Historiography of sociology, nr. 4

Here you go:

What is the logic of ' Classicality' and ' Canonicity'?

The current obsession with Classics or the Canon of sociology won't be understood if taken as an epiphenomena. Actually, this obsession is the cardinal problem within the discipline and directly targets our conception of the history of sociology. If the problems of Classics and Canons are treated as mainstream historiography of social science would us to believe then the end result won't be very different than the self-congratulatory current histories.

It seems most historians of sociology or those who I rather call ' Big Sociologists' a la Habermas, Giddens or Parsons work with an intellectual device which has the following components:

. The turning-point is the Enlightenment

. Farther away from the Enlightenment towards

institutionalization we come we would discover

a turn from Ideology towards Science

. Farther away from Enlightenment towards the

opposite side of institutionalization we get, we would come farther away from, first, science,then, ideology,

and closer to theology and its allies.

If presentism has any historical meaning and applicability, then one can find its most evident appearance in this intellectual device at ' Big Sociologists' Disposal'. The reason, one excludes a Bakunin from the canon and drops a Montesquie ( despite the huge amount of historical excavations and in spite of the lip-services paid by most sociologists his sociologistic credibility, still Montesquie is an in-between phenomena) from the Classical Pantheon is, at least this is what mainstream historiography asserts, the lack of scienticity in their respective work. If the scientific basis of modern social theory is thought to be a defence against the criticisms of the historiography of critical historiography, then it should be borne in mind that history can counter-attack. Early French socialists believed their work to be scientific:

The socialist perspective was universally understood by its

advocates to be the product of scientific inquiry, la science

sociale. This ... was virtually a fanatical viewpoint. Socialism

... was a movement of ideas, a triumph of the human mind ...

The scientific ideas themselves were seen as the product of

man's naturally inventive mind coming to grips with the ... ...

experiences of real life, such as, for example, a thwarted ... ...

Revolution and the depredations of competitive capitalism ...

( Corcoran: 1983, 7).

Marx and the self-styled anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ( 1809-1865) were each thoroughly convinced of the scientific basis of their socialist and anarchist thought respectively. Proudhon can be heard in 140 asserting that

By means of self-instruction and the acquisition of ideas,

man finally acquires the idea of science, - that is, of a system

of knowledge in harmony with the reality of things, and inferred

from observation ... and just as the right of force and the right of

artifice retreat before the steady advance of justice... so the ...

sovereignty of the will yields to the sovereignty of the reason, and

must at last be lost in scientific socialism ( Proudhon: 1970, 276-7).

Note that these were the words of Proudhon, the anarchist ( a tradition which has not a proper place in mainstream historiography and mainstream sociology does not take its theorists as equal in sociological debates), calling for ' scientific socialism', not those of Marx, who was still at University working on his Doctoral thesis at that time.

( Mclellan: 1980, 52) Science has been accessible to all ideologies and one just wonders how ideological the institutionalized sociology is?

As mentioned above the Big Sociologists work with an specific intellectual device which functions as a sieve in order to assess the credibility of all social discourses. The main question, in my view, here is not how this device works but how in the first

place did mainstream sociology get hold on this device? Is this a scientific device which evaluate scientifically our statement about past and present? Or? A categorical ' No' is the answer. The alleged scientific position granted to mainstream sociology was not won as a result of intellectual discussions based on argument and argumentation. The device at the Big Sociologists' disposal is an ideological device established ( not via reasoning alone because the anarchism and utopianism are the best example from within Western paradigm which evidently ridicule the assumed logic of both Classicality and Canonicity) in order to sustain something at the expense of other more important humane things.

One of the major argument against, say, Utopian discourses is its alleged utopianism ( in the sense that theirs is an argument based on nowhere, i.e. outopia) against the more scientific oriented discourse of Classics. Again here, one can note that this classical argument at the disposal of canonicity faults even against its own standards. Because it should be remembered that utopianism is not alien to the whole genre of classical modes of critique. ( D. Held: 1980, and Mike Michael: 1994, 383-404) In other words, to eschew a range of ideas and people behind these ideas by accusing them to be utopians, is neither scientific nor intellectual but a crude mode of presentism. A kind which is not sufficiently equipped to deal with the substantial components of a branch of human thought. Instead of engaging with thought first, the mainstream choose to catogorize first in order to exclude unlawful children from the community of scientists.