 339–40, 342, 343, 357, 366n, 367n Charles X, King of France, 98 Chartism, 80, 165 Cheddadi, Abdesselam, 20, 25 chemistry, Comte, 31 Chicago School, 210, 214, 231, 411, 412 children: sense of self, 398–401; socialization, 531–2 China: Parson’s studies, 538; Weber’s studies, 306, 330, 336, 345, 346, 347 Christian Humanism, 309, 312 Christian theodicy, 538 Christianity: divine order, 309; Mead, 374–6; slavery, 293–4; social evolution, 539; Veblen, 186, see also Catholicism; Protestantism citizenship rights, 545 civil associations, 100, 101 Civil Rights movement, 429, 443, 545 civil society, 471

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civilization: Du Bois, 434; Durkheim, 247; Martineau’s US study, 66, 70–1; Tocqueville’s US study, 107; Weber, 315, 345–8 civilizationist pluralism, Du Bois, 348, 349 Cladis, Mark, 275 clans, Durkheim, 247–9 Clark, Alice, 81 Clark, John Bates, 186, 195 class consciousness, 125, 131, 132, 137, 145, 146 class struggle: Comte, 34–5, 43; Dahrendorf, 548; Engels, 125, 131; Marx, 34, 121, 123–4, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 145, 312, see also ruling class; social class Claussen, D., 562, 578 Clauzade, Laurent, 52 Clinton, Bill, 153 co-operatives, establishment of, 168 Cobban, Alfred, 240 coercion, Durkheim, 247, 258, 259 “cognitive complex,” Parsons, 547 cognitive dissonance, 560, 563, 565 Cohen, G.A., 159 Cold War, 521, 544–5, 571 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 383 collective action: Durkheim, 274; Mead, 382, 415; Parsons, 542 collective behavior: Durkheim, 259; Mead, 395, 397; Spencer, 177 collective consciousness, Durkheim, 245, 247, 248–9, 257, 259, 261, 269, 270, 272, 273 collective representations, Durkheim, 256, 270–1 collectivity-orientation, 525, 526 Collini, Stefan, 169, 170, 180 Collins, Randall, 275, 408, 463 Colomy, Paul, 412 colonialism: 19th century Euro-American politics, 97; Africa, 429; capitalism, 98; Du Bois, 428, 429, 430, 439–40; Martineau, 78, 81; Spencer, 168; Tocqueville, 96, 97, 98, 106–9 commercialism, 104, 109 commitments: Mannheim, 473; Parsons, 535–6

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index commodities: fetishism of, 137, 140, 149, 462, 562; Marx, 137, 138, 139, 140, 144, 145 common sense: Adorno, 569; Schutz, 497, 500, 501, 503, 504, 505 Commons, John R., 513 communication: Mannheim, 486; Mead, 398 communicative action, 550–1 communism: collapse of, 153; Comte’s positivism, 49; Mannheim, 481; Marx, 116, 118, 121, 122, 148–53; rise of, 469 community: German theorists, 244; pragmatism, 386; and reason, 386; Royce, 384; Weber, 356, see also Gemeinschaft; societal community comparative research, Weber, 306, 307, 310, 313, 318, 330, 331, 348, 357, 360 comparison: Comte, 32–3; Durkheim, 260, 261 compassion, Weber, 305, 306, 315, 347 competition, Spencer, 166–7 Comte, Auguste, 30–60; assessment of, 56–8; classification of the sciences, 31; Du Bois’s criticism, 436; Durkheim’s criticism, 261; false consciousness, 41; historical meaning, 309; impact of, 54–6; imperialism, 7, 41, 42; influence on Durkheim, 55, 236, 254, 261; influence on Martineau, 61, 72–3, 76; intellectual context, 51–4; law of three stages, 33–5, 47, 56, 76; Martineau’s influence, 81; organic theories, 315; Parsons comparison, 512; personal history, 45–50; positivism, 6, 9, 30–1, 33, 34–5, 37–41, 42–4, 46, 47, 49–50, 51, 54–8, 79, 86; racism, 7, 41; Religion of Humanity, 7, 38–41, 49–50, 55, 57; role of the sciences and scientists, 35–8, 79; sciences and the arts, 44–5; Simmel comparison, 207; social context, 50–1; sociology, 3, 31–3, 55, 56, 240; theory, 30–45; women, 42–4, 49, 54, 73, 77; working class, 34–5, 42–3, 49, 57 concepts, Weber, 320–1 Condorcet, Marquis de, 46, 52, 53, 66 conflict: democracies, 405; Mead, 401, 417–18; Parsons, 529, 548–9; Simmel, 548; Weber, 314, 315, 340–1, 357

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conformity, Durkheim, 248, 260 Confucians, 538 Congreve, Richard, 55 Connell, Eileen, 83 conscience collective see collective consciousness consciousness: Bergson, 490; Engels, 130; Hegel, 392; Husserl, 490, 493; Marx, 119, 130; Mead, 392, 395, 402; romantic idealism, 383; Schutz, 490, 493, 494–5, 496, 497, 501, 504; Simmel, 225, see also collective consciousness; selfconsciousness conservatism: Comte, 49, 53; Durkheim, 272–5; Hegel’s theory of the state, 117; Mannheim, 474, 476, 486; Tocqueville, 105 conspicuous consumption, 199–200, 201 conspicuous leisure, 199, 200 constraint, Durkheim, 257, 258–9 consummation, Mead, 396–7 consumption, Veblen, 199–200, 201 contextual models, 337 Conti Odorisio, Ginevra, 83 contraceptives, 168 contractual relations, Durkheim, 246–7, 251 contradictions, Adorno, 2, 9, 560, 565, 567, 568, 576, 577–8 convergence argument, Parsons, 517 conviviality, Simmel, 221 Cook, D., 566, 578 Cook, Gary A., 374, 380, 408, 409, 419 Cooley, Charles, 218, 383, 410, 413, 415, 513 Cooper, Brian P., 83, 84, 88 Cooper, J., 560 Cormack, Patricia, 254 Corn Laws, 78, 80, 165 corporate capitalism, 5, 455, 456, 457, 459–63 corporate executives, 198 Corsi, G., 552 Corti, Walter Robert, 411 Coser, Lewis, 221, 232, 238, 240, 273, 548 Cott, Nancy F., 284 Cousin, Victor, 56 Coward, Rosalind, 287 Cox, F. Brett, 296

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index

craftsmen, 194, 195 creative destruction, 5, 460, 464 credit, Veblen, 197–8 credit economy, Simmel, 217 crime, Durkheim, 245–6, 259–61, 269 critical reflexivity, 560 critical theory: Adorno, 1–2, 9, 567–76, 577; Frankfurt School, 124–5, 231, 565–6, 567–76, 577; Horkheimer’s use of term, 561; Marx, 115, 118, 120, 158 Croly, David, 55 Croly, Herbert, 55 Cromwell, Oliver, 175 Cronk, George, 419 Crummell, Alexander, 430, 439 cultivation, Mannheim, 471, 480, 481, 482, 483 cultural capital, Simmel, 224 cultural experimentation, 469 cultural lag, 193 cultural pessimism, Weber, 349, 356, 367n cultural pluralism, 435 cultural sociology: Durkheim, 276; Mannheim, 3, 471, 472, 483; Simmel, 223 cultural traditions, Spencer, 177 culture, 7–9; Du Bois, 8, 430, 432, 435, 438, 439, 440; Durkheim, 7, 8, 243, 256; Freud, 218; German historicists, 471; Mannheim, 470; Martineau, 68; Marx, 125, 130, 133–4, 135; objective/subjective distinction, 211–12, 219, 221, 224–5; Parsons, 8, 522–3, 540–1; Simmel, 8, 207, 211–12, 217–25, 470; women, 223–4 culture industry, Adorno, 9, 573, 576 curiosity, 190, 192, 194 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 484, 485 custom, Veblen, 191 cybernetic hierarchy, 533 da Silva, Filipe Carreira, 408, 419 Dahms, H.F., 5, 9, 156, 449, 451, 455, 569 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 548 Daily News, 73, 76, 84 Dandaneau, S.P., 577 Dangel-Hagnauer, C., 465 Darwin, Charles: Adorno comparison, 568; influence on Martineau, 81; influence on

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Simmel, 208; influence on Veblen, 188; Marx comparison, 129, 130; materialism, 173; natural selection theory, 166, 170, 537, 540, 543; scientific socialism, 169; sex relations, 287, 288; Spencer comparison, 166, 170, 180; spontaneous variation, 173; Whitehead’s views, 519 Darwin, Erasmus, 165 Darwinism: debate with Lamarckians, 188; German historical criticism, 375; Marx, 129; Mead, 380; sex selection, 289, 293; Simmel, 208; Spencer, 170, see also reform Darwinism; Social Darwinism David, Deirdre, 83 David, Maxim, 243 Davis, Cynthia J., 284, 285, 296, 297 Davis, M., 156 Dawson, Michael, 443 “debate over methods,” Weber, 311 decision making, Veblen, 191 Deegan, Mary Jo, 82, 83, 85, 87, 298, 374, 379, 408, 419 Degler, Carl N., 296 Delanty, G., 578 Dell, Floyd, 295 Demirovic, A., 566 democracy: 19th century Euro-American politics, 98; Dewey, 377–8; Durkheim, 253–4; and equality, 100–1, 104, 105, 109; Germany, 348, 349, 563–4; Mannheim, 6–7, 482–3; Martineau, 65, 68; Marx, 150–3; Mead, 377, 378, 404–8, 417, 418; morals of politics, 68; Parsons, 540; radical, 118, 151–2, 153; religion, 65; Schumpeter, 448, 451, 461; Tocqueville, 5–6, 96, 97, 98, 99–106, 108–9; Weber, 307, 353, 367n, see also politics Democritus, 117 den Otter, Sandra M., 169, 180 Dentith, Simon, 82 Deploige, Simon, 256–7 Depression (1930s), 187, 451, 469, 480, 515, 519, 564 Derrida, Jacques, 255 Desai, M., 156 Descartes, René, 51 despotism: Martineau, 65; Tocqueville, 100

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index Destutt de Tracy, Antoine-Louis Claude de, 52 determinism: Comte, 52; Durkheim, 272; Mannheim, 483; Marx, 134, 135, 136; Tocqueville, 99; Veblen, 188 developmental models, 337, 339–40, 366n deviance, Parsons, 523 Dewey, John: conjectural and deductive orientation, 413; democracy, 118, 152, 411; dynamism, 434; factory system, 406; “fields,” 394; influence on Mead, 377–8, 379, 380, 384, 385–6; influence on Schutz, 494; Mead comparison, 409, 410; philosophical discourse, 373; pragmatism, 413 Dhaouadi, Mahmoud, 20 D’Herbelot de Molainville, Barthélemy, 19 dialectics: Adorno, 9, 560, 569, 571–2, 573, 574–6; Hegel, 574, 575; Mead, 392; Simmel, 222–3 Diáz, Porfirio, 54 Dickens, Charles, 77 Dickinson, Robert Latou, 294 difference, Simmel, 223–5 differentiation: Durkheim, 179, 209, 244, 246, 269; Luhmann, 551; Mead, 397; Parsons, 522–3, 527, 528, 531, 540; Simmel, 209, 211–12, 216, 221; Spencer, 172, 176, 179 diffuseness, 525, 526 Diggins, John Patrick, 202 dignity, 349, 352 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 208, 311, 349–50, 377, 382, 493, 550 Dimand, Mary Ann, 83, 88 Dimand, Robert, 83, 88 Dinopoulos, E., 465 discipline: Durkheim, 256, 259, 267; Protestant sects, 326 discourse, Martineau, 64–5 Dissenters, 79 distantiation, Mannheim, 480–1 division of labor: Comte, 52; democracies, 406; Durkheim, 244–51, 267; Martineau, 62, 63; Marx, 121, 127–8; Simmel, 211; Smith, 127, 244; Spencer, 63, 179; Tocqueville, 105 divorce, 267, 532 Dixon, Thomas, 181

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Djeghloul, Abdelkader, 25 Dock, Julie Bates, 296 documentary interpretation, Mannheim, 472, 474, 486 dogmatism, Comte, 38 domestic life: Martineau, 64, 83, 84–5; middle class, 98–9 Dorfman, Joseph, 185 double contingency, Parsons, 523, 549 “double interchanges,” Parsons, 530, 531, 534, 537, 541, 543, 547, 551 double-consciousness, Du Bois, 441 Douglas, Jack, 264 Douglas, Mary, 275 Douglass, Frederick, 430 Drake, R., 562 Draper, H., 153 Dreher, Jochen, 3, 8, 494, 501, 502 Drescher, Seymour, 110 Dreyfus, Alfred, 242 Dreyfus, Louise Julie, 239 Driver, Edwin, 435, 443 drives, Mead, 402, 403 Dryjanska, Anna, 83 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 1, 426–47; culture, 8, 430, 432, 435, 438, 439, 440; impact and assessment, 442–3; intellectual context, 430–2; materialism, 8, 439–40; personal history, 426–8; positivism, 9, 433, 434, 435, 436, 439; race, 7, 8, 426–30, 431–2, 435–42; racism, 427, 428, 429, 436–7, 440; social context, 429–30; social inquiry, 431, 432–4, 436, 439 dualism: Hegel, 119; Hume, 51; Mead, 381, 383; Simmel, 218, 219 Ducrotay de Blainville, Henri, 52 Duhem, Pierre, 56 Durkheim, André, 243 Durkheim, Émile, 236–82; assessment of, 272–5; Bauman’s defense of, 505; classification of societies, 261; Comte’s influence, 55, 236, 254, 261; conceptual realism, 214; conservatism, 272–5; crime, 245–6, 259–61, 269; criticism of Comte, 261; criticism of Spencer, 242, 244, 261; culture, 7, 8, 243, 256; division of labor, 244–51, 267; Du Bois comparison, 430; functionalism, 179, 261, 272, 550; Ibn

