Re: Historiography of sociology, nr. 4, suggestions, comments

Hi there,
        In some of my own studies about the 'boundary work' around the 'canon'
in the subsection of political sociology, when I analyzed particular
'uncanonized' and 'canonized' authors, comparatively and historically, I note
the same split.  However, I typically describe it as proponents of applied
modernism (state as beneficient actor, economic reductionism analysis, etc.,
which were institutionalized in what you have been calling the 'canon'), and
opponents/critiques of modernism, which actually began with Hegel when he
changed his mind about the French Revolution, Chateaubriand, Nietzsche, De
Toqueville (particularly his modernist-ignored more critical book about
Democracy in America, Proudhon, Tonnies, Mosca, Marcuse, etc. It's actually a
battle about 'the future' so to speak, instead of focused on the (past)
'Enlightenment', a battle about ongoing applied power's legitimacy or
illegitimacy.
        It was connected with the interest in explaining that what we call
'postmodernism' is closer to a longer linage critique of modernism, instead of
something that was a novel creation of the 1970s-onward. Opposition to
modernism in sociological writings is of a very long and dual lineage with the
biased 'canon' and is just as long. It's hard to get a handle for sociology,
particularly political sociology, I feel, if all one reads is the modernist
canon. It was only widely institutionailzed in curricular choice, that is all.
Plus, even though Simmel is pretty much ignored in the United States 'canon',
to do so in Europe is to show one's ignorance, I would venture. Plus, the
social movements around sociology study in the United States came out of rather
programmatic aspects of 'what do to about big cities,' and while this was the
barb for much socioligical study in the early 1800s in Europe/Britain, the
United States' this was a more naive perspective and a dropping of the issue of
power, which was pretty much swept under the carpet, wedded to a sense of
funtionalism through various pre-Parsons and Parsonian analysis that were only
slighly dented in the United States in the 1950s with C. Wright Mills and
_Community Power Structure_ by Floyd Hunter, and the debate that raged around
pluralism 'vs' senses of gatekeeping/agenda setting power. A nice way to probe
any state's history of sociolgy is by analyzing their attitudes towards the
issue and definition of power, which reveals commonalities as well as
differences. I would suggest discussing particular state's differences in the
way they constructed the issue of sociological study particularly around power,
instead of proclaiming that there is 'one sociology'. I would say that in
different states that different. I offer a more anthropological and political
approach to the issue of canon formation. I would take issue with the idea that
we can only look at 'the texts' as a history of sociology, when any science is
a history of institutional discipline formation, career lines formation,
accredidation and applied uses, etc., which would vary in interesting ways
across different states.

        Anyway:
 
        I tend to trace this bulwark of the 'canon' began to breakdown in the
1960s, I would say (though it can be traced I supposed to many Frankfurt school
writers). People began to call it 'postmodernism' though I feel that the term
postmodernism is very usefully linked to longer historical critiques of
modernism from the 1800s.


Regards,


Mark Whitaker
University of Wisconsin-Madison



At 07:22 PM 3/17/01 +0000, you wrote: 

>
>  
>
> 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 Montesquieu ( 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.
>
>
> ----------
> Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at
> <http://www.hotmail.com>http://www.hotmail.com.