Table Of Contentsociological amnesia
classical and contemporary
social Theory
series editor: stjepan g. mestrovic, Texas a&m University, Usa
classical and contemporary social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that
re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating
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Also in the series
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isBn 978-1-4724-5560-4
arendt contra sociology
Theory, society and its science
Philip Walsh
isBn 978-1-4094-3863-2
Being Human in a consumer society
Edited by Alejandro Néstor García Martínez
isBn 978-1-4724-4317-5
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Evangelia Sembou
isBn 978-1-4094-4308-7
sociological amnesia
cross-currents in Disciplinary History
Edited by
alex law
Abertay University, UK
eric royal lyBeck
University of Cambridge, UK
© The editors and contributors 2015
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
sociological amnesia : cross-currents in disciplinary history / [edited] by alex law and
eric royal lybeck.
pages cm. -- (classical and contemporary social theory)
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-1-4724-4234-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- isBn 978-1-4724-4235-2 (ebook)
-- isBn 978-1-4724-4236-9 (epub)
1. sociology--History. i. law, alex. ii. lybeck, eric royal.
Hm435.s635 2015
301--dc23
2015004238
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Printed in the United kingdom by Henry ling limited,
at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Acknowledgements xi
1 Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction 1
Alex Law and Eric Royal Lybeck
2 British Sociology and Raymond Aron 17
Peter Baehr
3 Two Men, Two Books, Many Disciplines: Robert N. Bellah,
Clifford Geertz, and the Making of Iconic Cultural Objects 37
Matteo Bortolini and Andrea Cossu
4 Erich Fromm: Studies in Social Character 57
Kieran Durkin
5 From Literature to Sociology: The Shock of Celine’s Literary
Style and Viola Klein’s Attempt to Understand It (With a Little
Help from Karl Mannheim) 73
E. Stina Lyon
6 Olive Schreiner, Sociology and the Company She Kept 89
Liz Stanley
7 Lucien Goldmann’s Key Sociological Problems and His
Critical Heritage: From the Hidden God to the Hidden Class 105
Bridget Fowler
8 G.D.H. Cole: Sociology, Politics, Empowerment and
‘How to be Socially Good’ 125
Matt Dawson and Charles Masquelier
9 Social Monads, Not Social Facts: Gabriel Tarde’s Tool
for Sociological Analysis 141
Álvaro Santana-Acuña
vi Sociological Amnesia
10 Alasdair MacIntyre’s Lost Sociology 159
Neil Davidson
11 Castoriadis and Social Theory: From Marginalization to
Canonization to Re-radicalization 181
Christos Memos
12 Norbert Elias: Sociological Amnesia and ‘The Most Important
Thinker You Have Never Heard Of’ 197
Stephen Mennell
Index 211
Notes on Contributors
Peter Baehr is Professor of Social Theory at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
His books include Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World (1997), Hannah
Arendt, Totalitarianism and the Social Sciences (2010) and Founders, Classics,
Canons: Modern Disputes over the Origins and Appraisal of Sociology’s Heritage
(2nd edn 2015). Current interests centre on the political writings of Rebecca
West, and the history of exposure practices (denunciation, informing, unmasking,
whistleblowing) since the French Revolution.
Matteo Bortolini is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Padova,
Italy, where he teaches undergraduate classes on the logic of the social sciences.
His research covers the fields of intellectual and artistic success, post-secularized
societies, and Foucauldian technologies of the self from the standpoint of a
strongly culturalist sociology. He is currently writing a sociological biography of
Robert N. Bellah from the standpoint of the sociology of the intellectuals, and a
book on secularization together with the Italian philosopher, Paolo Costa.
Andrea Cossu teaches Cultural Sociology at the University of Trento and the
University of Bologna. He has been a Visiting and Faculty Fellow of the Center
for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. He works mainly in the fields of cultural
and political sociology, with a particular focus on the relationship between
memory and the formation of identities and reputations. He is also the author of
It Ain’t Me Babe: Bob Dylan and the Performance of Authenticity, and his work
has appeared – among other journals – in Memory Studies, Journal of Classical
Sociology, Modern Italy.
Neil Davidson lectures in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He is the
author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), the Deutscher-Prize
winning Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003), How Revolutionary Were
the Bourgeois Revolutions? (2012) and, most recently, Holding Fast to an Image
of the Past (2014). Davidson has also co-edited and contributed to Alasdair
MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (2008), Neoliberal Scotland (2010) and
The Longue Durée of the Far-Right (2014). His work has appeared in a number of
journals including Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Capital and Class,
Historical Materialism, New Left Review and Science and Society.
