Classical Sociological Theory (review)

The genre of "theory readers" is interesting and instructive for its history and variety. Though I cannot claim to have a complete library of such books, I do have before me 30 of them, about 22 apparently still in print. I did not, of course, collect these books primarily in order to evaluate this new entry into a congested field. Rather, I have been working on a well-worn project that tries to understand how "the theory canon" or "canons" have been defined, refined, and redefined over time, and this demands that I establish the limits of what informed scholars have understood as constituting teachable theory during particular eras of the discipline's past. ("Teachable" is an important word in this context. Nobody quibbles about Vico's or Hegel's importance to early social theory, but few try to teach them to today's undergraduates.)

The most venerable and probably influential reader was V. F. Calverton's Modern Library volume from 1937, The Making of Society: An Outline of Sociology, dedicated to Harry Elmer Barnes. I have no data from the publisher, but judging from the number of copies in second-hand bookstores nationwide, this book seems to have sold very well in its time. Calverton was a Marxist littérateur whose view of the field was perfect for the depths of the Great Depression. He began his introduction this way: "The United States is the least creative and yet the most inventive of modern countries. No nation has been so barren of scientific originality or theoretical insight and yet at the same time so productive of inventive genius, engineering efficiency, and mechanical skill" — the Japan of a depressed world, it seems. This is hardly the rhetoric of today's theory readers, which normally begin by apologizing for the difficulty of the selections, the editors realizing that today's students suffer grievously, hermeneutically speaking, when compared with those Calverton hoped to reach. His table of contents included 60 selections by 62 authors, ranging from "The Ten Commandments" through Thomas Paine and up to Sidney Hook. It would be fun even today to teach from such texts. Alas, we have been persuaded by hyperspecialization between disciplines to cast off much of what Calverton thought worth excerpting. In fact, when Robert Bierstedt brought out the next iteration in the Modern Library volume, with identical title, he pointed out that whereas Calverton was on the Left, he was committed to "value-freedom"; the year was 1959. Yet Bierstedt began his readings with Plato and Aristotle, included Cicero, Dante, Marsilius, Hobbes, Vico, Smith, Hume, marching forward to Mannheim, Howard P. Becker, and ending with Parsons. Again, a wide-ranging and excellent set of readings for students wanting to know what "the sociological imagination" might look like when viewed with sufficient scope.

What makes the Calhoun et al. volume unique is not so much the readings, which include no surprises, but the personnel who constructed the book. Aside from Calhoun himself, a senior member of the theory guild, the other five co-editors are junior scholars, all of whom recently worked or are working under Calhoun as graduate students, four from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one at New York University. Equally intriguing is the fact that only one of them claims "social theory" to be a primary scholarly interest, according to their online vitae, though some do teach theory at their current job sites. There is no way of knowing, of course, how the labor was divided, nor does it matter very much, other than to observe that the list of authors selected — Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Mead, Simmel, Freud, Du Bois, Mannheim, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Parsons, and Merton — could easily have filled a theory reader with scarcely any changes back when Calhoun (and I) were in graduate school 30 years ago. Only Du Bois is...