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590

index

Durkheim, Émile (cont’d) Khaldu¯n comparison, 19, 20; impact of, 275–6; influence on Parsons, 410, 516; Jewish ancestry, 237; Martineau comparison, 62, 66, 81, 82; Marx comparison, 115; Marx’s Capital, 252; Mead comparison, 410; methodology, 229, 236, 254–61; morality, 180, 238, 242, 244, 245, 247, 259, 269; normative values, 180; objectivism, 506; organic theories, 315; Parsons comparison, 551; Parsons’s critique, 517, 518; personal history, 237–40; political context, 240–3; politics, 6, 241–2, 273, 274; positivism, 9, 272; religion, 8, 247, 248, 265, 268–72; science, 9, 237, 251–2, 255, 272; Simmel comparison, 205, 208, 209, 214, 229, 231; social change, 171, 273; social differentiation, 179, 209, 244, 246, 269; social facts, 3, 209, 252, 255, 257–60, 261, 262, 318, 362n, 392; social solidarity, 55, 239, 244, 245–7, 250, 265, 273; socialism, 6, 241–2, 251–4; society, 214; sociology, 3, 236–7, 239–40, 257; Spencer’s influence, 236, 254; Spencer’s theory of contract, 518; state, 6, 241–2, 246, 252, 253, 263; suicide, 65, 261–8 duty: Durkheim, 243, 258, 267; Weber, 322 Dyer-Witheford, N., 156 dynamism, Du Bois, 434, 435 Eberle, Thomas S., 490, 504 ecological threats, 157–8 economic development: as evolutionary process, 201; Germany, 348; Schumpeter, 451, 454, 458, 459, 462; Weber, 322, 346, see also industrialization economic ethic, 322, 324, 345 economic growth: Marx, 137; Schumpeter, 454 economic history: Du Bois, 431; Schumpeter, 448, 454, 455 economic planning, 455, 460 economic sociology, Schumpeter, 448, 454, 464 economic statistics, Schumpeter, 448, 454 economic theory: intellectual/ methodological debates, 452–3;

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Schumpeter, 448, 454, 455, 462; Veblen, 4, see also neoclassical economics economics: Austrian School, 448, 452; intellectual/methodological debates, 452; Marx, 125–6, 136–48; modern industry, 142–8; Parsons, 513, 514; Protestant ethic, 323–5; religion, 345–6; Schumpeter, 448, 454; Simmel, 210–13, 217; Veblen, 189, 196, 201; Weber, 322–5, 342, 345–7, 358, 452, see also money; neoclassical economics The Economist, 165 economy, 3–5; Durkheim, 252, 253; Martineau, 66, 68, 69–70; Parsons, 528, 529–31; social action, 332; Weber’s ideal type models, 337, 338, see also capitalism; neoclassical economics; political economy; sexuo-economic relations Edgell, S., 185, 187, 202 Edger, Henry, 55 education: Comte, 35; Durkheim, 253–4; German historicists, 471; Mannheim, 469; United States, 540, 546–7; Weber, 355 Edwards, Stewart, 241 Effrat, A., 552 Egan, Maureen, 289 egoism: Comte, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36; Durkheim, 264–5, 267–8; Spencer, 167, 177, 178, see also self-interest Egyptian civilization, 537 Einstein, Albert, 380, 388, 568 Eisler, Hanns, 562 Eistenstadt, S.N., 7, 550, 552 El-Azmeh, Aziz, 14 elective affinity, 337, 338, 364n Eliot, George, 55, 80 Elliott, J.E., 448 Embree, Lester E., 491 emergence, Mead, 388, 389, 390, 391, 393, 394, 395, 416–17 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 383 emotions: Comte, 36, 38–9, 40; Mead, 402, 404, 407; Protestant ethic, 325; Weber, 317, 363n empiricism: Comte, 37; Du Bois, 433, 435, 437–9, 440, 443; Durkheim, 272; Parsons, 512, 516, 519–20, 543–7, 548;

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index Simmel, 229; Spencer, 166, 167, 169, 171, 173, 180; Weber, 310, 311, 312, 313; Whitehead, 519 emulation instinct, 190, 194, 199 Endreß, Martin, 491, 492, 499 Engels, Friedrich: bourgeois revolution in Germany, 125; bourgeoisie and proletariat antagonism, 128; capitalism, 136; causal forms of explanation, 167; class struggle, 125, 131; financial support to Marx, 123; industrialization, 142; liberal individualism, 128, 129; Marx’s Capital, 126; materialism, 129, 130, 132, 135–6, 167; partnership with Marx, 120–3, 566; post-capitalism, 148, 149, 150, 152; sex relations, 287; theory of falling profits, 145; young Marx, 117 England, Tocqueville’s study, 96 enlightenment, Adorno, 567, 572–3 The Enlightenment; Comte, 51, 53; Idéologues, 53; Mannheim, 474; Martineau, 68, 72, 74, 78; Marx, 115, 116, 117, 153, 434; postmodern criticism, 154; rationality, 310, 538; reason, 129, 310; Scottish, 52; Weber, 355; Wollstonecraft, 299 entrepreneurship: ascetic Protestantism, 539; Parsons, 530; Schumpeter, 5, 449, 451, 454, 455, 456, 457–63, 464 environment: Durkheim, 249, 257, 259; Mead, 389, 391; Spencer, 173, 175, 177; Veblen, 188–9 Epicurus, 117 equality: Adorno, 567; and democracy, 100–1, 104, 105, 109; Marx, 119 equilibrium analysis, 189 Espinas, Alfred, 55, 240 ethics: Du Bois, 434, 436, 437, 438; Protestant sects, 326, 327; Simmel, 208, 209; Weber, 305, 306, 308–9, 313, 314–15, 347, 352, 354, 356, 363n ethnic groups: Gilman, 293, 297–8; Parsons, 545 ethnography: Martineau, 71, 78; Simmel, 208; Spencer, 175, 181 ethnomethodology: Durkheim, 276; Schutz, 506 ethnopsychology, 208 eugenics, 431

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Eurocentrism, 20, 25, 51, 313 evangelical Christianity, 375 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 275, 513 evolutionary economics, 464 evolutionary theory: Durkheim, 251, 272; Mead, 387–91, 393, 396, 398, 401, 418; Parsons, 537–40; Simmel, 208; Spencer, 9–10, 166–71, 172–80, 389; Veblen, 188–9, see also Darwinism; Lamarckianism exchange concept, Marx, 125–6 exchange values, Marx, 138, 139, 143, 147 experience: childhood, 399–400; Durkheim, 253–4; Schutz, 494–5, 496, 497 experience, lived: Mannheim, 472, 473; Simmel, 215, 221, 225 experimentation, Comte, 32, 52 explanation, Durkheim, 261 exploitation, Marx, 120, 126, 132–3, 137, 144 extractive process, Marx, 136–41 Fabianism, 55 face-to-face relationships, 497 factory system, 406 facts: Adorno, 577; Comte, 37; Du Bois, 433, 436, 437–8, 439, 440, 443; Martineau, 64, 65; Parsons, 519; Schutz, 497–8, 503; Weber, 307; Whitehead, 519, see also social facts faith, religious, 269 Falcone, M., 577 false consciousness, 41, 485 family: Martineau, 64; Parsons, 531–2; resource allocation, 525; social statics, 32; suicide rates, 265; Tocqueville, 102–3, 109, see also kinship Al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯, 15 Farber, Marvin, 491 Faris, Ellsworth, 409, 414, 415 fascism, 461, 469, 476, 481, 566, see also Nazism (National Socialism) fashion, Simmel, 212 fashion cycles, 200 fast capitalism, 157 fatalism: Durkheim, 264, 267, 268; Mannheim, 480, 481 Fauconnier, Paul, 19

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592

index

Fauset, Jessie, 443 Feagin, Joe R., 85 Fedi, Laurent, 57 Feffer, Andrew, 374, 419 feminism: Adorno, 576; Comte, 43; criticism of Parsons, 532; Durkheim, 273, 274; Gilman, 10, 283–4, 287, 289, 290–9; Martineau’s influence, 82; Simmel, 213, see also women Fenton, Steve, 276 Ferguson, Adam, 52 Ferri, Enrico, 169 Ferry, Jules, 54 Fessenden, Tracy, 298 Festinger, Leon, 560 fetishism: Comte, 33, 39, 40–1, 55; Simmel, 212 fetishism of commodities, 137, 140, 149, 462, 562 feudalism: Germany, 348–9; Marx, 131, 134, 140, 141; Parsons, 539, see also prebendal feudalism Feuerbach, Ludwig, 119, 383 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 382 fiduciary system, Parsonian subsystem, 528–9, 535 fin de siècle, 206, 228, 231 Fine, Gary Alan, 412, 414, 419 First International, 123 First World War: Durkheim, 242–3; Gilman, 290, 292; Schumpeter, 450, 451; Schutz, 489, 492 Firth, Raymond, 513 Firuski, Elizabeth Boody, 450 Fisher, Bernice M., 419 Fitch, James, 284 Flaherty, Michael G., 419 Flint, Robert, 19 Fogarasi, Adelbert, 484–5 Foote, Edward Bliss, 42 Forget, Evelyn, 83, 88 formal rationality, 350–1, 352, 353, 354, 355, 366n formalism, Simmel, 230 Fortes, Meyer, 513 Foster, J.B., 156, 448, 456 four function paradigm, Parsons, 526–9, 530, 531, 532, 533, 538, 540–1, 542, 547, 551

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Fourier, Charles, 32, 116 Fournier, Marcel, 276 Fox, Renee C., 511, 522, 552, 553, 554, 555 Fox, William J., 75, 79 Fragner, Bert, 22 frames of reference: Habermas, 550; Mead, 388–9, 390, 393, 403, 404; Parsons, 512, 517–19, 520, 547, 553; Whitehead, 519 France: colonization of Algeria, 7, 96, 97, 98, 107–8; democracy, 99–100; Marx’s writings, 123–4, 125, 151–2; politics, 240–1; positivism, 54–5; Second Republic, 97, see also French Revolution Francis, Mark, 4, 9–10, 168 Frankel, Oz, 297 Frankfurt School: Adorno, 561, 567–76; critical theory, 124–5, 231, 565–6, 567–76, 577; Mannheim, 479–80, 485 Franklin, Benjamin, 322, 326 Fraser, N., 156 Frederick the Great, 175 free contract ideology, 105 free-market economists, 452, 462 Freedgood, Elaine, 88 freedom: Adorno, 567; Marx, 118–19; secular idea of, 310; Simmel, 212, 229; Weber, 314 French Revolution: activism, 384; chronicling of, 175; Comte, 31, 45–6, 50–1, 53; hatred of inequality, 100–1; Mannheim, 474; power shifts, 539; “Rights of Man,” 355; support for reforms in Trier, 116; Tocqueville, 97, 106; women, 99 Freud, Sigmund: Adorno comparison, 568; ego’s relation to the id, 533; influence on Du Bois, 431, 439; influence on Frankfurt School, 566; influence on Parsons, 410; Mead’s interest in, 403; self body relationship, 402; sex relations, 293; Simmel comparison, 205, 212, 218, 222, 226; theory of culture, 218; the unconscious, 416 Friedland, Roger, 274 Friedländer, Julius, 206, 207 Friedman, Thomas L., 154, 155 friendship, 259 Frisby, David, 205, 206, 233, 487

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index Fromm, Erich, 524, 566 Fry, Elizabeth, 78 Fukuyama, Francis, 154, 158 Fuller, Margaret, 290 functionalism: Durkheim, 179, 261, 272, 550; emergence of, 412; Luhmann, 551; Parsons, 513, 524, 526–9, 551; Spencer, 171, 172–3, 174, 176, 179 Furet, François, 240 Fustel de Coulanges, 238, 239 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 201 Galileo, 519 Gall, Franz, 52, 53 Gambetta, Léon, 54, 240, 241 games, children, 399, 400 Gane, Mike, 38, 58, 242, 254, 274, 276, 277 Ganobcsik-Williams, Lisa, 297 Garfinkel, Harold, 276, 505, 549 Garvey, Marcus, 430 Gassen, K., 205, 208 Gaudelius, Yvonne, 297 Gautier, E.F., 21 Gaziano, Emanuel, 412 Geddes, Patrick, 55, 169, 173, 180, 181 Geertz, Clifford, 522 Gellner, Ernest, 18, 20, 25 Gemeinschaft, 311, 344, 349, 365n, 525, 526, 544 gender: Comte, 43; Du Bois, 441, 443; Durkheim, 274; Gilman, 283, 293, 298; Parsons, 531, 532, see also sexual relations; sexuality; women general action system, Parsons, 412, 540–1, 547 generalized other, 398–9, 400, 407 generational units, Mannheim, 474, 486 George, Stefan, 207 Gerhardt, C., 578 Gerhardt, U., 520, 544, 552–3, 554 German Historical School, 311, 431, 452–3, 513–14, 550 German Sociological Society, 206 Germany: democracy, 348, 349, 563–4; Durkheim’s criticism, 242–3; industrialization, 348–9, 544; influence on Durkheim, 238, 241; influence on Mead, 377; influence on Parsons, 513–14,

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515, 544; National Socialism, 451, 480, 481, 520–1, 544, 548, 564, 566; politics, 348–50; Weber’s views, 350, 355–6; Weimar Republic, 563–4; working class, 349, 350, 564 Gerth, Hans H., 361 Gesellschaft, 525, 526 gestures, Mead, 398, 401, 402 Gibbon, Edward, 177 Gibson, N., 578 Giddens, Anthony, 153–4, 244, 254, 255, 276, 277, 570 Gildea, Robert, 240 Gilligan, Carol, 223 Gillman, Susan, 443 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1, 283–304; assessment of, 296–9; feminism, 10, 283–4, 287, 289, 290–9; fictional works, 291, 296; impact of, 294–6; Martineau’s influence, 81; personal history, 284–6; social and intellectual context, 287–8; theory, 289–94 Gilman, George Houghton, 286 Gilman, Katharine, 285, 286 Gilman, Thomas, 285 Ginsberg, Morris, 513 Gissing, George, 55 Glaser, Barney G., 505 globalization: Marx, 121–2, 145; neoliberal, 154, 156, 157; Schumpeter, 456, 460, 464 Glock, Hans-Johann, 419 Gluck, M., 470 goal attainment, four function paradigm, 527, 528, 530, 533, 534, 541, 542 goals: Durkheim, 267; Parsons, 518 Gobineau, Arthur de, 98 God: divine order, 309; Mead, 375–6; Protestant ethic, 323–5, 326; Protestant sects, 326, 327; sacrificial practices, 271, 272; Simmel, 227 Godlove, Terry, 275, 277 gods, sacrificial practices, 271–2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 171, 209, 221, 308, 310 Goff, Thomas, 419 Goffman, Erving, 275, 411, 505 Goldman, Emma, 297 Goldschmidt, Jakob, 308

