There has been a dispute in Europe and North America as to whether classic texts should retain their status as part of a canon with which all students should become familiar, or discarded in favour of something more recent and relevant. The vigour of the debate centres on the surprising fact that classics in sociology and other disciplines continue to speak to audiences far removed in time, place and sensibility from the original ones. This book is an exploration of how this ‘speaking’ is possible, of why the classic persists in the face of a sociology that is committed to a transient present and thus largely indifferent to the past. It is through the concept of tradition that an explanation is sought. Tradition is not a concept that is much used in sociology, but if one conceives of it in the more familiar sociological terms of ‘social integration’, but stretched across time, its relevance becomes apparent. Tradition is sometimes thought of as being oppressive; we talk of the dead hand of tradition, the concept developed here, however, is one which emphasises that tradition is frequently contested and preserves ‘difficulty’ as readily as harmony. Its role in social life is considerable as is its importance to an understanding of how the classic works. For a classic to be a classic it will be argued, it must challenge the self-importance of the present and show how much it has in common with the past.
As there are many books about classical sociology and numerous collections of extracts from classic authors, it may be useful to say what this book is not about. It is not a textbook or commentary on, nor eulogy for, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Marx, nor does it offer a new set of interpretations of their work. It does not seek to limit the sociological canon, if there is one, to the famous three. There are plenty of contenders waiting in the wings to join them if they have not done so already: Georg Simmel; George Herbert Mead; Talcott Parsons; W. E. B. Du Bois; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; and to Jurgen Habermas; Zygmunt Bauman; Pierre Bourdieu. Nor does it seek to extend the canon and apply the term ‘classic’ to particular authors that I might favour. To become classic, it will be argued, is a process that involves an author’s ideas subsequently being taken up by others and shown to be productive in myriad different ways; it is not the outcome of special pleading.
Some Background
Behind the writing of Restoring the Classic in Sociology there were two personal factors both concerned with what I perceived as the negative light in which classics were increasingly being regarded. The first became apparent when my duties as a university lecturer involved teaching classical and contemporary social theory to undergraduates. At that time, the mid-1980s, certain authors were distinctly infra dig. Durkheim, amongst the classical authors was regarded as clearly dismissible. His positivism was plain to see in his claim that fundamental to sociology was the principle that social facts must be treated as things external to the individual. His seeming indifference to agency, plus the overriding concern he had for the desirability of a strong externally imposed ‘conscience collective’ smacked of an unjust and overbearing kind of conservatism. This thread of unpopularity worked its way directly towards Talcott Parsons who was regarded in the same dismal light. His description of the structure of social action led seamlessly to an account of the social system as a reified organisation indifferent to social action as the creative source of historical change. Held together by a ubiquitous value system, he assumed the social system was consensual, which closed off of any sense that power in society was unevenly distributed or conflict structurally inherent. Such criticisms were made concrete by feminists who argued that the Parsons’ views of traditional sex-roles in the nuclear family were antiquated and oppressive towards women. Indeed, on one occasion, having run through the gamut of these criticisms to a group of students, one asked me why Parsons was being taught at all, for it seemed no one had a good word to say for him. The question was apt and my only response at the time was to say he was important in terms of the history of sociology; however I was not teaching sociological theory from the standpoint of history. The question made me re-think and re-read the work of Durkheim and Parsons to clarify why these and other classic authors should be taught. In the case of Parsons it was the writings of Jürgen Habermas and later Margaret Archer who, though not uncritical of it, highlighted its importance. What resonated from Archer (1995: 1ff) was the unflinching sociological (re-)assertion of what she called ‘the vexatious fact of society’, proffered as a challenge to those who would magic away the determinacy of the social system. Both she and Habermas showed that an adequate sociology needed to account for the complex, systematic way society’s institutions continue on a daily basis, as well as accounting for the more pliable nature of the lifeworld. What was surprising was that Habermas, notable as being the main contemporary figure in the left-wing tradition of Critical Theory, was explicitly complimentary about Parsons whose work was usually adjudged to be right-wing. He described it as ‘a body of work without equal in its level of abstraction and differentiation, its social-theoretical scope and systematic quality’ (Habermas 1987: 199). In the face of the growing unpopularity of classical sociology it was a timely reminder for me of the worth of the old Critical Theory adage ‘be out of step’. Habermas also noted with approval that Parsons paid his key source authors, Durkheim, Weber, and Vilfredo Pareto, the compliment of treating them as his contemporaries. That is, he regarded their work not in historical terms, not as something to be read off flatly as the product of its historical context, but as something that exceeded its context and was worthy of critical appropriation in the present and for the present. It is a view that underpins the ideas of this book.
The second factor was the general intellectual climate of that time, in particular the emergence of a body of poststructuralist thought in the field of literary theory that was critical of the literary canon. I had a colleague and friend in the English department who felt quite passionately that the literary canon was no more than a hall of fame for outdated ideas and socially repressive attitudes. The aim of literary studies, he argued, should be to disassemble the supra-historical pretensions of the literary classics and to see them instead as examples of how a culture at a particular time saw itself. Literature, it was argued, articulated the dilemmas of a specific moment and should be explained only in those terms. The idea that a text, any text, could have some intrinsic power of transcendence such that it could speak meaningfully to subsequent generations was anathema. If a classic text does appear to have this ‘intrinsic’ ability it is because a particular set of circumstances allowed it to become visible initially, and then be sustained by another complex set of cultural, economic, political, and institutional interests (Tompkins 1985).
