Charles Lemert

Sociology after the crisis

After the crisis sociology as theories of lost worlds modernitys riddle and Durkheims lost fathers the end of ideology, really! measured selves in weak worlds structuring differences three ways to think structures and ignore differences measuring the subjects secrets the future of sociologists.

Subjectivity's Limit: The Unsolved Riddle of the Standpoint

Several years ago the American Sociological Associations newsletter Footnotes carried an opinion piece which argued, in effect, that feminist sociology was a fraud and an annoyance. The idea of this little piece was that gender is already an important variable; therefore, a feminist sociology is unnecessary. Positive method could generate the truth of womens social reality. More recently, however, it has been rumored that a once major department of sociology in a prestigious university denied tenure to a sociologist who is known for her contributions to research on womens social reality. The seniors in that department are said to have claimed that a major reason for their decision was that gender is not really a variable. One might find this rumor hard to believe were it not for the hard fact that this same department not too long before had denied tenure to a distinguished female sociologist, for which it was found guilty of sex discrimination. Decide for yourself whether these two events (one quite possibly apocryphal) properly represent the uncertain understanding in sociology of either feminism or womens reality. Many will find both irritating, neither surprising. Taken together, their contradictions notwithstanding, they point to the still-missing feminist revolution in sociology (Stacey and Thore 1985). Dorothy Smiths work over more than a quarter-century illustrates the price sociology has paid for its refusal to take feminism seriously. It is not that Smith has solved problems sociologists cannot. Nor is it that, were her work magically recovered from neglect, sociologists would be instantly converted to feminism. Neither, probably. Rather, Dorothy Smiths recently edited and republished work (Smith 1987, 1990a, 1990b) instructs sociologists on just what they have been missing while missing the revolution. Smith is decidedly a partisan feminist. She is also a tough-minded sociologist-hard on the discipline for its neglect of womens reality, yet devoted enough to sociology not to abandon it. She continues to write sociology while other feminists have given up on it entirely. There are today so many important publishers eager to present work on womens reality that a feminist, once tenured or otherwise established, hardly need be bothered to please those who deny gender is a variable or those who think because it is, all that needs be done has been done. Smith continues to do sociology. Why? One plausible answer is that Dorothy Smiths social theory draws on sociological sources-most especially Marx and ethnomethodology, secondarily Schutz-from which she has fashioned empirical and theoretical studies on a stunning array of topics. In well over 60 articles (many reprinted and translated into several languages) and seven books or collections since the mid-1960s, Smith has written on suicide, the news, Virginia Woolfs suicide, mental illness, education, family life, ethnography, and power relations,

The Might Have Been and Could Be of Religion in Social Theory

Religion may well be the most inscrutable surd of social theory, which began late in the 19th century dismissing the subject. Not even the renewal of interest in religion in the 1960s did much to make religion a respectable topic in social theory. It is possible that social theorys troubles are, in part, due to its refusal to think about religion. Close examination of social theories of Greek religion suggest, for principal example, that religion is perfectly able to thrive alongside the profane provided both are founded on principles of finitude, which in turn may be said to be the foundational axiom of any socially organized religion. The value of a social theory of religion, thus defined, may be seen as a way out of the current controversies over the politics of redistribution and politics of recognition. Any coherent principles of social justice, whether economic or cultural, may only be possible if one begins with the idea that all human arrangements are, first and foremost, limited—that is to say: finite; hence, strictly speaking, religious. Durkheim got this only partly right.

Intellectuals and politics : social theory in a changing world

PART ONE: SOCIAL THEORY AND POLITICAL INTELLECTUALS Making History and Making Theory - Dick Flacks Notes on How Intellectuals Seek Relevance Three Waves of New Class Theories and a Postcript - Ivan Szelenyi and Bill Martin Learning from Feminism - Roslyn Wallach Bologh Social Theory and Intellectual Vitality PART TWO: WORLD POLITICS AND INTELLECTUALS French Intellectuals from Sartre to Soft Ideology - George Ross Political Intellectuals in the Third World - Alex Dupuy The Caribbean Case Eastern Europes Lessons for Critical Intellectuals - Michael Kennedy The Ideology of Intellectuals and the Chinese Student Protest Movement of 1989 - Craig Calhoun PART THREE: SOCIAL THEORY OF POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF THEORY Ideology and Occularcentrism - Martin Jay Is There Anything Behind the Mirrors Tain? Bringing Democracy Back In - Jeffrey Alexander Universalistic Solidarity and the Civil Sphere The Politics of Theory and the Limits of the Academy - Charles Lemert