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594

index

Gondermann, Thomas, 167, 168, 173, 180 Gordon, Lewis, 442 Gouhier, Henri, 40 Gould, Mark, 550, 552, 553, 554 Gouldner, Alvin, 411, 549 government: Martineau, 66, 68; state intervention, 452, 458; Weber, 353, see also politics Graef, Gustav, 207 Graef, Sabine, 207 Grand Theory, 548 Granet, Marcel, 275 Grange, Juliette, 35, 36, 57, 58 Granovetter, M., 464 Grathoff, R., 547 Great Depression (1930s), 187, 451, 469, 480, 515, 519, 564 Greece, ancient, 538 greed, 267 Green, Dan, 435, 443 Green, T.H., 273 Groenewegen, Peter, 170 groups: generalized other, 398–9, 400; interaction, 526–7; Weber, 319–20, 331–2, 333, 336, 342 Gründer, K., 221 Guesde, Jules, 251 Guizot, François, 50 Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 19, 410 Gunter, Pete A.Y., 373, 411 Gurwitsch, Aron, 491, 495 Gusfield, Joseph R., 412 gynaecocentric theory, 288, 289 Haac, Oscar, 58 Haberler, Gottfried von, 490 Habermas, Jürgen: Adorno’s influence, 576; critical theory as philosophy, 570; criticism of Schutz, 505–6; critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment, 572; critique of Parsons, 550–1, 554–5; democracy, 118; Marx’s influence, 118, 156; Mead, 373, 419; positivism, 35, 562; Simmel comparison, 205, 207 habits: Mead, 402, 403, 407; Veblen, 191 habitus concept, 506 Haines, Valerie A., 180 Halbwachs, Maurice, 40 Hall, Catherine, 83

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Hall, Stuart, 429 Hamelin, Octave, 263 Hamilton, Peter, 409, 553 Hamilton, Walton, 513 Hammer, E., 577 Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph, Freiherr von, 19 Hammond, Phillip, 225 handicraft era, 194, 195 hands, Mead, 396 Hanusch, H., 464 happiness: Durkheim, 247, 259, 265, 267; Martineau, 67–8 Hardy, Thomas, 55 Harp, Gillis J., 55, 58 Harrison, Faye, 435 Harrison, Frederic, 55, 82 Hart, Albert Bushnell, 426, 433 Hart, Chris, 552 Hartley, David, 79 Harvey, David, 156, 159 Harvey, Lee, 419 Harwood, E., 463 Hawkins, Richmond Laurin, 58 Hayek, Friedrich von, 453, 490 Hearfield, C., 567 Hearnshaw, L.S., 181 Heertje, A., 464 Hegel, G.W.F.: alienation, 119, 562; consciousness, 392; dialectics, 574, 575; historical meaning, 309, 312; historicism, 119–20, 121, 129; influence on Adorno, 576; influence on Comte, 33, 52; influence on Frankfurt School, 566; influence on Marx, 117, 119–20, 121, 124, 129, 158; influence on Weber, 308; liberal state, 154; Marx’s criticism of, 118, 119, 121; mind, 382; reality, 382; self, 382; self-consciousness, 382, 384; Simmel comparison, 207; slavery, 120; “spirit,” 120, 312; spiritualism, 172; theory of the state, 117, 118, 119, 153; women, 223 Hegelianism: historical meaning, 309; influence on Marx, 117; Marx’s criticism, 118, 119, 121; Sittlichkeit, 574 Heidegger, Martin, 274, 470 Heilbron, Johan, 35, 58 Helburn, S.W., 463 Henderson, Lawrence J., 516, 518–19, 549

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index Herder, Johann Gottfried, 52 Herkner, Heinrich, 81 hermeneutics, 383, 441 Herrenschmidt, Olivier, 272 Herskovits, M.J., 201 Hertz, Robert, 243 Hess, Moses, 120, 121 heterosexuality: Gilman, 283, 286, 291, see also sexuality Hildebrand, Bruno, 452 Hilferding, Rudolf, 449, 453 Hill, Mary Armfield, 285, 286, 296, 297 Hill, Michael, 65, 82, 83, 84, 85–6, 87, 88 Hiller, Kurt, 231 Hinsley, Curtis M., Jr., 180, 181 Hirst, Paul Q., 257, 276 historical materialism see materialism historicism: German academics, 471–3; Hegel, 119–20, 121, 129 history: Adorno, 564; Comte’s comparative method, 32–3; Comte’s law of three stages, 33–5, 47, 56, 76; conflict, 314; Du Bois, 434, 437–8; Ibn Khaldu¯n, 14–15; Mannheim, 476, 477; Marx and Engels, 130; meanings of, 309–10; multicausality, 312; Simmel, 230; theological explanations, 309; Weber, 311, 312, 314, 344, see also economic history; past Hitler, Adolf, 481, 561 Hobbes, Thomas, 174, 176, 309, 518 Hobhouse, L.T., 55, 170, 410, 513 Hobson, J.A., 168, 169, 180 Hodgson, G.M., 188, 464 Hoecker-Drysdale, Susan, 4, 6, 63, 69, 70, 71, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 Hofstadter, Richard, 168 Holloway, J., 577 Holmwood, J., 552, 553 Holocaust, 564 Holt, Thomas, 442 Holton, R.J., 552 Hommay, Victor, 263 Honegger, Claudia, 85 Honigsheim, Paul, 308 Honneth, Axel, 156, 570, 576 honor: Martineau’s US study, 69, 70; Weber, 331–2, 336, 352 Hook, Sidney, 409

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595

Hooker, Isabella Beecher, 284–5 Hooper, Glenn, 85 horde concept, Durkheim, 247–8, 257 Horkheimer, Max, 485, 561, 562, 565, 566, 570; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 572–3 Hose, Sam, 438 Houghton, Walter, 87 Howard, John, 78 Huber, Joan, 412 Hubert, Henri, 239, 271 Hudak, Jennifer, 298 Hughes, Everett, 417 Huhn, T., 578 Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 561, 570, 572, 578 human nature: Comte, 34, 41, 45, 52, 54; Martineau, 65, 79; Marx, 127, 128, 129; Mead, 418; neoclassical economics, 189; Protestantism, 310, 323; Veblen, 189, 195 humanity: Comte, 35, 38–41, 42, 44, 53, 57; Du Bois, 440–2 Hume, David, 18, 51, 52 Hunt, E.K., 200 Hunt, Lynn, 275 Hussein, Taha, 20 Husserl, Edmund, 489, 490, 491, 493, 495, 500, 501, 561 Hutchins, Robert, 380 Huxley, T.H., 171 hyperinflation, 469 hypnosis, 79 hypotheses, Comte, 37, 55–6 hypothesis-forming models, 336–41 “I” and “me” theory, Mead, 403–4, 407, 416 I-Thou relationship, Schutz, 493 Ibn ‘Arabsha¯h, 19 Ibn Khaldu¯n, 1, 12–29; 'as.abiyyah, 15–16, 18–19, 22–3, 24; autobiography, 12; family background, 12, 13; history, 14–15; impact in the West, 19–21; Kita¯b al-’Ibar, 14, 21; marginalization of, 20; and the modern state, 23–4; modes of production framework, 21–3; Muqaddimah, 12, 14, 16, 17, 19, 21; political offices, 12, 13–14; religious

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596

index

Ibn Khaldu¯n (cont’d) reform, 17–19; state formation, 7, 15–17, 21–3; works on, 12–13 Ibn Rushd, 15 Ibn Saud, 17 Ibn Sina, 15 Ibsen, Henrik, 287 ideal types: Mannheim, 476, 479, 482, 486; Schutz, 499; Weber, 214, 229, 307, 315, 319–21, 332–41, 343–4, 358, 360, 361n, 362n, 486, 549–50 idealism: Comte, 33, 34; English philosophical establishment, 169, 170; Mead, 373, 380–2, 383, 384, 386, 403; relativist physics, 388; Weber, 356, 360, see also romantic idealism identity formation, Adorno, 564 identity thinking, Adorno, 9, 562, 575 Idéologues, 52, 53 ideology: Durkheim, 255; Mannheim, 476–7, 478; Marx, 133, 137, 140; Marxism, 476 idle curiosity, 190, 192, 194 Ihering, Rudolf von, 238 Illinois school, 413 imagination, Comte, 36–7 imitation theory, 262 immigration, 293, 297, 406, 545 imperialism: Comte, 7, 41, 42; Spencer, 7, 168 imperialist militarism, Du Bois, 441 imposed relevances, 499 impulse, Mead, 396, 402, 403, 404, 407 ‘Ina¯n, Muhammad ‘Abd Allah, 12–13 income distribution, 196 indeterminacy, 403, 416 India: Parson’s studies, 538; Weber’s studies, 306, 330, 336, 345, 346, 347 individual–society relations: Durkheim, 242, 246, 256–7; Mead, 386, 394–5, 400–1; Parsons, 524; pragmatism, 386; Schutz, 502–3; Simmel, 213–14 individualism: Comte, 31–2, 53, 57; Durkheim, 241–2, 262, 264, 269–70; Engels, 128, 129; imitation theory, 262; liberal, 127–9; Marx, 118, 127–9; Parsons, 542; Protestantism, 310, 375; Schumpeter, 460; Smith, 127, 128; Spencer, 168, 169, 178, 179; Tocqueville, 100, 104, 109; Weber, 310, 367n

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individualities, German academics, 471, 472 individuality: Marx, 128, 129, 130, 147–8, 149; Simmel, 207–8, 209, 214, 221; Spencer, 179 industrial depression, 198, see also Great Depression (1930s) Industrial Revolution, 50, 115, 122, 123, 539 industrial society: Comte, 39; Durkheim, 244, 250, 251; Spencer, 166, 178; United States, 540; Weber critique, 305–7, 350, 351, 352, 355 industrialization: Comte, 41, 52; Durkheim, 250; effect of war, 176; Germany, 348–9, 544; Martineau, 77; Marx, 120, 121, 142–7; and the past, 343; resource allocation, 525; Spencer, 176, 179; suicide rates, 262; Tocqueville, 98, 104, 105; Veblen, 193; Weber, 348–9 industry, conflict with business, 187–8, 194, 197–8 inequality: Adorno, 574; and democracy, 100–1, 104, 105, 109; Durkheim, 250–1; Engels, 120; French Revolution, 100–1; Martineau’s US study, 69; Marx, 118, 120, 126, 140; Mead, 406; neoliberalism, 152–3, 154; Schutz, 492, 506; Tocqueville’s US study, 84; United States, 545–6; women, 288, 290, see also caste system influence, Parson’s essay, 535–6 Inkeles, Alex, 537, 552 innovation, Schumpeter, 454, 458, 459–60 instincts: Freud, 402; Mead, 402; Veblen, 189–90, 192, 193–4, 197, 199 institutions: Durkheim, 258–9, 263, 273; Mead, 392, 405, 407, 417; Parsons, 516, 524, 525–6, 527, 528, 529, 530, 531, 537, 538, 539, 540; Schumpeter, 462; Spencer, 172–3; Veblen, 189, 190, 191–2, 193, 194, 195, 197, 202, see also political institutions instrumental activism, Parsons, 533 instrumental reason, 562 integration: Durkheim, 244, 250, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 273; four function paradigm, 527, 528, 530, 533, 534, 541, 542; organic theories, 315–16; Parsons, 520, 524–5, 526, 527, 528, 530, 533,

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index 534, 541–2, 543; Spencer, 167, 172, 177, 179; Weber, 315–16 intellectual evolution, Comte, 33, 34, 35, 38, 51 intellectual property rights, 193 intellectuals: Mannheim, 6, 469, 474, 478–9, 480, 485; Weber, 338, 479 intelligence: Mead, 389, 391, 396–8, 404, 418; social dynamics, 32; Spencer, 167, 172 interaction: Bales, 526–7; groups, 526–7; ideal types, 336, 337; logical, 337, 338; Mead, 394, 397, 406; Parsons, 523–4, 531–2; Protestant sects, 327; Schutz, 500–1; Simmel, 3, 209–10, 213–18, 221, 227, 232; status differences, 336, see also symbolic interactionism interchange processes, Parsons, 530, 531, 534, 537, 541, 543, 547, 551 international relations, Parsons, 544–5 interpretation: German academics, 472; Mannheim, 472, 473, 474, 483–4, 486–7 interpretational relevances, 499 interpretive sociology: romantic idealism, 383; Weber, 306, 317, 319, 330, 331, 332 interpretive understanding (Verstehen): Parsons, 550; Schutz, 490; Simmel, 229, 550; Weber, 229, 306, 316–17, 333, 347, 489, 490, 492, 500, 505, 550 intersectionality, Du Bois, 432, 441, 443 intersubjectivity: Mead, 408; Schutz, 490, 495, 496, 501, 502 intrinsic relevances, 498 Ionin, Leonid Grigor’evich, 419 Iowa school, 413 Iran: Qajar dynasty, 17; Safavid dynasty, 20, 21, 22–3 Iraq, Baath regime, 24 Isaiah the prophet, 538 Islam: 'as.abiyyah, 15–16, 18–19; Comte, 42; Ibn Khaldu¯n’s theory of religious reform, 17–19 Israel, ancient: Parsons’s studies, 538; Weber’s studies, 306, 345 Israel, J., 158 ‘Izzat, ‘Abd al-’Azı¯z, 19 Jabar, Faleh A., 25 Jackson, Andrew, 67, 98

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597

Jäger, L., 562 James, Joy, 443 James, William: “fields,” 394; influence on Du Bois, 426, 431, 433; influence on Mead, 377; influence on Schutz, 493–4; knowledge, 498; Mead comparison, 384, 409; pluralistic universe, 393; pragmatism, 385; religion, 225–6; social inquiry, 432–3; social nominalism, 413; “specious present,” 496 Jameson, Fredric, 155, 156, 576 Janara, Laura, 5–6, 7, 109, 110 Janet, Paul, 56, 240 Jarvis, Simon, 572, 575–6, 578 Jaspers, Karl, 514 Jászi, Oscar, 470 Jaurès, Jean, 238, 241, 242, 251 Jay, Martin, 160, 485, 565 Jeffrey, Louisa, 67 Jenemann, D., 565 Jessop, B., 243 Jevons, William Stanley, 452 Joas, Hans, 373, 374, 408, 409, 411, 419, 456, 570 Joël, Karl, 206 Johnson, G.D., 412, 414 Johnson, Miriam M., 532 Johnson, M.M., 552 Jones, Robert Alun, 258, 275, 276 Judaism, 151, 265 Judy, Ronald, 443 justice, Durkheim, 246–7, 251 Kaelber, Lutz, 361 Kaern, Michael, 233 Kalberg, Stephen, 1, 4, 180, 315, 321, 322, 333, 337, 338, 339, 342, 344, 348, 349, 356, 358, 361 Kant, Immanuel: influence on Comte, 51; influence on Parsons, 512, 513, 514, 518; influence on Simmel, 207, 208, 218, 222; influence on Weber, 308; law and chance paradox, 436; moral individualism, 242; notion of time and space, 382; reality, 382; reason, 221, 381; religion, 226; self, 381, 403; self-interest, 242; Unitarian circles, 79; women, 223 Kantian ethics, 208