The irony was that while I was starting to explore the contemporary value of sociology’s classics, he was intent on turning literary studies into a kind of sociology. Where I was trying to determine the nature of ‘classicity’1 in order to assess the value of the sociological classic to the discipline’s curriculum, he was using sociological concepts such as ideology and cultural capital to expose what he saw as the myth of the literary classic and the empty grandeur of the literary canon. Time appeared to be on his side as the outlooks in the ascendant at that point, both in literary and social theory, were poststructuralism and postmodernism with their emphasis on the discursively constructed nature of reality. Such was the iconoclasm of the key authors in this movement, Jean Baudrillard; Michel Foucault; Jean-Francois Lyotard, that all the certainties of sociology, let alone its classic texts, came under suspicion. Paul Ricoeur (1970: 32ff) had coined the phrase ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ in the mid-1960s to highlight an interpretive outlook where all appearances were to be distrusted and their validity challenged. Though he was referring to the ideas of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, it was a prescient insight for the movement towards poststructuralist and postmodernist thought brought fundamental doubt to the basic concepts used in the human sciences, indeed to the value of conceptual thought altogether. If the role of the classic was to be restored this new nihilistic mood in the world of social theory had to be challenged for it had the implication that a classic, at least in theory, was reader-less, referent-less, and author-less.
Poststructuralism and the Reader-less, Referent-less, Author-less Text
Talcott Parsons was once accused of working with an ‘over-socialised conception of man’ (Wrong 1980), but did nevertheless have a conception of man (sic), albeit one that explained the behaviour of actors as an epiphenomenon of system imperatives. With the arrival of Foucault’s poststructuralism not only did the idea of a system seem to disappear, so did human beings as active agents; both were subsumed under a quilt of interlocking discursive structures. Although Nicos Mouzelis (1995: 47) finds a ‘teleological’ parallel between Foucault’s ‘de-centring of the subject’ and Parsons’ ‘over-socialised’ view, in that both see human behaviour as drawn into meeting the needs of larger entities, a significant difference remains. Foucault’s ‘de-centring’ took Parsons’ ‘over-socialised’ view a decisive step further because under the aegis of discursive structures socialisation became a totally one-way process, filling up and dissolving the individual entirely.
Where ‘social construction’ in the hands of Berger and Luckman (1966) had originally implied that the social world involved a two-way dialectical process between structures and agents, in the hands of Foucault and others social construction meant that everything was socially constructed; ‘societies’, ‘agents’, ‘subjects’ and ‘selves’ had no ontological depth but were constituted through the interplay of contingent discourses. A discursive formation or discourse2 was a way of talking, thinking and acting according to rules that were in line with particular socio-historical arrangements. Objects, ‘things’, including the (human) subject were constituted, defined and classified through these discursive relations. Famously Foucault (1980) described the re-defining of the (human) subject in terms of the changing discourses of discipline and punishment from the ‘sovereign’ to the ‘carceral’, with what we now call the modern reflexive individual emerging from the latter. What this amounted to for the sociologist who is concerned with the identity of human beings was captured by Stuart Hall (1998: 6) as a contingent affair:
In other words the human subject has no self, no identity, no being, except that bequeathed by the subject positions constructed for it by discursive practices. For this disembodied creature identity is like a temporary suit of clothes through which he or she is shackled into the stream of discourse. Insofar as the human subject as a willing, conscious, reflexive individual is effectively dissolved in poststructuralist theory, then classic texts, all texts will have lost their readers as reading presumes a skilled, embodied subject capable of understanding what a text has to say to them about a world beyond them.Identities are points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us. They are the result of a successful articulation or “chaining” of the subject into the flow of discourse.
If embodied humans fared ill under this regime, society and its social institutions fared no better. It fell to Baudrillard (1983: 79ff) as a sociologist3 to signal ‘the end of the social’. In sociology there has been a successful critique of the tendency to reify ‘society’, to make it thing-like and unchangeable, but with Baudrillard the very concept of society is seen to be an empty one. The rapid development and deployment of modern information technology with its capacity to simulate reality has had, he claimed, the effect of de-realising reality. Concepts such as ‘society’ and ‘social relations’ no longer served a purpose because they referred to things that have become unreal. As a result the same institutions that appear to signal ‘society’ now do the opposite:
Sociology has long been aware that its ‘object’, be it society, structured social relations or situated interaction, is problematic in ways that is not true of the observational ...Thus the institutions which have sign-posted the “advance of the social” (urbanization, concentration, production, work, medicine, education, social security, insurance, etc.), including capital, which was undoubtedly the most effective socialization medium of all, could be said to produce and destroy the social in one and the same movement (1983: 79).