Literary politics and the Champ of French sociology

ConclusionCertainly it cannot be claimed that French sociology has definitive answers to the problems besetting sociologies everywhere. What can be claimed is that among those sociologies outside the strict and direct domination of American sociology, Frances is one of the most interesting. Having avoided the Scylla of mimicking American empiricism and the Charybdis of philosophical devolution, French sociology stands as a small but coherent body of research, the quality of which is frequently very high. Stylistically, its example of theoretical inventiveness and scope is well worth our while. Substantively, its consideration of such topics as inequality, critique, practice, structural analysis, social change, control, and the State, among others, deserves international attention. Those sociologies, such as the American, which have just lately discovered the full significance of certain of these topics would do well to heed the example of the French who, by virtue of intellectual heritage and political-economic curcumstance, have long seen them as central. If the French do not give answers, they do give questions and, more than this, they offer the witness of their situation-bound solutions. The only positive thing I can, for the moment, think to say of the spread of international capitalism is that it has at least made national circumstances less determinant. As the present fiscal crisis deepens and as the control of national ruling classes gives way to the hegemony of international money interests, whatever differences separate others from the French will become even less important: hence, a reason to transcend sociological provincialism.

Thinking the unthinkable : the riddles of classical social theories

Preface PART I: WHAT IS SOCIAL THEORY? Total Destruction, Bead Lust, and Other Unreasonable Social Things Chapter 1: The Impossible Reasons of Modern Civilizations Chapter 2: Social Theory and Modernitys Unthinkable Chapter 3: Social Violence as the Bread Lust of the Unthinkable Chapter 4: Five Ways to Skin a Cat: Modernitys Five Riddles PART II: UNTHINKABLE SOCIAL THINGS Five Solutions to the Riddle of the Defiant Darkness, 1848-1914 Light and Dark Chapter 5: Revolutionary Reasons: Karl Marx and the Melting of Solid Modernity Chapter 6: Rationalitys Double-Bind: Max Weber and Modernitys Threat to Human Spirit Chapter 7: The Reasonable hope of a Social Bond: Emile Durkheim and Modern Mans Trouble with Conflict Riddles and Realities Chapter 8: Perverse Reasons: Sigmund Freud and the Discontents of Conscious Life Chapter 9: Unreasonable Differences: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Logic of the Feminist Standpoint PART III: THE EXILED OTHERS THINK THE UNTHINKABLE The Classic Solutions Encounter Differences and Possibilities Unthinkable Variations on the Classic Riddles: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Georg Simmel, and Ferdinand de Saussure Chapter 10: Beyond the Double Blind: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Gift of Second-Sight Chapter 11: A Revolutionary Social Bond: Anna Julia Cooper and the Colored Womans Office Chapter 12: The Strange Social Benefits of Conflict: Georg Simmel and Modern Wandering Chapter 13: The Social Structure of Meanings: Ferdinand de Saussure and the Arbitrary Sign Violence, War, and the Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 Chapter 14: The Unfolding of Social Theory in the Unraveling of the Twentieth Century into the Twenty-First Bibliographic Essay and Other Acknowledgments Index About the Author

De-centered analysis

The following text is limited to a study of two important theoretical structures: American ethnomethodology and European structuralism. The claim will be made that the relationship between the two is homologous. That is to say: even though they are functionally different theories, they possess a similar internal structure as well as a similar structural place in their respective theoretical organisms. Briefly stated, the homology is that both employ language as a primary theoretical resource with the result that both eventuate in a criticism of the theoretical phenomenon sociologists know best by the name