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598

index

Kardiner, Abram, 524 Karplus, Gretel, 561, 562 Karsenti, Bruno, 40 Katovich, Michael A., 419 Katz, Michael, 443 Kaufmann, Felix, 490 Kautsky, Karl, 126, 207 Kellner, Douglas, 115, 156, 576 Kelsen, Hans, 489 Kent, R.J., 156 Kersten, Fred, 489, 493 Kettler, D., 470, 475, 480, 485, 486, 487 Key, Ellen, 284, 294, 295 “key position” concept, Mannheim, 483 Keynes, John Maynard, 202, 451, 456, 463, 464, 530, 534–5 Kierkegaard, Søren, 561 Kim, David, 233 Kinel, Gertrud, 207 kinship: 'as.abiyyah, 16, 17, 23; Durkheim, 248; resource allocation, 525 Klausner, S.Z., 512, 519, 521 Kleinman, Sherryl, 412, 414 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 521, 522 Knapp, Adeline E., 286 Knies, Karl, 311, 452 Knight, Denise D., 284, 285, 286, 296, 298 Knöbl, Wolfgang, 570 knowledge: critical theory, 271; Mannheim, 6, 8, 469, 473–5, 477, 483, 484–5, 486, 487; Martineau, 72–3, 86, 87; Parsons, 550; positivism, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 51, 56, 58; Schutz, 489, 497–8, 499, 500; Simmel, 213, 214, 217; Spencer, 172; traditional theories of society, 271; Veblen, 190, 192; Weber, 310, 311, see also scientific knowledge Koch, H.W., 243 Koczanowicz, Leszek, 419 Kofman, Sarah, 43 Kohn, Margaret, 110 Köhnke, Klaus, 208, 209 Kolakowski, Leszek, 159 Kolchin, Peter, 298 Kolko, G., 156 Kon, Igor S., 374, 418–19 Kracauer, Siegfried, 231, 566 Kravchenko, E.I., 419 Kremer, Alfred, Freiherr von, 19

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Kropotkin, Peter, 169 Kuhn, Manford, 412–13 Kuhn, Thomas, 37 Kuklick, Henrika, 170, 419 Kukulan, Annis, 87 Kundera, Milan, 212 Kurayb, 12 La Capra, Dominick, 240, 276 labor: Martineau’s US study, 69; Parsons, 530; Tocqueville, 105, see also productivity; wage labor labor movements: Durkheim, 273; Marx, 116, 150–1 labor theory of value, Marx, 126, 137–41, 142, 143, 144, 147, 195, 253 Lacoste, Yves, 13, 16, 20, 21, 25 Laffitte, Pierre, 54 Lamanna, Mary Ann, 274 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 170, 287 Lamarckianism, 32, 170, 171, 173, 188, 293 Lambton, Anne K.S., 23 Lamennais, Felicité, 273 land, Parsons, 530 land nationalization, Spencer, 165–6 Landmann, M., 205, 208 Lane, Ann J., 286, 297 Lang, Fritz, 562 language: Adorno, 575; Mead, 396, 397, 398, 400; Schutz, 502 Lanser, Susan S., 297, 298 Lanzillotti, R.F., 465 Laski, Harold, 513 late capitalism, Adorno, 564, 567 Laube, R., 487 Laudan, Larry, 37 Laughlin, James Laurence, 186 law, Durkheim, 243, 246–7, 269 laws, Weber, 307, 311, 321 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 412, 535, 561, 565 Lazarus, Moritz, 208 leadership: Durkheim, 248; Weber, 353 Leck, Ralph, 233 Lederer, Emil, 449, 453 The Left: Comte, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56–7; criticism of Weber, 360; Marx, 116; Marxism, 154;

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index Parsons, 515; post-Marxist, 155; Spencer, 169, see also New Left Lehmann, Hartmut, 361 Lehmann, Jennifer, 257, 274, 276–7 leisure, Veblen, 199, 200 Lemert, Charles, 237 Lengermann, Patricia Madoo, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88 Lenin, Vladimir, 432 Lenzer, Gertrud, 35, 58 Leonard, Thomas, 168 Lepenies, Wolf, 58 Levering-Lewis, David, 438, 443 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 275 Levine, Donald N., 39, 55, 58, 233 Lévy, Emmanuel, 275 Levy, M.J., Jr., 552 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 55, 275 Lewes, George Henry, 55 Lewis, David, 413 liberal individualism, 127–9 liberalism: Comte, 53, 54, 55; Mannheim, 474, 476; Martineau, 86–7; Parsons, 512, 515, 544; Spencer, 179 liberty: Martineau, 64; Marx, 118–19; Tocqueville, 96, 99, 100, 104, 109 Lichtman, Richard, 419 Lidz, C.W., 542 Lidz, Victor, 8, 512, 517, 519, 521, 537, 540, 542, 552, 553, 555 “life form” concept, Schutz, 493 life/form dualism, Simmel, 218–23, 226, 228 life-world theory, Schutz, 3, 8, 489, 490, 494–504, 505–6 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87 Littré, Émile, 49, 50, 54 Lizardo, Omar, 179, 181 Loader, C., 6–7, 480, 485, 487 lobbying, 197 Locke, Jill, 84, 110 Locke, John, 79, 518 Logan, Deborah A., 83, 84, 85, 88 Logan, Rayford, 429 logical interactions, 337, 338 logical positivism, 56 Loubser, R.C., 552 love: Comte, 36, 57; social statics, 32 Löwenthal, Leo, 565

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599

Löwith, Karl, 314 Lucas, Robert, 201 Luckmann, Thomas, 9, 491, 494, 495, 502, 503, 505, 506 Luhmann, Niklas, 551–2, 570 Lukács, Georg: Adorno, 561; alienation, 231; Mannheim’s mentor, 470, 473, 474–5, 477, 478, 481; positivism, 470; reification, 231, 562; Simmel’s influence, 205, 215, 231; Western Marxism, 461 Lukes, Steven, 180, 238, 240, 245, 251, 254, 256, 276 Lumpenproletariat, 124 Luther, Martin, 348, 349 Lutheranism, 365n McCarthy, Joseph, 544 McCarthyism, 534, 544 McChesney, R.W., 156 McCormick, Ken, 4, 202 McCormick, Medill, 379 McCraw, T.K., 449, 465 McDonald, Lynn, 82, 85, 88 McGerr, Michael, 287 Mach, Ernst, 56 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 535 machine industry see mechanization Machlup, Fritz, 490 Mackay, Ian, 169 Mackay, Thomas, 169 McLellan, David, 116, 117, 118, 123, 159 McPhail, Clark, 413, 414 macrosociology: Martineau, 64, 66–71; Weber, 357, see also sociology Magdoff, F., 156 Magner, Lois N., 289 magnetic force, 79 Mahdi, Muhsin, 15, 25 Maines, David R., 419 Maistre, Joseph de, 53–4, 273 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 275, 513, 524 Malthus, Thomas, 62, 77, 168 Mamiani, Terenzio, 171 management: excesses of, 198; Marx, 146, 156; Schumpeter, 460 managerial capitalism, 5, 455, 456, 457, 459–63 Manicas, Peter T., 56 manipulation, Mead, 396

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600

index

Mann, Thomas, 562 Mannheim, Karl, 469–88; Adorno’s criticism, 565; democracy, 6–7, 482–3; exile in Britain, 481–4; German academic world, 471–81; impact and assessment, 484–7; intellectuals, 6, 469, 474, 478–9, 480, 485; knowledge, 6, 8, 469, 473–5, 477, 483, 484–5, 486, 487; organic cultural unity, 471–3, 474–5; personal history, 470; politics, 6–7, 476, 478–9, 480–1, 483 Manuel, Frank, 58 manufacture, Marx, 141–2, 143 Manzoni, Alexander, 54 Marcet, Jane, 88 Marcuse, Herbert, 485, 561, 565, 566, 576 Marinids, 13, 18, 21 market economies: free-market economists, 452, 462; Martineau, 63; Marx, 139; neoclassical economics, 457; Parsons, 515; Schumpeter, 457, 458–9, 460; Smith, 127, 187 marriage: Gilman, 287, 288, 291; suicide rates, 265; Tocqueville, 103 Marshall, Alfred, 514, 516, 517 Marshall, Gordon, 330, 361 Marshall, T.H., 545 Martin, John, 295 Martin, Prestonia Mann, 295 Martindale, Don, 411 Martineau, Harriet, 1, 61–95; assessment of, 86–7; capitalism, 4, 63, 80, 86; immanent critique, 3, 62, 67, 87; impact of, 80–2; intellectual context, 78–80; metamethodology, 62, 63–6; personal history, 73–7; political economy, 4, 62–3, 80; positivism, 9, 55, 61, 62, 72–3, 76, 79–80, 86; social context, 77–8; theory, 62–73; Tocqueville comparison, 6, 7; translation of Comte, 61, 72–3, 76, 86; US study, 62, 63–4, 66–71, 83–4; women, 6, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 81, 84 Martineau, James, 75, 76, 81 Martineau, Thomas, 74 martyrdom, 266 Marx, G., 217 Marx, Heinrich, 116 Marx, Henrietta, 116

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Marx, Karl, 115–64; Adorno comparison, 568, 578; American critics, 356; capitalism, 3, 116, 117–19, 120–2, 123–7, 128–9, 131–2, 134–5, 136–47, 159, 448, 449, 457, 461; causal forms of explanation, 167; class struggle, 34, 121, 123–4, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 145, 312; commodity fetishism, 137, 140, 149, 562; Comte comparison, 57; Durkheim, 238, 242, 252; dynamism, 434; Enlightenment, 115, 116, 117, 153, 434; family life, 123; Ibn Khaldu¯n comparison, 20; influence on Du Bois, 430, 431, 432, 439; influence on Frankfurt School, 566; influence on Parsons, 514; influence on Schumpeter, 448, 453, 454, 455, 461, 462; Jewish ancestry, 116; Jewish political rights, 118; labor theory of value, 126, 137–41, 142, 143, 144, 147, 195, 253; legacy, 158–9; liberal individualism, 118, 127–9; life and context, 116–20; Martineau, 62, 66, 81, 82; materialism, 119, 120, 121–2, 125, 126, 129–36, 167, 210, 223, 382, 475; means of production, 128, 141, 143, 149; modern industry, 142–8; partnership with Engels, 120–3, 566; political economy, 4, 122, 126, 210; politics, 123, 135, 148–53, 202; post-capitalism, 148–53; pragmatism, 433; prospects for, 155–8; religion, 252; Safavid Iran, 22; Schumpeter comparison, 448, 463, 464; scientific socialism, 169, 309; Simmel comparison, 207, 229, 230, 231; social class, 121, 131–3, 318, 335; social cooperation, 127–9; social evolution, 174, 189; utopian socialism, 461; values, 567; Weber comparison, 335, 336 Marxism, 153–5; capitalism, 244; challenge from Left, 154; criticism of Weber, 360; critique of Parsons, 548; decline of, 411; diversity of, 116; Du Bois, 428, 432, 440; economics, 452; false consciousness, 485; historical meaning, 309; ideology, 476; income distribution, 196; means of production, 483; proletariat, 477; prospects for, 155–8; revival of, 155–6; stratification theory, 357 masculism, 290, 292

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index Mas.mu¯dah tribe, 18, 21 Mason, P., 156 Massin, Caroline, 47, 48, 49, 50 Matamoros, F., 577 materialism: Darwin, 173; Du Bois, 8, 439–40; Engels, 129, 130, 132, 135–6, 167; growing influence of, 79; Marx, 119, 120, 121–2, 125, 126, 129–36, 167, 210, 223, 382, 475; Spencer, 167, 172, 173; Tocqueville, 104–5, 106, 109 maternity leave, 292 mathematics, Comte, 31, 44–5, 49 matriarchy, 287 Maunier, René, 19 Maurras, Charles, 55 Mauss, Marcel, 237, 239, 243, 262, 270, 271, 275, 276 Mayhew, L., 553, 554 “me” and “I” theory, Mead, 403–4, 407, 416 Mead, George Herbert, 373–425; commitment to theory development, 126; Du Bois comparison, 430; influence on Schutz, 494; intellectual context, 380–7; intellectual legacy, 408–15; mind, 390–1, 392–3, 397, 542; personal history, 374–80; relativity, 10, 388, 389, 390, 391, 395, 398–9, 404, 407, 418; romantic idealism, 373, 380–2, 383, 384, 386, 403; Simmel influence, 232; sociality, 10, 388, 389, 390, 391, 401, 403, 414–15; symbolic interactionism, 3, 411–13, 416–17; theory, 387–408 Mead, Hiram, 374 meaning: German academics, 472; Mannheim, 486; Mead, 398; phenomenology, 493; Schutz, 490, 493, 494, 496, 497, 501; Weber, 306, 310, 314, 316, 347, 359, see also subjective meaning Means, Gardiner C., 146, 147 means of production, Marx, 128, 141, 143, 149 means-end rational action, 317, 320, 329, 334, 335, 339, 341, 347, 352, 360, 362n mechanical solidarity, Durkheim, 245–6, 247, 260, 269 mechanization: Marx, 122, 142–4, 147, 149; Mead, 406; Veblen, 195