Matt Dawson is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He has
research interests in social theory, political sociology, normativity, the history of
viii Sociological Amnesia
sociology and asexuality. Matt is the author of Late Modernity, Individualization
and Socialism: An Associational Critique of Neoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan,
2013) and is currently writing a book outlining visions of alternative societies
offered throughout the history of the discipline. He has also published articles on
the work of theorists such as Bauman and Durkheim in a variety of journals.
Kieran Durkin is Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Glasgow. His
research interests are in Social Theory, and in Humanist Marxism, Critical Theory,
and the thought of Erich Fromm in particular. He is the author of The Radical
Humanism of Erich Fromm (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Bridget Fowler is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. Her
main research interests are in social theory, Marxist-feminism, and the sociology
of culture. She remains greatly indebted to the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, on
whom or around whom her own work has been published, including two books
Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (Sage, 1997) and
The Obituary as Collective Memory (Routledge, 2007). Her most recent work
has been an article on the significance of welfare state support to British drama
and how this affects Bourdieu’s arguments about cultural production (‘Pierre
Bourdieu, Social Transformation and 1960s British Drama’, Theory, Culture and
Society, May 2012), a chapter on the relationship of Bourdieu to Marx (‘Bourdieu:
Unorthodox Marxist?’ in S. Susen and B.S. Turner [eds], The Legacy of Pierre
Bourdieu, Anthem, 2011), and an evaluation of Bourdieu’s former collaborator,
and founder of the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique: Boltanski (‘Figures of
Descent from Classical Sociological Theory: Luc Boltanski’, in S. Susen and
B.S.Turner [eds], The Spirit of Luc Boltanski, Anthem, 2014).
Alex Law is Professor of Sociology at Abertay University. His most recent
book, Social Theory for Today (Sage, 2015), examines the historical relationship
between crisis and social theory. He is interested in developing a reflexive
history of sociology as a means of orientation for sociology in the present. His
work develops a relational sociology to account for, amongst other things, the
disciplinary ‘failure’ of Patrick Geddes’ sociology, changing power-balances in
Scotland, and international sport and the national habitus.
Eric Royal Lybeck is an historical sociologist of education at the University of
Cambridge. His dissertation research focuses on the ‘academization process’ and
the institutionalization of the modern research university in Germany and the
United States since 1800. He has also published research in the fields of general
social theory and the history of the social sciences.
Charles Masquelier is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. His
research assumes an interdisciplinary outlook, crossing over the fields of social
theory, political theory and political philosophy, with particular interests in
Notes on Contributors ix
critical theory, social movements, the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole and the
cooperative movement. He has published articles in international journals and a
book entitled Critical Theory and Libertarian Socialism (Bloomsbury).
E. Stina Lyon is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences,
London South Bank University. Her recent research interests lie in the areas of
the history of sociology and social research, inequality and the welfare state. Her
most recent work has been on the contribution to sociology of Viola Klein and the
Swedish social scientists and reformers Alva and Gunnar Myrdal. She is a Fellow
of the Academy of Social Sciences in Britain.
Christos Memos is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Sociology,
University of Abertay, UK. He has previously taught at the Department of
Politics, University of York. His research interests include Critical Social and
Political Theory, the Thought of Cornelius Castoriadis, Marx and Marxism,
Council Communism and Anarchism, Social Movements and Anti-capitalism. He
is the author of Castoriadis and Critical Theory: Crisis, Critique and Radical
Alternatives (Palgrave, 2014).
Stephen Mennell is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University College
Dublin. His books include All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and
France from the Middle Ages to the Present (1985), Norbert Elias: Civilization
and the Human Self-Image (1989), and The American Civilizing Process (2007).
He holds the degrees of Doctor in de Sociale Wetenschappen (Amsterdam) and
Doctor of Letters (Cambridge). He is a member of the board of the Norbert Elias
Foundation, Amsterdam, of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,
the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea.
Álvaro Santana-Acuña is College Fellow in the Department of Sociology at
Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersection between material
culture and processes of valuation. His dissertation, ‘The Making of a National
Cadastre’, studies cadastral mapping and its contribution to the nationalization
of the French territory between 1763 and 1807. He is currently finishing a book
manuscript on the process by which some literary books attain ‘classic’ value.
Liz Stanley is a feminist sociologist and ESRC Professorial Research Fellow
at the University of Edinburgh, where she also holds the established chair
in Sociology. Her interests include all aspects of sociological theorizing and
questions of methodology, while much of her research has involved historical
topics. Recent books include Mourning Becomes: Post/Memory and the
Concentration Camps of the South African War (2006), Documents of Life
Revisited (2013) and The World’s Great Question: Olive Schreiner’s South
African Letters (2014), with a book on archive methodology and another on
‘race’ and social change hovering in the wings.
