Charles Camic

The Matter of Habit

This article is a historical investigation of the concept of habit in sociology. Beginning with the claim that historians of sociology need to look beyond the now-famous ideas that appear in the foreground of the works of the sociological masters, the article examines the neglected idea of habit to document that this concept was long a staple term in the conceptual vocabulary of Western social theorists and that it continued to function as a major background factor in the substantive writings of both Emile Durkheim and Max Weber-a factor that previous scholarship on Durkheim and Weber has almost completely overlooked. It is shown that Durkheim viewed habit not only as a chief determinant of human action in a great variety of areas but also as one of the principal supports for the moral fabric of modern societies. Similarly, habit is found to be significant in Webers treatment of modern economic and political life, Calvinism and the spirit of capitalism, and the force of traditionalism, which is so central a factor in his framework for comparative-historical analysis. Although the idea of habit was also used extensively in American sociology down to around 1918, in the course of the two decades that followed the concept was purpose fully excised from the conceptual structure of the field. This dramatic change is shown to be a result of the interdisciplinary disputes that surrounded the institutionalization of sociology as an academic.

The Utilitarians Revisited

For generations sociologists have attacked utilitarian social theory as inadequate theoretically. At the same time, their presentist orientation toward sociologys past has prevented a direct examination of the utilitarians in their own right. This paper rejects that orientation and investigates the social theory of the major utilitarians. David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. No alleged characteristic of utilitarianism-from the atomistic, rationalistic model of social action to the failure to solve the problem of order-adduced in the traditional attack upon it is actually found in the work of the utilitarians. The paper then outlines the historical process whereby the prevailing mythology concerning utilitarianism developed. The hallmark of that process is not the cumulative development of social theories but the displacement, in changing cultural and social circumstances, of the concerns of utilitarian social theory-a displacement succesively evident in the work of Spencer, early American social scintists, and Park and climaxing in Parsons The Structure of Social Action. The paper concludes by offering a sociological interpretation of Parsons selective account of utilitarian social theory and by identifying the constricting, but still pervasive, theoretical implications of that account.

Knowledge, Sociology of

This entry examines four broad stages in the development of the sociology of knowledge, the subfield focused on the relationship between various processes and products of human cognition (including ideas, ideologies, scientific theories, religious, philosophical and political doctrines, moral beliefs, mental categories, cultural and organizational discourses, and the forms and practices of everyday knowing) and their sociocultural origins and consequences. Sociological examination of this relationship has involved linking intellectual products and processes to factors such as sociohistorical contexts, material and cultural conditions, modes of production, power relationships, institutional arrangements, internal organizational processes, and various social positions and interests. The stages identified in the development of the subfield are as follows: first, the long period from antiquity to the early twentieth century, during which thinkers moved from frequent general claims about the social bases and effects of various types of ideas to more specific casual statements, seen in Marxs analysis of the material foundations of ideology and in Durkheims studies of the social origins of the categories of human thought; second, the period from 1920 to 1965, when the sociology of knowledge emerged, in Europe and the USA, as a distinct theory-and-research subfield, initially in the writings of Mannheim and Scheler, which accented the subfields epistemological and political implications, and then in the more research-oriented work of Merton and others; third, the period from 1965 to 1985, when the sociology of knowledge largely disappeared as a recognized speciality owing to the rise of new, more empirically focused, subfields and other exogenous factors; and fourth, the period from the mid-1980s to the present, during which the sociology of knowledge has undergone a revival—a revival now pulled in contrary directions by broad-constructionist and narrow-constructionist agendas for the subfields future development.

ALVIN GOULDNER AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF IDEAS: Lessons from Enter Plato

Alvin Gouldners 1965 book Enter Plato is one of the most important contributions ever made to the sociology of ideas. Overshadowed soon after its publication, however, by Gouldners more controversial work, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, the earlier book has suffered neglect. In an effort to correct this situation, we situate Enter Plato against the backdrop of other mid-twentieth-century works in the sociology of knowledge and related areas, arguing that Gouldners study was one of the first sustained responses to Robert K. Mertons call for a sociology of knowledge that would steer a middle course between the abstract, speculative tendencies of the fields European founders and the relatively atheoretical contributions of their American counterparts. We build on this interpretation to offer a contemporary sociological appraisal of Enter Plato, considering its positive and negative lessons for sociologists of knowledge and ideas at the present time.