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601

Medearis, J., 451, 465 medical sociology, 523 Medieval civilization, 539 Meja, V., 474, 475, 485, 487 Menger, Carl, 311, 312, 452, 514 mental illness: Comte, 47, 48; Martineau, 66; Weber, 308 mental life, Mead, 390 mercantilist system, 195 merger movement, 460 meritocracy, Durkheim, 253 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 491 Merton, Robert, 409, 410, 412, 485, 487, 535, 548, 566 Mesmer, Anton, 79 mesmerism, 76, 77, 79 Mesopotamian civilization, 537 Mészáros, I., 156, 158, 159, 160 metamethodology, Martineau, 62, 63–6 metaphysical stage of history, 33–4 metaphysics: Comte’s skepticism, 31, 32; Du Bois, 432, 433, 435, 436, 443; romantic idealism, 381; Spencer, 172; Veblen, 186 Methodenstreit, 452 methodology: Durkheim, 229, 236, 254–61; Martineau, 62, 63–6; Parsons, 511–12, 547, 548, 549–50, 553; Schumpeter, 448–9, 455; Schutz, 489, 503–4, 505; Simmel, 205, 209, 214, 229; Spencer, 180; Weber, 307, 313, 315–21, 490 Mexico, positivism, 54 Meyer, J.R., 463 Michaud, Gérard, 23–4, 25 Michelangelo, 209 Michelet, Jules, 44 Michels, Robert, 207 micro–macro dualism, romantic idealism, 383 middle class: domestic life, 98–9; Industrial Revolution, 539; industrialization, 98; materialism, 104–5, 106; Parsons, 515, 531–2; property ownership, 104, 106; rise of, 98; Spencer, 166, 177; travel as leisure activity, 78; United States, 155, 157, 540; Veblen, 194 middle range theories, 548 Miklitsch, R., 576

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602

index

Milbrandt, Tara, 6 militarism, Du Bois, 441 Mill, James, 63 Mill, John Stuart: Comte, 34, 49, 50, 55, 58; influence on Durkheim, 254; Martineau, 81; “middle principles,” 483; positivism, 79; sex relations, 287, 290, 291, 294, 299; Simmel comparison, 209; social evolution, 174; women, 223 Miller, David, 374, 419 Miller, W. Watts, 277 Miller, William L., 169 Mills, C. Wright, 200, 201, 361, 410 mind: Comte, 33, 34, 36, 40, 43; Dewey, 385; Hegel, 382; Martineau, 79; Mead, 390–1, 392–3, 397, 542; pragmatism, 385; romantic idealism, 381; Simmel, 218; Spencer, 167 mind–body relations, 79, 81, 401–4, 416 Mises, Ludwig von, 449, 453, 489 misogyny, 286, 290, 292 missionary prophet, 333 Mitchell, Harvey, 110 Mitchell, Wesley Claire, 201, 552 mode of production, Marx, 121, 133–5, 138, 142, 146 models, Weber, 330–1, 332, 336–41 modern West, Weber, 305–7 modernity: Du Bois, 434, 435, 436, 439, 440–2; Marx, 121, 124; Schumpeter, 448, 455; Simmel, 207, 216, 218, 219–20, 228 modernization theory, 157, 356–7, 368n, 455 Mommsen, Theodor, 208, 308 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 344 monarchy, Schumpeter, 451 money: Parsons, 535, 536; role in economy, 534–5; Simmel, 5, 206, 208, 210–13, 215, 218, 229–30, 232 monopolies: Marx, 139, 144, 146, 147; Schumpeter, 458; Veblen, 187, 191, 197 monotheism, 18, 33, 271, 272 Montagne, Robert, 18 Monteil, Vincent, 25 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, 46, 52, 65, 66 Monthly Repository, 62, 72, 75, 79 moral rules, Durkheim, 245, 259

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morality: Comte, 31, 38, 52; Durkheim, 180, 238, 242, 244, 245, 247, 259, 269; Martineau, 64, 79, 82; Martineau’s US study, 66, 67, 68–70, 71; Social Gospel movement, 375; Spencer, 167, 174, 180; Weber, 180 Morgan, A., 563 Morgan, C. Lloyd, 188 Morgan, J.P., 187 Morgenstern, Oskar, 490 Morris, Charles, 374, 408, 409 Morrow, Glenn R., 409 Mörz, E., 465 Moss, L.S., 465 Mosse, George, 349 motherhood, 287, 288, 289, 292–3 motivational relevances, 499 motives/motivation: Parsons, 524; Schutz, 493, 498, 500–1, 504; Weber, 316, 317–18, 362n Mottley, Mary, 97 Mouzelis, N., 456 Muhammad the Prophet, 24, 42 Mukherjee, S. Romi, 277 mulk (royal authority), Ibn Khaldu¯n, 16 Muller, Charlotte, 88 Müller-Doohm, S., 562, 568, 570, 578 multicausality: Weber, 312, 330, 341–3, 344, 345–6, 358, see also causality multiple realities, Schutz, 494, 496, 497, 501, 506 Mumford, Lewis, 55 Murray, Henry A., 522 Muschert, G., 217 Muslim Brotherhood, 24 Myrdal, Gunnar, 81, 82 mysticism, 226 Nadkarni, Asa, 298 Napoleon I, 40, 42, 46, 116 Napoleon III, 40, 42, 97, 124, 240 Nasserism, 24 Nasu, Hisashi, 499, 506 Natanson, Maurice, 374, 409, 411, 418, 505 “nation,” as an idea, 502–3 nation-states, Parsons, 549 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 427, 428, 430

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index nationalism: Veblen, 191, 192, 197; Weber, 355–6 natural selection, 166, 168, 169, 170, 180, 389, 537, 540, 543 nature, 9–10; Adorno, 564; Marx, 130; Mead, 391, 399; Simmel, 218 nature–nurture distinction, 224 Nazism (National Socialism), 451, 480, 481, 520–1, 544, 548, 564, 566 necessarianism, 79 Nedelmann, B., 215 negative dialectics, Adorno, 9, 560, 569, 571–2, 573, 574–6 Negri, A., 156 Nelson, R.R., 464 neo-Kantianism, 208, 232, 238, 513, 514 neo-Marxism, 360 neoclassical economics: Austrian school, 452; capital, 195; changes in capitalism, 463; entrepreneur role, 458; income distribution, 196; Schumpeter, 5, 454, 455, 457, 461, 463; static nature, 457; Veblen, 186, 189, 201 neofunctionalism, 358, 551 neoliberalism, 116, 119, 136, 152–5, 156–7, 158, 159 Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 123 Neurath, Otto, 56 neurophysiology, Spencer, 10, 167, 168, 173, 180 neutrality, 525, 526 New Deal, 116, 451, 515 New Left, 158, 549, see also The Left Newman, Louise, 298 Newton, Isaac, 79, 519 Newtonian physics, 189 Niagara Movement, 427 Nichol, John, 72 Nichols, L.T., 522 Niebrugge-Brantley, Jill, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88 Nielsen, Jen, 521 Nietzsche, F.W., 209, 218, 310, 314, 566, 572 Nightingale, Florence, 78 Nisbet, Robert, 273, 411 Nixon, Richard, 534 Nizan, Paul, 273 Nkrumah, Kwame, 430

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Nolte, P., 232 nomadic societies, Ibn Khaldu¯n, 15–17, 21 nominalism: Hume, 51; James, 413; Martineau, 63; Simmel, 214 normal, Durkheim, 259–61 normative elements, Parsons, 517, 518, 523, 524, 529, 549 normative values, 180 nuclear weapons, 545 nurture–nature distinction, 224 Nyland, Chris, 83 Oakes, Guy, 233 Oakeshott, Michael, 179 obedience, Weber, 333–4, 335, 339, 359 object–subject dualism: Hegel, 119; Mead, 403; romantic idealism, 381, 384; Simmel, 211–12, 214, 215, 217, 219, 221, 224 objectification, Simmel, 224–5 objectivity: Adorno, 577; Parsons, 544; Weber, 318–19, 544 observation: Comte, 31, 32, 37; Du Bois, 433; Martineau, 64, 65, 72 O’Connor, B., 569, 578 Offe, C., 565, 576 Olds, James, 522 Ollman, B., 156, 158 O’Neill, Maggie, 576 ontogeny, 398, 399 Oppenheimer, Franz, 19 Oražem, Claudia, 83, 84 organic cultural unity: German historicists, 471; Mannheim, 471–3, 474–5, 478, 482 organic publics, Mannheim, 6, 482 organic solidarity, Durkheim, 245, 246–7, 249, 250, 251, 268, 269 organic theories, 315–16, 360 Ortega y Gasset, José, 17, 19 Osterhammel, J., 463 Ostwald, Wilhelm, 56 the “Other”: Schutz, 495, 497, 501; Simmel, 216–17, 219; Weber, 313, 318, see also generalized other Ottoman Empire, 17, 20, 21 Owen, Richard, 171 Paddison, M., 576 Palmer, George H., 426

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604 Palmeri, Ann, 288, 289 Pan-Africanism, 427, 429 Pankhurst family, 284 Papilloud, C., 232, 233 parent–child role relationship, 531–2 parental bent instinct, 190, 192, 193 Pareto, Vilfredo, 169, 189, 514, 516, 517, 548 Paris Commune, 151–2, 241 Park, Robert E., 210, 231, 232, 410, 411, 415 parliamentary democracy: Germany, 563; Marx, 124 parliaments: Germany, 349, 480; Spencer, 167; Weber, 353, 355, see also government Parsons, C., 512 Parsons, Edward, 512–13 Parsons, Talcott, 1–2, 511–58; American society studies, 532–3, 540, 541–2; applied writings, 543–7; critique of Simmel, 205; critiques of, 547–53; culture, 8, 522–3, 540–1; Durkheim comparison, 272; family and socialization, 531–2; four function paradigm, 526–9, 530, 531, 532, 538, 540–1, 542, 547, 551; general action system, 412, 540–1, 547; human condition, 542–3; legacy, 553–4; Marshall Lectures, 529–31; Mead’s influence, 410; pattern variable schema, 525–6, 529; personal history, 512–14, 520–2; positivism, 9, 517, 518; Schumpeter comparison, 464; Schutz’s paper, 491–2; Simmel comparison, 207; social evolution, 537–40; The Social System, 523–6; The Structure of Social Action, 515, 516–19; symbolic media, 535, 536–7, 541, 543, 547, 551; theory, 515–47, 570; values, 272, 516, 518, 532–3 particularism, 525, 526 past: Mead, 394, 406–7; Schutz, 496; Weber, 343–5 paternalism, Veblen, 190 pathological, Durkheim, 250, 259–61 patriarchy, 287, 293 patriotism, 177

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index pattern maintenance, four function paradigm, 527, 528–9, 530, 533, 540–1, 542–3 pauperism, 173 Pearce, Frank, 6, 247, 250, 251, 267, 272, 277 pedantocracy, 34 Pedersen, Jean Elisabeth, 275 Peel, J.D.Y., 170, 180 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 186, 384, 385, 413, 434 perception, Mead, 396 Perkins, Charlotte Anna, 285 Perkins, Frederick Beecher, 285 Perkins, John, 284 Perkins, Mary, 285, 286 Perkins, Thomas, 284 Perrin, Robert, 171 personality: German historicists, 471; Parsons, 522–3, 524, 540, 541; Simmel, 212, 214, 215, 219; suicide relationship, 263, 265–6; Weber, 305 perspective, Mead, 389–91, 393, 394–5, 396, 401 perspectivism, Mannheim, 472–3, 477, 478 Petras, John, 374 Peyser, Thomas Galt, 298 Pfuetze, Paul E., 374, 411, 418 phallocentrism, 255 phallogocentrism, 224–5 phenomenology, 180, 489, 490, 493, 505 philosophy: ancient Greece, 538; Comte, 57–8; critical theory, 570; Durkheim, 238; “historic” civilizations, 538; sociology relations, 373 phrenology, 77, 79 physics, Comte, 31 physiological psychology, 385, 386 Piaget, Jean, 542 Pichanik, Valerie Kossew, 74, 79, 84, 88 Pickering, Mary, 3, 6, 58 Pickering, W.S.F., 243, 277 Pitts, Jennifer, 98, 110 planning, Mannheim, 483–4 Plato, 223 Platonism, 169, 171, 175 Platt, Gerald M., 546, 547 playacting, children, 399–400

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index pluralism: cultural, 435; Du Bois, 348, 349; Mannheim, 470, 473, 474, 478, 480–1; Weber, 476 pluralistic universe, 393, 398, 404, 405, 406, 407, 418 Poincaré, Henri, 56 Polanyi, Karl, 459 polis, 538 political economy: Comte, 31, 52; division of labor, 247, 249; Du Bois, 439; Martineau, 4, 62–3, 80; Marx, 4, 122, 126, 210; Schumpeter, 5, 449, 455; Simmel, 210–13, 229–30; Smith, 3–4; Spencer, 4; Weber, 4, 210 political institutions, 178–80 political parties, Mannheim, 474 politics, 5–7; 19th century Euro-American politics, 97–8; Comte’s law of three stages, 33, 34; Du Bois, 439; Durkheim, 6, 241–2, 273, 274; France, 240–1; Germany, 348–50; Mannheim, 6–7, 476, 478–9, 480–1, 483; Martineau, 66, 68–9, 82; Marx, 123, 135, 148–53, 202; Mead, 377, 378–9, 404–8, 417–18; Parsons, 515, 534–7, 544, 549; Spencer, 168, 169, 178–80; suicide relationship, 265; Tocqueville, 104; Veblen, 201–2; Weber, 5, 308–9, 353, 475–6, see also government polity, Parsonian subsystem, 528, 530, 534 Pollini, G., 552 Pollock, Friedrich, 561, 566 polytheism, 18, 33, 271–2 Poor Laws, 77, 80 Pope, Whitney, 262 Popper, Karl, 562, 565 population growth, Spencer, 168 positive stage of history, 33, 34–5 positivism: Adorno, 572; Comte, 6, 9, 30–1, 33, 34–5, 37–41, 42–4, 46, 47, 49–50, 51, 54–8, 79, 86; Du Bois, 9, 433, 434, 435, 436, 439; Durkheim, 9, 272; German academics, 472; Habermas, 35, 562; Jászi circle, 470; Lukács circle, 470; Martineau, 9, 55, 61, 62, 72–3, 76, 79–80, 86; Parsons, 9, 517, 518; reductionism, 35, 386; social action, 318; Weber, 318, 321 Positivist Society, 49