Gouldner's theoretical method and reflexive sociology

ConclusionThere is a further, more substantial proof that Gouldner, somewhere in the deep metaphorically of his thought, recognized the digression of his sociolinguistic phase. It turns out that the Culture of Critical Discourse did reappear one more time after its repression in The Two Marxisms. In the book on Marxism and intellectuals, left unpublished at the time of his death, CCD reenters in a crucial chapter “The Origins of Marxist Theory in the New” “Class.” How and where it reappears is most telling.In The Future of Intellectuals one of the most objectivistic sections is Thesis Eleven, “The Alienation of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia.” Here, still in the sociolinguistic phase, Gouldner tried, it seems, to answer the troubling question of his New Class theory. How, if CCD is classicist and thus deeply flawed, is the New Class to be a source of revolutionary change? He offers two answers: one, “CCD is radicalizing partly because... it experiences itself as distant from (and superior to) ordinary languages”; and, two, because intellectuals are structurally blocked with respect to their ascendency to power, status, and the fulfillment of their interests. In other words, the New Class is a source of critique, hence, change because it is alienated, by its discourse, and its structural location. It is crucial to note, however, that Gouldner provides no comprehensive discussion of the nature and effects of that alienation, which is left as a presumably self-evident potential tied to a property (CCD) and a structural effect — two very objectivistic explanations. This theme is picked up in the chapter in the book on Marxism and intellectuals. Here Gouldner provides a full account of alienation. After a very brief discussion of CCD (now presented as dynamically interacting with the second alienating effect, career blockages), Gouldner says: Alienation, then, is a statement about the Subjects failure to have acquired the power and control over his world — including the means of production — inherent in the very notion of the Subject. It is a grievance about the “constraint” to which the Subject has been exposed. Alienation would not be problematic without the premise that man is and should be a Subject, that persons should control their activity.... The aim of such a Subject, then, is not simply self-control and self-development; he also seeks domination over the object world. The Subject reenters, now capitalized, as if to make up for lost time. Even though, in the same place, Gouldner warns of the “humanistic imperialism” of this view of the alienated Subject, it is quite clear that the same process is at work here as in The Two Marxisms. Though presenting a superficially balanced appraisal of the subject in its objective context, of critical, voluntaristic Marxism against deterministic objectivist Marxism, Gouldners prose decidedly favors the revolutionary potential of the Subject. Control over human activity, even domination of the object world, is, virtually, an inherent right of the Subject — a conviction that, Gouldner regrets, “loses salience with the emergence of Scientific Marxism.” It might be too harsh to interpret the sociolinguistic phase as an objectivistic digression. If Gouldners work is taken as a whole, it could, more fairly, be said that his Reflexive Sociology was, among other things, an attempt to overcome the limitations placed on social theory by its weddedness to the classical, subject-object dichotomy. Though, from one point of view, he remained within the terms of that debate, from another he employed his own dichotomizing method in an attempt to transcend it. If he was, himself, and for good reasons, on the side of critique, the subject, and voluntarism, this does not mean that he ignored the object world. Whether or not his solution prevails remains to be seen. But it is evident that a problem which today is debated widely among social theorists, was tackled by Gouldner a full generation before Foucault, Bourdieu, and Giddens took up this same question. Such was Gouldners genius. He left a rich legacy precisely because he trusted “his own individuating impulses, personal experiences, unique aptitudes and all of the fainter powers of apprehension,” and thus could often see what needed to be seen, and say what needed to be said, long before the rest of us.

The canonical limits of Durkheim's first classic

A classic text is not always canonized. Canonical texts are frequently anything but classics. Durkheims Division of Labor in Societyis an instance of the former; his Rules of Sociological Methodof the latter. Both books are based on errors of fact and method. Division of Laborwas so intentionally the classical theory of modern divided societies that Durkheim, son of generations of rabbis, totally misrepresented the facts of Ancient Israel. In Rules,Durkheim was so intent on writing the canonical text of sociologys methods that he stipulated rules that even he (in Suicide) could not use. Durkheim was thus a giant of the sociological past because,not in spite of, his errors. He erred because he dared to think seriously about the moral issues of his time. Hence, the ironic fate of Durkheims sociology—it led in two different directions. From Rulesand Suicidecame modern empirical sociology. From Elementary Formscame all the antimodernists—beginning with Levi-Strauss, and from him, Derrida and the others—who became, among other things, the most articulate critics of the sociology Durkheim helped invent. Such is the genius of classic, if not canonical, authors like Durkheim.

The habits of intellectuals

Nearly twenty years ago I failed my first reading of Fritz Ringers The Decline of the German Mandarins. Or, perhaps, it failed me. I wanted, then, something it could not give. What I sought, I sought for a good but insufficient reason. I wanted a book for use by students in a graduate seminar in social theory. I thought they would warm more to the theories of Weber, Mannheim, and the others, if they knew something of the lives of these exceptional persons.