To Flourish or Destruct: A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, Failure, and Evil by Christian Smith (review)

In this book, Smith critiques the modern foundations and practice of American sociology and carefully puts forth alternatives for our consideration. His critique and his alternatives are programmatically oriented by critical realist personalism: an analytic approach to social life that starts with persons, not individuals—persons who deontologically possess certain powers and capacities and who are oriented toward natural human goods. Bodily, agentic, or moral goods—which Smith derives thematically as analytic categories by synthesizing decades of multidisciplinary scholarship (chapter 5)—are ends in themselves, and thus they orient human existence of their own accord (chapter 1).

Before explicating his personalist approach to social science, Smith identifies and critiques traditional sociological approaches to human motivation and social action (chapters 2–4). Here, he catalogues well-known and oft-contested schools of thought such as rational action, habitual action, and social situationism. While seasoned listeners are used to hearing rote imports and shortcomings for all these mainline approaches, the exceptional thoroughness, keen versatility, and cogitative originality with which Smith outlines and justifies what these approaches seem to get right and wrong about human social life is uniquely his. A key refrain amid this disciplinary overview is that the notion of personhood, in all its lived complexity, extricates us from a false duality of individuals and society; persons inherently are social beings who are creating society and its structures continually and emergently.

Next, Smith imparts a critical realist personalism of the social sciences (chapters 6–7, conclusion). Guiding this effort is his hard-won assertion that there are—after the conceptual dust settles and is sifted—six analytically basic human goods and interests (I won't reveal them here). These fundamental six are in many ways the conceptual vertebrae (or, perhaps better yet, "sociological 'periodic table'"; 182) of this second project. Like vertebrae, one can hardly imagine a backbone of a good human life without any one of the six; in combination, these six yield human flourishing, or a good life well lived, the summum bonum, which is marked by continual and full realization of one's personhood (206). Though—and this is a crucial point—Smith notes that these periodic elements of humanity usually shouldn't be expected to do any direct or straightforward explanatory work when it comes to social life. After all, Smith asserts, these six combine in dynamic ways, and they are embedded yet further within human capacities, as enabled and constrained by cultural and social structures.

Therefore, conceptual and mechanistic routes from Smith's six periodic elements to widely researched sociological phenomena—such as, let's say, fertility, hiring discrimination, social movement bricolage, and educational attainment—are not direct, nor are they expected to be. This may be quite frustrating for a "typical" sociologist, who, let's say, is a positivist who runs and substantively interprets regression models as a basis for causal interpretations. Yet, at the same time, were mechanisms chaotically labyrinthine, they wouldn't be worth theorizing (or studying scientifically). As Douglas Porpora has argued eloquently and powerfully, something like narrative—not a positivist covering law—may be needed to address the true contingencies and embeddedness of social life. So Smith's ontological stance ends up affirming the real existence of causality and mechanisms, even as their intricate, multilayered, emergent turns and processes lie (well) beyond our current social–scientific grasp.

But Smith's work, and other works of capital-T sociological Theory, must always, I think, grant and craft for themselves a kind of meta-ontological space in order to accomplish Theory. As scientists, and as theorists, we tend to favor particular ontologies as more correct or true or good or complete than others, which is part of why we bother to make Theory in the first place. But here, as always, the identification and defense of meta-ontological grounds for Theory is really itself another conceptual puzzle, and one of rightful...