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post-positivists, 57–8 Postlethwaite, Diana, 84 postmodernism, 411 postmodernity, 207, 224–5 Postone, Moishe, 160 poverty: suicide relationship, 266, see also Poor Laws power: Arab world, 24; Comte, 47; Du Bois, 440–2; Mead, 417–18; Parsons, 534, 535–6; Schutz, 506; Veblen, 188; Weber, 342–3, 357, 535 practical rationality, 350–1, 352, 355 pragmatism: Du Bois, 433–4, 435, 436; failure of, 409; Mead, 373, 380–1, 384–7, 392, 393, 394, 407, 415–18; opposing branches of, 3; Schutz, 493–4 prebendal feudalism, 22–3 predation instinct, 190, 192, 193–4, 197 Predestination doctrine, 323, 324 prediction, Comte, 37 premodern civilizations, 136, see also primitive societies prices, of commodities, 139 Priestley, Joseph, 79 primary socialization, 256 primitive societies: Durkheim, 247–9; Parsons, 537, 539; sex relations, 287, 288; social action, 317; Spencer, 175, 178–9, 180, see also premodern civilizations “principia media” concept, Mannheim, 483, 484 prison reform, Martineau, 78 Le Producteur, 47 production see automated production; handicraft era; manufacture; means of production; mechanization; mode of production production costs, 198 productivity, Veblen, 192, 194, 196, 199 profanation, 269–70, 271 professionals, role-relationships, 519 profit: Marx, 126, 140, 144–5; Protestant ethic, 324, 325 progress: capitalism, 322; Comte, 33, 34, 40, 45, 52, 54; Du Bois, 434; Martineau, 64, 72, 77; Marx, 132; Mead, 407; secular idea of, 310; Spencer, 166–7, 168, 171; Victorian belief in, 77; Weber, 313, 347

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606

index

Progressive Era, 55; Gilman, 287, 290, 294, 296, 297; Mead, 405, 406, 407, 418 proletarian dictatorship, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153 proletarian revolution: Engels, 125; Marx, 121, 122, 123–4, 150, 151 proletariat: antagonism with bourgeoisie, 128, 132; Comte, 43; Engels, 128; individualism, 129; Marx, 122, 124, 129, 132, 145–6, 149, 153; Marxism, 477, see also working class property ownership: Marx, 121; Tocqueville, 104, 106; Veblen, 194 prostitution, 283, 288, 290, 291, 292 Protestant ethic: capitalism, 323–4, 325, 326, 329, 345, 364n, 539; Protestant sects, 326, 328–9; Puritan life style, 324–6; Weber, 7–8, 321–6, 328–9, 364n, 450, 539 Protestant Reformation, 53, 538, 539, 543 Protestant sects, 326–30, 344, 351 Protestantism: “Doctrine of Predestination,” 323, 324; individualism, 310, 375; optimism of, 310; reduced appeal of, 375; suicide rates, 265; Weber, 308, 326–30, 344, 345, see also ascetic Protestantism Proudhon, Pierre, 44 Przeworski, A., 152 Psathas, George, 505 psychoanalysis, influence on Parsons, 520, 524 psychologism, Simmel, 214, 228, 229 psychology: Aristotle, 256; behaviorism, 395; Comte’s rejection of, 56; influence on Parsons, 524; pragmatism, 385; sociology distinction, 214; Spencer, 167, 171, 173, 181, see also social psychology Pugwash Conferences, 545 punishment, Durkheim, 245–6 Puritan life style, 324–6 Puritanism, 101 Putnam, Hilary, 57–8 Qajar dynasty, Iran, 17 Quakers, 344 qualitative research, 411, 505 quantitative research, 35, 413

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race: Comte, 41–2; Du Bois, 7, 8, 426–30, 431–2, 435–42; Gilman, 297–8; Social Darwinism, 431, see also caste system “race work,” Gilman, 283, 289, 290, 292 racial inequality theory, 98 racism: Comte, 7, 41; Du Bois, 427, 428, 429, 436–7, 440; Gilman, 297, 298; Martineau’s US study, 68, 69, 84; Schutz, 492; Tocqueville, 101–2 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R., 275 radical democracy, 118, 151–2, 153 Ramp, William, 273 Rampersad, Arnold, 442 Ranke, Leopold von, 309, 311, 312, 431, 434 Rankin, Elizabeth, 74 rape, 288 rational choice theory, 358 rational intelligence, 396, 397, 398, 407 rational thought: Adorno, 569; Ibn Khaldu¯n, 15 rational-legal rulership, 334–5 rationalism: Comte, 38; Durkheim, 255, 272; Weber, 330, 346–7, 363n rationality: Enlightenment, 310, 538; Mannheim, 475, 482, 483, 484; social action, 317; Weber, 315, 317, 347, 350–1, see also formal rationality; practical rationality; theoretical rationality rationalization: capitalism’s growth, 457; Schumpeter, 457, 462, 463; Weber, 45, 366n, 463 Rawls, Anne, 276 Rayman, J., 565 Raymond, Jean, 243 reality: Adorno, 559, 564, 566, 567, 572, 573, 575, 576, 577; Hegel, 382; Kant, 382; Mead, 393–4; pragmatism, 385; romantic idealism, 381, 382, 383–4, 385, see also social reality reason: Adorno, 565; and community, 386; Comte, 33, 36, 37–8, 41; Enlightenment, 129, 310; Greek philosophy, 538; instrumental, 562; Kant, 221, 381; Mead, 386, 397, 402, 404; pragmatism, 385, 386; romantic idealism, 381, 385; secular idea of, 310; Spencer, 178 recession, 187–8

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index reciprocity, Simmel, 209, 213, 215, 219, 221 Reck, Andrew, 374 reductionism: behaviorism, 386; positivism, 35, 386 reference frames see frames of reference reflection theory, 135 reflex action, Spencer, 167, 168, 173, 176, 177, 181 reform Darwinism, 287, 288, 290, 291, 293, 295, 298 Reformation, 53, 538, 539, 543 regulation, Durkheim, 250, 251, 264, 266–7, 268 Reichenbach, Hans, 56 Reid, James J., 22 reification, 231, 316, 462, 562, 563, 575 Reinharz, Shulamit, 83, 85 Reisinger, Annie, 450 Reisman, D., 465 relationism, Mannheim, 478–9 relationships: Weber’s models, 337, 338, see also social relations relativism: Comte, 36, 51, 56, 58; Mannheim, 484, 485 relativity: Einstein, 380, 388; Mead, 10, 388, 389, 390, 391, 395, 398–9, 404, 407, 418 relevance, Schutz, 498–9, 506 religion: American values, 533; androcentrism, 290–1, 293; capitalism, 345–6, 364n; Comte, 30, 38, 40, 44, 53, 54, 58; divine order, 309; Du Bois, 434; Durkheim, 8, 247, 248, 265, 268–72; Gilman, 290, 291, 293–4; “historic” civilizations, 538; Hume’s oscillation theory, 18; Mannheim, 482; Martineau, 64, 65, 74, 76, 82; Martineau’s US study, 66, 71; Marx, 252; Parsons, 529, 533; Schumpeter, 451; science, 78; Simmel, 225–8, 230; social cohesion, 16, 17; Spencer, 166, 172, 175; suicide rates, 265; theological stage of history, 33; Tocqueville, 103, 104; Veblen, 186, 194; Weber, 225, 308, 309–10, 312, 321–9, 331, 338–9, 343, 344, 345–8, 351, 357, 518, 533, see also ascetic Protestantism; Catholicism; Christianity; Protestant ethic; Protestantism

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Religion of Humanity, Comte, 7, 38–41, 49–50, 55, 57 religiosity: Durkheim, 269; Simmel, 225–7, 230 religious reform, Ibn Khaldu¯n, 17–19 Rembrandt, 209, 221, 228 Renaissance, 308, 538, 539 Renan, Ernest, 55 Renner, Karl, 450, 453 Renouvier, Charles, 238, 256, 257 Renwick, Chris, 168, 173, 181 repression: Durkheim, 245, 260; typology of power, 24 reprimitivization, Mannheim, 480–1, 483 republicanism: Comte, 46, 54; Schumpeter, 451; Tocqueville, 100–1, 104 resource allocation, Parsons, 524–5, 526, 528, 530 respectability, Protestant sects, 328 responsibility: Mannheim, 481; pragmatism, 385; romantic idealism, 385; Weber, 352, 353, 354–5, 356, 475, 481 restitutive law, 246, 247 revolution: Hungary, 470; Marx, 121, 122, 123–4, 146, 149–50, 151; Veblen, 191–2, see also French Revolution; proletarian revolution; Russian Revolution Rexroat, Cynthia, 413, 414 Reynolds, Jenice, 412 Reynolds, Larry, 412 Rheinische Zeitung, 117, 118 Ricardo, David, 138, 452 Richards, Robert J., 181 Richie, D.G., 169–70 Richman, Michèle, 277 Richter, G., 578 Richter, Melvin, 110, 273 Rickert, Heinrich, 309, 311, 471, 513 Riedesel, Paul L., 83, 88 the Right: Comte, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57; Marx, 116 rights: animals, 416; citizenship, 545; Durkheim, 242; Marx, 118–19, see also Civil Rights movement “Rights of Man,” 50, 65, 353, 355 Ringer, Fritz, 349, 361, 471 rituals, Durkheim, 248, 268, 270–2

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Ritzer, George, 85 Roberts, Caroline, 83 Robertson, William, 52 Robeson, Paul, 428, 430 Robespierre, Maximilien, 46 Robinson, Cedric, 432 Rockefeller, J.D., 187 Rockmore, Tom, 156, 159 Rodin, Auguste, 221, 228 Roediger, David, 442 Roemer, J.E., 156 Rojahn, Jürgen, 156 Rol, C., 232, 233 roles: closed societies, 406; democracies, 406; families, 531–2; Mead, 395–6, 397, 398–400; Parsons, 518, 523, 524–5; professionals, 519, see also caste system Rolfe, Ellen, 186 Roman Empire, 177 Romano, Mary Ann, 85, 87 romantic idealism, 8, 373, 381–5, 386–7, 403, 415 Romanticism: influence on Comte, 54; influence of, 411; Marx, 117, 383; Weber, 310, 315, 349, 411 Rome, ancient, 308 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 428 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 451, 515 Ropers, Richard, 412, 419 Rorty, Richard, post-positivists, 57–8 Rosati, Massimo, 277 Roscher, Wilhelm, 311, 452 Rose, Gillian, 575, 576 Rosen, Lawrence, 25 Rosenthal, Franz, 12, 25 Rosenthal, Sandra, 373, 374 Rossi, Alice, 85, 88 Roth, Guenther, 330, 361, 517, 550 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 57, 98, 174, 242 Roussillon, Alain, 19 routines, Veblen, 191 Royce, Josiah, 377, 383, 384, 426 Rubin, A., 578 Rueschermeyer, D., 243 rulership, Weber, 331, 333–5, 338, 339–40, 342–3, 357, 359, 365n ruling class: Engels, 121; Marx, 121, 124, 126, 131, 132–3, 137, 140 Russian Revolution, 378, 470

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Ruthven, Malise, 25 Rylance, Rick, 181 sacredness, 268, 269–71, 272 sacrificial practices, 271–2 Saddam Hussein, 24 Sade, Marquis de, 572 Safavid dynasty, Iran, 20, 21, 22–3 Saint-Simon, Henri: Comte comparison, 32, 35; friendship loss with Comte, 50; historical meaning, 309; influence on Comte, 46–7, 52; influence on Durkheim, 236; influence on Martineau, 74; science, 79–80; support in Trier, 116 Salin, Edgar, 514 Salomon, Albert, 314, 350, 352 salvation: elective affinity, 338–9; intellectuals, 338; Protestant ethic, 323, 324, 326 Sanders, Valerie, 73, 85, 88 Sanger, Margaret, 284, 291, 294, 297 Sanha¯jah tribe, 18, 21 Santayana, George, 426 Sappol, Michael, 42 Sassen, S., 156 Sassoon, Donald, 159–60 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 275 Say, J.B., 52 Sayer, D., 449 Scaff, Lawrence, 3, 5, 8, 327 Schacht, R., 158 Schäffle, Albert, 238, 241, 252 Scharff, Robert C., 30, 37, 56, 57–8 Scharnhorst, Gary, 289, 294, 296, 299 Scheler, Max, 473, 475, 493 Schelting, Alexander von, 485 Schiller, Friedrich, 310 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 383 Schlick, Moritz, 56 Schluchter, Wolfgang, 361, 552 Schmitt, Carl, 481 Schmoller, Gustav, 210, 238, 241, 309, 311, 431, 433, 437, 452, 513 Schönberg, Arnold, 561 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 308, 566 Schreiner, Olive, 284, 291, 294 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 448–68; assessment of, 464; capitalism, 5, 448, 449, 451, 452, 453–4, 455, 456–64; entrepreneurship, 5,

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index 449, 451, 454, 455, 456, 457–63, 464; impact of, 463–4; intellectual context, 452–4; Parsons’s auditing of seminars, 514; personal history, 449–50; social context, 450–2; theory, 454–63 Schutz, Alfred, 489–510; critique of Parsons, 547–8; impact and assessment, 505–6; intellectual context, 492–4; Jewish descent, 491; life-world theory, 3, 8, 489, 490, 494–504, 505–6; personal history, 489–92; signs and symbols, 8, 489, 494, 497, 501–3; social context, 491–2; theory, 494–504 Schutz, Ilse, 491 Schwalbe, Michael L., 419 science, 9–10; Comte, 31, 35–8, 44–5, 79–80; Durkheim, 9, 237, 251–2, 255, 272; German academics, 472; Greek philosophy, 538; hierarchy of human races, 98; Mannheim, 472, 476, 479; Martineau, 72–3, 75, 81; Marx, 143, 147, 148, 153; Parsons, 519; philosophy of, 56; positivism, 30–1, 33, 34–5, 37–8, 46, 54, 55–6, 79–80; religion, 78; rise of, 318–19; Saint-Simon, 79–80; Schumpeter, 454; Schutz, 503–4; Simmel, 217, 221; Weber, 220–1, 311–12, 319, 354–5, 454, 475–6; Whitehead, 519 scientific fiction, 37 scientific knowledge: Comte 31, 35, 36, 46, 56; Martineau, 72; Schutz, 493; Whitehead, 519 scientific rationalism, Durkheim, 255, 272 scientific socialism, 169, 309 scientific sociology, Parsons, 511 scientism, 35, 36, 49 Sciortino, Giuseppe, 541, 552 Scott, John, 85 Scott, Walter, 54 Scottish Enlightenment, 52 Seaver, Gladys Ricarde, 449 Second World War, 492, 564 secret society, Simmel, 216, 217 secularism, 533 sedentary societies, Ibn Khaldu¯n, 15–17, 21 Seidl, C., 463 Seidman, S., 456