Habit: History of the Concept

This article examines aspects of the history of the concept of habit in Western social thought. As an expression, the concept of habit has generally referred to a disposition to act as one has previously acted, whether in regard to simple behaviors, more complex forms of conduct, or broader characterological tendencies (habitus). Among social thinkers who have used the concept, habit has generally been applied to recurrent forms of moral, economic, political, and religious conduct insofar as these occur more or less automatically, thus differing from reflective forms of human action that entail the deliberative selection of means and ends by normative standards. While the history of the concept of habit has been roughly coextensive with the entirety of Western intellectual history, four phases are distinguished. The first phase, running from antiquity to the early 1800s, was marked by the frequent discussion of the role and significance of habit by thinkers ranging from Aristotle to the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The second phase, extending from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, was characterized by two contending developments. One of these was the invocation of the concept of habit by a great many European and American social theorists, including Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, and the use of the concept, in tandem with models of reflective action, to analyze human conduct in the social world. The second development in this period was the effort on the part of natural scientists to restrict habit to more elementary human and subhuman behaviors. The third phase, beginning roughly in the late 1910s, saw the successful appropriation of habit, narrowly conceived, by behaviorist psychologists and, in a strong countermovement, the abandonment of the concept by a majority of European and American social thinkers, who for the next half century conceptualized all human conduct exclusively in reflective terms. The fourth phase, extending from the early 1980s to the present time, has witnessed steps by social theorists and empirical researchers to revive and elaborate the concept of habit and to examine the relationship between habitual and reflective forms of human action.

Veblen's Apprenticeship: On the Translation of Gustav Cohn's System der Finanzwissenschaft

Latin receded as the common language of the Republic of Letters as the eighteenth century unfolded, ushering in a new and expanded role for translation. However, international copyright legislation was nonexistent, which offered translators freedom to take liberties with the text. This article examines four women—Emilie du Châtelet, Sophie de Grouchy, Clemence Royer, and Harriet Martineau—who translated political economy between English and French from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, and it argues that these translators saw their work as an opportunity to contribute to the scientific conversation in their own right as they commented on the original texts and made significant and often unacknowledged adjustments to the texts. They invariably appealed to a broader audience than did the original authors, and they used the same tools and techniques as did such popularizers of political economy as Jane Marcet.

Classics in What Sense

They seem the perfect bookends for the social psychologist’s collection of “classics” of the field. Two volumes, nearly identical in shape and weight and exactly a century old in 2008—each professing to usher “social psychology” into the world as they both place the hybrid expression square in their titles but then proceed to stake out the field in divergent ways that presage the rift between the “two social psychologies” which would characterize the 100 years ahead. A more apt start for the Janus-faced enterprise is hard to imagine than this co-appearance of psychologist William McDougall’s An Introduction to Social Psychology, with its hollow treatment of “the social,” and sociologist’s Edward Alsworth Ross’s Social Psychology: An Outline and Source Book, where “the psychological” is a cipher. This historical co-occurrence has long furnished the stuff for tidy origin stories about social psychology as a field. Yet, examining the two books today, the question inevitably arises as to whether they still merit attention for any reason beyond the plain fact of their arrival in the same calendar year under the banner of “social psychology.” For the contemporary reader is hardly surprised to see that—in 1908, as in almost any year since— the psychologist’s social psychology is less sociologically far-reaching than the sociologist’s, or that the sociologist’s approach to social psychology accentuates social forces far more heavily than psychological processes. Beyond confirming notions about the deeply rooted bifurcation of social psychology, however, McDougall’s Introduction and Ross’s Social Psychology initially seem to confound expectations for works that have attained the status of classics. To see why this is so, a few comments about how works from the past achieve classical standing may be helpful. These comments require, however, the caveat that no generalization on this topic fits all cases because “classic” is a highly heterogeneous category. In some academic disciplines, for example, scholars expressly brand classics as classics only to leave them largely unread; scholars in other disciplines eschew the label of classic but have constant recourse, nevertheless, to certain canonical earlier writings. What is more, the works that enter the classic category, through either of these scenarios or others, may range in format from synthetic theoretical treatises (Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marshall’s Principles of Economics), through sharply focused empirical monographs (Durkheim’s Suicide, Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Goffman’s Presentation of Self), down to textbooks for virtual beginners (Gray’s Anatomy, Samuelson’s Economics, Sutherland’s Criminology, Kroeber’s Anthropology)1—textbooks providing the rubric under which McDougall and Ross both issued their books in 1908. Of greater usefulness, however, than brand or format in appraising these two volumes at the present time are some of the different intellectual justifications that lead scholars of a later period—scholars in the social sciences at any rate—to confer classical status upon an earlier treatise, monograph, or textbook. Typically, social scientists will adduce one of three grounds for including a work among the enduring classics of their field. The first is a justification that empirical researchers often invoke and that receives perhaps its clearest expression in Robert Merton’s famous essay “On the History and Systematics of Sociological Theory” (1968). According to this justification, a work from the past commands present-day attention insofar as it informs the contemporary intellectual Classics in What Sense?

