Book Review: The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick

Abstract

Several of the towering figures of American sociology in the first decades after the Second World War have in the last years become the subject matter of intense biographical contextualization and serious scholarly debate. Robert Bellah, the great sociologist of religion, is a case in point, as is his long-time Berkeley colleague Philip Selznick, one of the crucial contributors to the sociology of law and organization. In the latter case it may seem difficult to go beyond the magisterial monograph on him published by the Australian legal theorist Martin Krygier in 2012 (see also my review: Joas, 2015). But the present collection makes quite a successful attempt to re-evaluate Selznick’s work in the light of changes—both in society and in the social sciences—that have occurred after the publication of Selznick’s major works or after Krygier’s study. The uninitiated should perhaps begin studying this volume with the two “bookends,” namely chapters 1 and 10. They will encounter a young New York leftist in the late 1930s and early 1940s with a Jewish (non-religious) background, struggling to develop a nonMarxist form of democratic socialism—in close connection with friends whose list reads like a “Who-is-who?” of postwar sociology (Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Alvin Gouldner, among them). As the author of chapter 1 and editor of the volume, the Dutch legal scholar Paul van Seters (p. 8), convincingly argues, however, “the most important source of inspiration and guidance for Selznick personally and for his work in sociology” was none other than the great pragmatist philosopher and public intellectual John Dewey. It was from Dewey that Selznick derived his life-long interest in the combination of a naturalistic understanding of the human mind with a fervent plea for democratic values and a sober understanding of the conditions for their emergence and stability. Krygier coined the term “Hobbesian idealism” for Selznick, to grasp a seemingly paradoxical combination of ambitious ideals with a realism of power; Selznick’s own self-characterization was “humanistic naturalism.” This combination was also constitutive for Selznick’s—and Bellah’s—understanding of the role of the social sciences in the public sphere, and in a particularly illuminating passage Van Seters (pp. 16–18) contrasts their project with Michael Burawoy’s contemporary “public sociology.” Bellah’s and Selznick’s ambition was certainly less restricted to the immediate present 1153831 JCS0010.1177/1468795X231153831Journal of Classical SociologyBook Review research-article2023