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Seigel, J., 116, 117, 118, 121, 123, 125, 126, 145 self: Adorno, 568; children, 398–401; Du Bois, 441; Hegel, 382; Kant, 381, 403; Mead, 382, 391, 392, 394, 396, 398–404, 407, 415, 416, 417, 418; romantic idealism, 381, 382, 383, 384; Royce, 384; Simmel, 219, 227 self-aggrandizement instinct, 190 self–body relationship, 79, 81, 401–4, 416 self-consciousness: Freud, 402; Hegel, 382, 384; Mead, 390, 396, 401, 402, 404, 418; romantic idealism, 381, 382–4; Simmel, 218, see also consciousness self-criticism, 401 self-development, Simmel, 219 self-esteem, 177, 191, 327 self-interest: Durkheim, 242, 244, 247; Kant, 242; Marx, 118; Parsons, 519, 529; Rousseau, 242; Smith, 127, 187; Veblen, 191 self-orientation, 525, 526 self-preservation, Durkheim, 249 self-reflexivity: Adorno, 565, 569; Mannheim, 480, 481, 483, 486 self-respect, 327 Sellars, Wilfrid, 433 serfs, 131, 134, 140, 141 “sex work,” Gilman, 290 sexual evolution, Gilman, 283, 287, 288, 289, 290 sexual relations, Gilman, 283, 287–8, 289–99 sexual violence, 288 sexuality: Durkheim, 274; Gilman, 283, 289, 294; Simmel, 212, see also heterosexuality sexuo-economic relations, 283, 287–8, 289, 290, 291, 292 Shalin, Dmitri N., 3, 8, 10, 374, 375, 377, 406, 411, 418–19 shareholders, 159, 198 Shaskolsky, Leon, 412 Shaw, George Bernard, 284 Shefner, J., 156 Sherratt, Y., 569 Shibutani, Tamotsu, 412 Shifflett, P.A., 412, 414 Shils, Edward, 485, 522, 526

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Shionoya, Y., 465 Sidgwick, Henry, 169 Siebeck, Paul, 475 signs, Schutz, 8, 489, 501–3 Silvestre de Sacy, Antoine Isaac, 19 Simiand, François, 275 Simmel, Edward, 206 Simmel, Georg, 205–35; ambivalence, 230; art, 221, 227–8; asceticism, 218; conflict, 548; critique of, 228–31; culture, 8, 207, 211–12, 217–25, 470; Du Bois comparison, 430; early writings, 208–10; formalism, 230; impact of, 231–3; influence on Mannheim, 470; interaction, 3, 209–10, 213–18, 221, 227, 232; interpretive understanding (Verstehen), 229, 550; Mead comparison, 410; personal history, 206–7; The Philosophy of Money, 5, 206, 208, 210–13, 215, 218, 229–30, 232; psychologism, 214, 228, 229; religion, 225–8, 230; romantic idealism, 383; sociation, 70, 209, 212, 213–15, 232; stranger, 216–17, 478; subjectivism, 212, 229; transcendence, 226; women, 223–5 Simon, Heinrich, 13, 19, 25 Simonds, A.P., 474, 485–6, 487 Sinclair, Upton, 294 Sinha, Vineeta, 87 Sklair, L., 156 Sklar, Kathryn, 85, 88 Slane, William MacGuckin de, 19 slavery: 19th century Euro-American politics, 98; abolitionists, 68, 69; Du Bois, 438, 440; Gilman, 293–4; Hegel, 120; Martineau’s US study, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 81; Marx, 118; Tocqueville, 97, 98, 101–2; Veblen, 194 Small, Albion, 205, 214, 411 Smelser, Neil, 511, 522, 530–1, 550, 552, 553, 554 Smith, Adam: capitalist property relations, 141; classical economics, 452; commodities, 138; division of labor, 127, 244; influence on Comte, 52; influence on Martineau, 62, 84; “invisible hand,” 3–4, 127, 142; “laws of the market,” 312; liberal individualism, 127, 128; market economies, 127, 187; materialism,

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134; Mercantilist system, 195; Newtonian physics, 189; political economy, 3–4; political messages, 202; specialization, 192; useful goods production, 194 Smith, David Norman, 156 Smith, Dorothy E., 239 Smith, Philip, 276 Smith, Rogers M., 110 sociability: Comte, 35, 40, 42, 44; Simmel, 214; social dynamics, 32 social action: four function paradigm, 526–9, 530, 531, 532, 533, 538, 540–1, 542, 547, 551; Parsons, 511, 516–19, 520, 522–3, 524–9, 540–1, 542–3, 549, 550–1, 554; rulership, 333, 335; Schumpeter, 462; Schutz, 489, 500–1; Weber, 307, 316–21, 329, 331–3, 341–3, 344, 347, 359, 362–3n, 490, 505 social bonds, Durkheim, 244, 245 social capital, Simmel, 217 social change: Adorno, 567; Durkheim, 171, 273; Mead, 401, 406, 407; Parsons, 529, 537, 540, 548–9; social theories, 456; Spencer, 166–71, 172–80; Weber, 313, 347, 359, 360, 548 social class: conflict in Germany, 544; Du Bois, 441, 443; Engels, 131, 132; Gilman, 297; “historic” civilizations, 538; Martineau, 63, 64; Martineau’s US study, 68–9, 70; Marx, 121, 131–3, 318, 335; Parsonian subsystem, 528; Spencer, 166, 167, 177; Tocqueville, 99, 104, 109, see also class struggle; middle class; ruling class; upper class; working class social cohesion see 'as.abiyyah social conduct, Mead, 386, 395–6, 397, 398, 400–1 social contract theory, 52, 179 social control: Comte, 57; Mead, 383, 400–1, 402, 404, 417; Parsons, 520, 523–5, 544 Social Darwinism: Du Bois, 431; Gilman, 292; historical meaning, 309; Spencer, 167, 168, 170, 188; “survival of the fittest,” 314, 431; Weber, 358 social democracies, 116, 125, 152, 377–8, 453 social dynamics: Comte, 32; Parsons, 524; pragmatism, 394; Weberian sociologists, 359

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index social economics, 455 social esteem, 336 social evolution: Durkheim, 251, 272; Marx, 174, 189; neoclassical economists, 189; Parsons, 537–40; Spencer, 9–10, 166–71, 172–80; Veblen, 188–95, see also reform Darwinism social facts: Comte, 31, 37; Durkheim, 3, 209, 252, 255, 257–60, 261, 262, 318, 362n, 392; Simmel, 209, see also facts social formations: Du Bois, 432, 443; Marx, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138; Spencer, 167, 176 Social Gospel movement, 375, 512 social harmony: Comte, 32, 42, 45, 47, 51, 55, 56; Durkheim, 55, 274; Parsons, 548, 549; Smith, 127 social identity: Du Bois, 431, 441; Mead, 402 social imaginaries, 2–10 social morphology, 261 social movements: critical theory, 115, 120; Durkheim, 273, 274; Marx, 154, 155, 159; Parsons, 533; Simmel, 213; Weber, 357 social networks, 357 social ontology, Du Bois, 433, 434 social order: Comte, 6, 32; Durkheim, 6, 244, 245, 246, 250, 259, 260, 262, 268, 273, 274; Martineau, 62, 65, 84; Parsons, 518, 549; symbolic interactionists, 417; Tocqueville, 6, 100, 103; Weber, 360 social psychology: Mead, 374, 380, 395, 415; pragmatism, 386; Simmel, 208 social reality: Adorno, 567, 575, 577; Comte, 36; Durkheim, 236, 254, 256–7; Parsons, 517; Schumpeter, 449; Weber, 316, see also reality social reconstruction: Comte, 46, 57; Mead, 383, 406, 407 social relations: Comte, 34; cybernetic, 533; Durkheim, 247–9, 262; family, 531–2; Martineau, 65; Marx, 3, 4, 125, 126, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 138; Mead, 396; Parsons, 518, 523–4, 525–6, 527, 529, 531–2, 533; Schumpeter, 457; Schutz, 495, 496–7,

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502; Simmel, 216, 231; Tocqueville, 105–6; Weber, 351 social roles see roles social solidarity: Adorno, 567; Comte, 32, 33, 39, 44; Durkheim, 55, 239, 244, 245–7, 250, 265, 269, 273; Maistre, 53; Schumpeter, 452–3, see also 'as.abiyyah social statics, Comte, 32 social stratification: Mannheim, 474; Marxism, 357; Weber, 335–6 social structure: Adorno, 564, 567, 574; capitalism, 322; Du Bois, 429; Durkheim, 243, 245, 261; life-world, 496–7; Martineau, 66, 82; Marx, 132; Mead, 392, 394, 416; Parsons, 524, 533, 551; pragmatism, 416; Schutz, 496, 503, 506; Simmel, 215–16; social action, 317–18; Spencer, 176, 178; Weber, 317–18, 322, 329, 346 social systems: four function paradigm, 526–9, 530, 531, 532, 533, 538, 540–1, 542, 547, 551; Parsons, 518, 520, 522–9, 540, 541 social theory, Schumpeter, 448–9, 456–7, 459, 462, 464 social trust: Protestant sects, 328; Simmel, 217 socialism: Comte, 43, 49, 54; Durkheim, 6, 241–2, 251–4; economics, 452; evangelical Christianity, 375; Gilman, 290, 291, 295, 297; Mannheim, 474, 476; Martineau, 80, 86–7; Marx, 116, 117, 118, 461; Mead, 377; Parsons, 515, 519; Schumpeter, 449, 456, 457, 460, 461–3; Simmel, 213; Spencer, 166, 168, 169; Weber, 354, 463, see also scientific socialism; utopian socialism sociality: Du Bois, 433; Mead, 10, 388, 389, 390, 391, 401, 403, 414–15; Schutz, 493, 497 socialization: Adorno, 563; Durkheim, 256; Marx, 128, 146; Parsons, 531–2, 544; Protestant sects, 327; Schutz, 495, 502; Simmel, 215–16 sociation, Simmel, 70, 209, 212, 213–15, 232 societal community, Parsonian subsystem, 528, 541–2 societal domains, 331–3, 337, 340, 343–4

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socio-economics, 454 sociological theory, 456 sociology: Comte, 3, 31–3, 55, 56, 240; Comte’s law of three stages, 33–5, 47, 56, 76; Durkheim, 3, 236–7, 239–40, 257; Durkheim’s definition, 257; Martineau’s influence, 82–3, 85–6; Mead, 414–15; philosophy relationship, 373; psychology distinction, 214; Schumpeter, 455; Simmel, 205, 213; Spencer, 166, 170; Weber, 321, 356–8, see also cultural sociology; economic sociology; interpretive sociology; macrosociology Socrates, 260 Soeffner, Hans-Georg, 503, 505 Sofsky, W., 232 solidarisme doctrine, 169 solidarity see 'as.abiyyah social solidarity Sombart, Werner, 207, 210, 452, 514 somnambulism, 79 Sorokin, Pitirim, 515, 522 South Yemen, 24 Soviet Union: Cold War, 521, 544–5; Parsons’s critique, 540; planned economy, 515 spatial stratification, life-world, 496 specialization: Comte, 34, 35, 36, 52, 57; Durkheim, 249; Mannheim, 482; Marx, 127, 142, 143; Smith, 192; Spencer, 172, 176; Veblen, 192; Weber, 332, 335 specificity, 525, 526 Spencer, George, 165 Spencer, Herbert, 1, 165–84; biology, 9, 166–71, 172, 173–4, 176, 180; Comte’s influence, 55; division of labor, 63, 179; Du Bois’s criticism, 436; Durkheim’s criticism, 242, 244, 261; evolutionary theory, 9–10, 166–71, 172–80, 389; impact of, 169–70; imperialism, 7, 168; influence on Du Bois, 430, 431; influence on Durkheim, 236, 254; influence on Simmel, 208; Lamarckianism, 170, 171, 173, 188; Martineau, 63, 81; Mead comparison, 389; Parsons comparison, 512; personal history, 165–6; political economy, 4; political institutions, 178–80; Simmel comparison, 207; Social Darwinism, 167, 168, 170, 188;

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society as organism, 171–5; structure and organization of society, 175–8; theory of contract, 518 Spencer, Thomas, 165 Spender, Dale, 85 Spengler, J.J., 188 Spickard, J.V., 19 Spinoza, Baruch, 308 spirit, German historicists, 471 Spykman, Nicholas, 233 Srubar, Ilja, 502 stakeholders society, 159 Stalin, Joseph, 452, 566 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 287, 291 Starr, J., 486 state: coercion, 141; Durkheim, 6, 241–2, 246, 252, 253, 263; entrepreneurial function, 455; German historicists, 471; Germany, 348–50; Hegel’s theory, 117, 118, 119, 153; Martineau, 64; Marx, 118, 119; post-capitalism, 148–53; Weber, 318, 355–6, 357 state formation, Ibn Khaldu¯n, 7, 15–17, 21–3 state intervention, 452, 458 state-centered theory, 357, 358 status: Veblen, 188, 190, 194, 195, 198, 199–200; Weber, 331–2, 333, 335–6, 338, 341–2 Staubmann, H., 552, 553, 555 Stedman Jones, Susan, 241, 257, 277 Stehr, N., 474, 475, 485, 487 Stephens, E.H., 243 Stetson, Charles Walter, 285, 286 Steuermann, Eduard, 561 Stevens, J.D., 243 Stewart, Dugald, 62, 79 stimulus-response schema: Dewey, 385–6; Mead, 389, 395, 396 Stirner, Max, 383 Stocking, George W., Jr., 170, 180, 181 Stolper, H.-D., 463 Stolper, W., 450, 465 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 284 stranger: Schutz, 492; Simmel, 216–17, 478 strategic management, Mannheim, 484 Strauss, Anselm, 411, 419, 505 Strauss, Leo, 179 Strenski, Ivan, 237, 239, 275, 277