Experience and Ideas: Education for Universalism in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

The nature of the relationship between ideas and the social conditions in which they develop has long been among the central concerns of fields like the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of intellectuals, and the social history of ideas. For generations, scholars in these areas have hotly debated the proper way of characterizing the form of this relationship and how it should be conceptualized and studied. With few exceptions, however, there has been an astonishing consensus on one matter: fundamental intellectual reorientations have almost invariably been seen as the product—whether simple or complex—of one or more major social changes. As far as it has gone, this perspective has led to extremely important conclusions, but except among the psychoanalytically inclined, it has remained strangely and regrettably silent on the specific micro-level processes by which macro-level social changes actually translate into changes in ideas.

Book ReviewsAnthony Giddens: The Last Modernist.By Stjepan G. Mestrovic. New York: Routledge, 1998. Pp. x+242.

Over the course of the past 20 years, the writings of Anthony Giddens have emerged as one of the most substantial bodies of work in the area of contemporary sociological theory. The subject of frequent discussion and debate, Giddens’s work has already called forth a sizable literature of exegesis, analysis, and critique. The need for serious further contributions to this literature, however, is widely recognized. Stjepan Mestrovic’s Anthony Giddens: The Last Modernist falls short of meeting this need. Thin in exegesis, tendentious in analysis, and querulous in critique, his scattershot and repetitive commentary adds little to the growing scholarship on Giddens’s work. The reason for this is not hard to seek. Mestrovic is plainly frustrated—frustrated at contemporary sociology as a whole for everything from its overreliance on “the deductive methodologies of the natural sciences” (p. 70), to its valorization of “mainstream journals” (p. 198), to its practice on holding its annual conventions “in luxury hotels in large metropolitan centers” (p. 216). Mestrovic then projects this gnawing frustration onto Giddens, casting him as the “representative of what [is] wrong with modern sociology” (p. 1). Thrown into this unenviable part, Giddens is doomed from the outset of the book. In Mestrovic’s eyes, his writings are not only “shallow,” “arrogant,” “trite and superficial,” “little more than rhetoric, cliches, and slogans” (pp. 11, 173, 194, 205), they are also “symptoms of dissolution and apocalypse,” containing the “potential for a new form of totalitarianism” (pp. 161, 212). Indeed, Mestrovic goes so far as to state, “I maintain that, as of this writing, the West’s complicity in the genocide in Bosnia is the most serious indictment of the goals and values that Giddens holds dear” (p. 213). But whatever one’s opinions about Giddens’s contribution, surely he deserves better than this. Commentators, even critical commentators, have an important obligation to their subjects. As Mestrovic himself recognizes (in the context of still another criticism of Giddens), they must try “to understand [their subjects] with some degree of empathy on [their] own terms” (p. 148). When it comes to the interpretation of Giddens, however, Mestrovic violates this rule, offering “not a sympathetic reading, [but one that] is polemical” (p. 1)—so polemical that Mestrovic fails even to hear some of Giddens’s plainer statements, let alone to understand empathically his overall theory on its own terms (the obvious precondition of any serious criticism). Thus, where Giddens has insisted that social structure is both enabling and constraining, Mestrovic charges him with seeing only enablement (p. 193); where Giddens has drawn freely from other disciplines and welcomed a loosening of sociology’s boundaries, Mestrovic faults him for advocating “neat and tidy divisions between so-

75.00 (cloth);

In this response to comments on her book How Professors Think, Lamont discusses several points raised by discussants. She also contrasts their respective perspectives and the complementarity of their viewpoints. She identifies the questions they leave open, possible ambiguities in interpretation, as well as topics for future research.