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index structure: Parsons, 524, 527, 529, 533; pragmatism, 394; Simmel, 216; Spencer, 174, 176; Weber, 318, 359–60, see also social structure Stryker, Sheldon, 412 students, 546–7 style, Simmel, 212 subject–object dualism see object–subject dualism subjective interpretation, 504 subjective meaning, Weber, 307, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 316–21, 331–3, 358, 359, 360, 362n, 363n, 490, 492, 493, 505 subjectivism: Schutz, 506; Simmel, 212, 229 subjectivity: Gilman, 293; Mead, 388, 392, 393; romantic idealism, 381; Schutz, 490, 493, 505, 506; Simmel, 217, 227; Weber, 490, see also intersubjectivity subsystems, Parsons, 522, 528–9, 530, 531, 534, 535, 540–3, 547, 550 Sugrue, Noreen M., 419 Sugrue, Thomas J., 443 suicide: Durkheim, 65, 261–8; Martineau, 65–6, 82 suicide bombers, 266 Sullivan, Harry Stack, 400 Sumner, William G., 81, 186, 188, 431, 513 superstructure, 133–4 survival of the fittest, 10, 173, 176, 314, 431 suyurghal benefices, 22–3 Swatos, William, 361 Swedberg, Richard, 110, 454, 463, 465 Sydie, Rosalyn, 274 symbolic interactionism, 231, 232; Mead, 3, 411–13, 416–17 symbolic media, Parsons, 535, 536–7, 541, 543, 547, 551 symbolic tools, 397, 402 symbolization, religious, 268 symbols, Schutz, 8, 489, 494, 497, 501–3 Syria, Khaldu¯nian theory, 23–4 system theory: Luhmann, 551; Parsons, 548–9, 550–1 Taine, Hippolyte, 55 Tait, William, 64

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Tamerlane, 19 Tanner, J., 552 Tarde, Gabriel, 55, 262 Taussig, Frank W., 514 Tawney, R.H., 513 Taylor, Charles, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 Taylor, Michael W., 168, 181 Taylor, Paul, 8 Taylor, Steve, 277 technocratic society, 34 technological change, Veblen, 192–5, 196–7, 201 technological determinism, 135 technological progress: Mannheim, 482; Simmel, 212 Tehranian, Majid, 25 teleology, 170–1, 180, 309 thematic relevances, 499 theocentrism, 310 theological stage of history, 33 theology, “historic” civilizations, 538 theoretical rationality, 351, 352, 355 Therborn, Göran, 155, 158, 160 Thiers, Adolphe, 240–1 Thomas, Gillian, 88 Thomas, Jan E., 87 Thomas, W.I., 411, 414, 415 Thompson, J. Arthur, 181 Thompson, Kenneth, 254, 277 Thomson, Dorothy, 88 Thou–I relationship, Schutz, 493 three stages, law of, 33–5, 47, 56, 76 Tiedemann, Rolf, 562 Tilman, Rick, 186, 188, 200, 202 time structure, life-world, 496 Tiryakian, Edward, 236, 238, 239, 277 Tischler, S., 577 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1, 96–114; Algeria study, 7, 96, 97, 98, 107–8; assessment of, 108–9; democracy, 5–6, 96, 97, 98, 99–106, 108–9; Martineau comparison, 6, 7; Martineau’s research, 82; political offices, 96–7; US study, 66, 67, 82, 83–4, 96, 97, 99–105, 106–7, 108–9 Tolman, Edward, 522 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 206, 221, 244–5, 365n, 525 tool-making, Mead, 396 totalitarianism, 460, 461

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trade unions, Durkheim, 273, 274 tradition: Mannheim, 482; Spencer, 179; Veblen, 191 traditional action, 317, 320, 327, 341, 347 traditional rulership, 334, 335, 342, 366n transcendence, Simmel, 226 transcendental idealism, 381, 383, 385 transparency, Simmel, 217 Traugott, Mark, 277 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 208, 243 Trevino, A.J., 552, 553, 555 tribal societies: Durkheim, 247–9; Parsons, 537, 539 Troeltsch, Ernst, 470, 472, 475 Trotter, William Monroe, 427 truth: Adorno, 575; Comte, 36; Du Bois, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 440; Mannheim, 472–3, 477, 478, 485 Tufts, Irene, 378 Tufts, James, 380 Tugendhat, Ernst, 419 Turner, B.S., 552, 553, 554 Turner, Jonathan, 167, 171, 172, 174, 179, 180 Tuttle, Jennifer S., 296 tuyu¯l benefices, 22–3 typification, 499, 505, 549 typological analysis, Martineau, 65 tyranny, Tocqueville, 101–2 unconscious self, Mead, 402, 403, 416 understanding see interpretive understanding (Verstehen) unit act, 517, 523 United States: African Americans, 426–30, 431–2, 435–42, 545–6; American Revolution, 355, 539; class polarization, 157; Cold War, 521, 544–5; colonization of, 106–7, 520; democracy, 99–100; education, 540, 546–7; family relations, 531–2; immigration, 545; indigenous Americans, 106–7; industrialization, 98; inequalities, 545–6; institutionalization, 540; McCarthyism, 534, 544; Martineau’s US study, 62, 63–4, 66–71, 83–4; middle class, 155, 157, 540; New Deal, 116, 451, 515; Parsons’s studies, 532–3, 540, 541–2; positivism, 55; Protestant sects, 326–30, 344; racial

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politics, 429; Reconstruction era, 429, 437; social evolution, 540; Tocqueville’s study, 66, 67, 82, 83–4, 96, 97, 99–105, 106–7, 108–9 universalism: Mannheim, 476–7; Parsons, 525, 526 upper class: travel as leisure activity, 78; Veblen, 186 urban sociology, 435 use values, Marx, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147 Utilitarianism: Durkheim, 242, 244, 258, 516; historical meaning, 309; Martineau, 67; Spencer, 178, 242 utopian socialism, 116, 291, 461 utopian will, Mannheim, 278, 476–7, 480 utopianism, 515 Vaihinger, Hans, 56 value, labor theory of, Marx, 126, 137–41, 142, 143, 144, 147, 195, 253 value-commitments, Parsons, 535–6 value-freedom, Weber, 307, 318–19 value-neutrality, Weber, 316, 319, 357 value-rational action, Weber, 317, 320, 334, 341, 347 value-relevance, Weber, 311, 318–19 values: Adorno, 563, 567, 574; capitalism, 321; Durkheim, 180; Martineau, 67, 69, 70, 82; Marx, 567; Parsons, 272, 516, 518, 532–3; Protestant ethic, 324; Protestantism, 344; Schumpeter, 448; Weber, 180, 307, 310, 311–15, 324, 351–3, 354–7, 359, 475, 532 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 187 Vaux, Clotilde de, 48–9, 50 Veblen, Thorstein, 4–5, 185–204; capital and business enterprise, 195–8; impact and assessment, 200–2; influence on Parsons, 513; instincts, 189–90, 192, 193–4; institutions, 189, 190, 191–2, 193, 194, 195, 197, 202; intellectual context, 188–9; Martineau, 81, 82; personal history, 185–7; social context, 187–8; social evolution, 188–95; status, 188, 190, 194, 195, 198, 199–200 Veeder, William, 285 Verstehen see interpretive understanding (Verstehen)

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index Vetter, Lisa Pace, 83, 84, 85 Victoroff, David, 411, 418 violence: Gilman, 288; Ibn Khaldu¯n, 23; Marx, 132, 141; Spencer, 176 Voegelin, Eric, 490 voluntarism, Du Bois, 433–4 Wa¯fı¯, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Wa¯h.id, 19 wage labor, Marx, 120, 126, 131, 137, 139–40, 142, 143–4 Wagner, Adolph, 238, 241 Wagner, Helmut R., 489, 490, 506–7 Wahhabi movement, 17 Wakeman, Thaddeus, 55 Walford, Geoffrey, 277 Walker, Helen, 514, 515, 521, 554 Wallerstein, I., 156 Walling, William E., 295 Wallon, Henri, 275 Walras, Léon, 452 Walsh, Correa Moylan, 295 Ward, Lester Frank, 55, 288, 289, 295 warfare, 469; Durkheim, 240; Gilman, 290; monotheistic societies, 272; Spencer, 176–7; suicide, 266; Veblen, 194, 197–8, see also First World War; Second World War Warren, John, 83, 84 Warshay, Diana W., 412 Warshay, Leon H., 412 Washington, Booker T., 427, 430 Watergate events, 534 Watier, P., 214 Watson, John, 380, 395, 414 We-relation, Schutz, 495 wealth: Durkheim, 250–1; Martineau’s US study, 69, 70; Marx, 138, 140–1, 144, 146, 147–8, 159; Protestant ethic, 324, 325; Veblen, 188, 194, 195, 199–200 Webb, Beatrice, 55, 81 Webb, Robert K., 86 Webb, Sidney, 55 Weber, Alfred, 471, 472, 473, 474–5, 476, 478, 514 Weber, Helene, 308 Weber, Marianne, 224, 308 Weber, Max, 305–72; action, 306, 314, 315, 331–3, 335, 341–3, 347–8, 359, 383, 492, 493; Adorno’s critique, 566;

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615 assessment of, 358–60; bureaucracies, 124, 334–5, 338, 350, 351, 352–3, 355, 357, 368n; capitalism, 136, 322–4, 325, 326, 329–30, 345–7, 350, 354, 364n, 449, 450, 451; class in America, 69; commitment to theory development, 126; Du Bois comparison, 430; Economic Ethics of the World Religions, 345–8; economics, 322–5, 342, 345–7, 358, 452; Economy and Society, 330–45; ethos, 211; German Sociological Society, 206; goals of sociology, 321; Ibn Khaldu¯n comparison, 20; ideal types, 214, 229, 307, 315, 319–21, 332–41, 343–4, 358, 360, 361n, 362n, 486, 549–50; impact of, 356–8; influence on Frankfurt School, 566; influence on Parsons, 356, 410, 513, 514, 515, 516, 529, 543, 544, 548; influence on Schumpeter, 448, 454; influence on Schutz, 490, 492, 505; intellectual context, 307, 309–15; intellectuals, 338, 479; interpretive understanding (Verstehen), 229, 306, 316–17, 333, 347, 489, 490, 492, 500, 505, 550; iron cage, 220; Mannheim comparison, 475–7; Martineau comparison, 62, 66, 82; Marx comparison, 115; mental illness, 308; methodology, 307, 313, 315–21, 490; morality, 180; Parsons comparison, 551; Parsons’s critique, 517, 518, 548, 549–50; personal history, 307–9; pluralism, 476; political economy, 4, 210; politics, 5, 308–9, 353, 475–6; power, 342–3, 357, 535; Protestant ethic, 7–8, 321–6, 328–9, 364n, 450, 539; rationalization, 45, 366n, 462; religion, 225, 308, 309–10, 312, 321–9, 331, 338–9, 343, 344, 345–8, 351, 357, 518, 533; responsibility, 352, 353, 354–5, 356, 475, 481; Romanticism, 310, 315, 349, 411; Safavid Iran, 22; Schumpeter comparison, 448, 464; science, 220–1, 311–12, 319, 354–5, 454, 475–6; Simmel comparison, 205, 207, 208, 214, 220–1, 222, 225, 229, 230; social change, 313, 347, 359, 360, 548; social context, 307, 348–50; social/cultural sphere fragmentation, 471; sociology of

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Weber, Max (cont’d) civilizations, 315, 345–8; status groups, 538; “steel-hard casing,” 306, 352, 356; subjective meaning, 307, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 316–21, 331–3, 358, 359, 360, 362n, 363n, 490, 492, 493, 505; values, 180, 307, 310, 311–15, 324, 351–3, 354–7, 359, 475, 532 Webern, Anton von, 561 Weinbaum, Alys Eve, 298, 443 Weiner, Gaby Harriet, 82, 85, 88 Welch, Cheryl B., 110 Welch, Joseph, 544 welfare states, 571 Wellmer, A., 560, 570 Wells, H.G., 284 Wells, J., 562 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 443 Wenzel, H., 552 Wernick, Andrew, 57, 58 West, Cornel, 443 Westcott, Mary Fitch, 284 Westminster Review, 73 Westphalen, Baron von, 117 Westphalen, Jenny von, 118 Wheatland, T., 565 Whewell, William, 79, 81 White, Barbara, 285 White, Walter, 430 White, Winston, 532 Whitehead, A.N., 389, 394, 409, 494, 512, 518, 519 widowhood, 267 Wienen, Mark W. Van, 297 Wiener, Norbert, 533 Wieser, Friedrich von, 449 Wiggershaus, Rolf, 160, 561, 570 Wills, Gary, 83 Wilson, Woodrow, 564 Winclawska, Maria S., 83 Winter, S.G., 464 Winthrop, Delba, 84 Wirth, Louis, 214 Witkin, R., 576 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 222 Wobbe, Theresa, 85 Woldring, H., 487 Wolff, Kurt, 233 Wolin, Sheldon, 83, 110

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Wollstonecraft, Mary, 43, 274, 299 woman suffrage movement, 283, 290, 291, 292, 294, 295 women: Comte, 42–4, 49, 54, 73, 77; Du Bois, 441, 443; Durkheim, 274; European conception of, 98–9; French Revolution, 99; Gilman, 283, 287–8, 289–99; inequality, 288, 290; Martineau, 6, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 81, 84; Parsons, 532; Simmel, 223–5; Tocqueville, 84, 103, 104, see also feminism Wood, E.M., 154, 156 Wood, John Cunningham, 202, 465 Woolf, Daniel, 431, 434 Woolf, Virginia, 299 Wordsworth, William, 79, 85 work: Gilman, 290, 291; Martineau’s US study, 69–70; Protestant ethic, 323–5 working class: Comte, 34–5, 42–3, 49, 57; Durkheim, 250, 252–3, 273–4; Engels, 120; Germany, 349, 350, 564; Martineau, 72, 73, 77; Marx, 116, 118, 120, 123, 125, 132, 144, 145–6; Spencer, 169, 177; Weber, 350, see also proletariat working world, life-world, 497 workmanship instinct, 190, 192, 193, 194 world systems theory, 358, 432, 463 world views: Comte, 52; Mannheim, 471, 472, 473–4, 477, 486; Tocqueville, 100, 102; Weber, 307, 312, 314, 351, 359 Worms, René, 55 Wright, E.O., 156 Wright, Earl, 443 Wright, T.R., 55, 58 Wundt, Wilhelm, 238, 398 Yemen, 17 Yui, Kiyomitsu, 552 Zana¯tah tribe, 18, 21 Zeitlin, Irving, 85, 86, 110 Ziemnowicz, C., 465 Žižek, S., 156 Zola, Émile, 55 Zuberi, Tukufu, 443 Zuidervaart, Lambert, 572, 578 Zunz, Olivier, 97

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