Pub Date : 2022-06-22DOI: 10.1177/1468795X221105723
Andrew Smith
This chapter argues for a recognition of the nuanced complexity of Marx’s account of empire. In particular, I argue, that account came to be characterised by: (i) a recognition of the historical centrality of anticolonial resistance; (ii) a provincialisation of his own assessment of capitalism’s development in Western Europe; (iii) an understanding of imperialism as a historically regressive force. In seeking to understand the history of European imperialism as a constitutive feature of the modern world we need recourse to a theory of capitalism. In that respect, as generations of writers from the colonised world have demonstrated, Marx’s analysis remains powerfully salient.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-22DOI: 10.1177/1468795X221105711
B. Turner
Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) is an enigma. In his generation, he was highly influential across a range of issues in sociology including sociological theory, research strategies, and areas of neglect such as the sociology of science. Merton created more concepts and theories than any other sociologist. These include ambivalence, anomie-and-opportunity structure-theory, manifest and latent functions, Matilda effect, Matthew effect, Principle of Cumulative Advantage, role-set, the self-fulfilling prophecy, serendipity, status-set, and unanticipated consequences of purposive action. He also created new areas of research including the sociology of scientific discovery and the prestige of famous scientists. Merton was also at key institutions that had a major impact on sociology such as Columbia University in New York. Merton (1965), his text-book 1949 Social Theory and Social Structure (Merton, 1949) went into many editions. In 1994, Merton became the first sociologist to e awarded the National Medical of Science. Prior to Crothers’s study of Merton, the only full length evaluation was undertaken by Piotr Sztompka (1986) Robert K. Merton. An Intellectual Portrait on the occasion of Merton’s 75th birthday. The Berliner Journal fuer Soziologie published a special collection to celebrate his work 100 years from his birth in 1900 (Mueller et al., 2010). Despite his presence in American sociology, Merton may have laid the foundations for his own demise in his famous view of scientific progress or lack of it. Playing with Newton’s aphorism “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” Merton claimed that any science that continues to stand on the shoulders of its founders is destined to fail. The other irony is that Merton made major contributions to the sociology of scientific success and professional prestige in his theories of serendipity, the Matthew effect and the Principle of Cumulative Advantage. Cynically we might simplify his conclusions by noting that people who are famous continue to be famous even when the reasons for their fame have evaporated. Merton also worked with Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) on audience research for radio and television from which Merton went on to perfect the idea of the focused group interview. Charles Crothers offers insights into the demise of Merton’s influence and provides arguments to restore Merton to modern sociology. Merton became influential to some extent in the shadow of Talcott Parsons and functionalism against which he developed 1105711 JCS0010.1177/1468795X221105711Journal of Classical SociologyBook Review book-review2022
罗伯特·K·默顿（1910–2003）是一个谜。在他那一代人中，他在社会学的一系列问题上都有很高的影响力，包括社会学理论、研究策略和被忽视的领域，如科学社会学。默顿创造了比任何其他社会学家都多的概念和理论。其中包括矛盾心理、失范和机会结构理论、显性和隐性功能、玛蒂尔达效应、马太效应、累积优势原则、角色集、自我实现的预言、偶然性、地位集以及有目的行动的意外后果。他还开创了新的研究领域，包括科学发现的社会学和著名科学家的声望。默顿也在对社会学产生重大影响的关键机构工作，如纽约哥伦比亚大学。默顿（1965），他的教科书《1949年社会理论与社会结构》（默顿，1949）出版了多个版本。1994年，默顿成为第一位获得国家科学医学奖的社会学家。在克罗瑟斯对默顿进行研究之前，唯一的完整评估是由Piotr Sztompka（1986）Robert K.Merton进行的。默顿75岁生日之际的知识分子肖像。Berliner Journal fuer Soziologie出版了一本特别集，以庆祝他1900年出生100周年的作品（Mueller et al.，2010）。尽管默顿参与了美国社会学，但他对科学进步或缺乏科学进步的著名观点可能为自己的灭亡奠定了基础。默顿借用牛顿的格言“如果我看得更远，那就是站在巨人的肩膀上”，声称任何继续站在创始人肩膀上的科学都注定会失败。另一个具有讽刺意味的是，默顿的机缘巧合理论、马太效应和累积优势原理对科学成功和职业声望的社会学做出了重大贡献。讽刺的是，我们可能会简化他的结论，注意到即使成名的原因已经消失，名人仍会继续出名。默顿还与Paul Felix Lazarsfeld（1901–1976）合作，为广播和电视进行受众研究，默顿从中完善了焦点小组采访的理念。查尔斯·克罗瑟斯对默顿影响力的消亡提供了见解，并为默顿恢复现代社会学提供了论据。默顿在塔尔科特·帕森斯和功能主义的阴影下产生了一定程度的影响力，他针对这一阴影发展了1105711 JCS0010.1177/1468795X221105711《古典社会学杂志》书评2022
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Pub Date : 2022-06-22DOI: 10.1177/1468795X221106631
Jean-Pierre Ehrmann
Increasing calls to decolonize the university brought forward by student-led movements have raised the question regarding how to reassess the canon of European social and political thought. This article offers a critical but appreciative reading of Gurminder Bhambra’s and John Holmwood’s Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, based on the first chapter titled “Hobbes to Hegel: Europe and Its Others.” It discusses the strategies of intervention into the canon proposed by the authors and argues for complementary strategies of transformation if decolonizing the canon means to move beyond the myths, metaphors, fictions, and false universals of modern European thought.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-20DOI: 10.1177/1468795X221105713
Matt Dawson
In this piece I explore how Bhambra and Holmwood’s Colonialism and Modern Social Theory implies three different questions that can be asked concerning the connections between colonialism and social theory. With reference to their discussion of Durkheim, I suggest the answers they offer to these possible questions return us to what Kurasawa termed the ‘constitutive paradox’ of Durkheim’s relation to colonialism, namely a mix of political acceptance while also questioning its ideological legitimacy. While exploring Durkheim’s comments on colonialism, race, the state and his own Jewishness, I emphasise the need for a careful historical sociology which reckons with the different possible connections between social theory and colonialism.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-16DOI: 10.1177/1468795X221105421
Gurminder K. Bhambra, J. Holmwood
We are grateful to the editors of the Journal of Classical Sociology for inviting this symposium on our recently published book, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. In it, we call for an engagement with the past of European social thought and its legacies in the present. It is in this spirit that the various contributors to this symposium were approached. They were asked to consider the overall approach, but also to respond to the arguments made in specific chapters. In this way, we sought to encourage a range of responses that would take debates into new areas. We were also conscious that the focus of our book – European social theory (within which we include that of North America), the established canon (with the exception until recently of W.E.B. Du Bois) – would be contentious even among those sympathetic to our general position. In this short introduction, we will set out some aspects of the context in which the book was written. We will respond separately to the contributions in an Afterword. Debates in contemporary sociology have long been conducted through critical engagement with the history of social thought. This has been lamented by many as an indication of immaturity and as a part of a failure of the discipline to ‘take off’ as a properly mature science. Writing in the 1960s, Robert Merton proposed a neat distinction between the ‘history’ and ‘systematics’ of sociological theory (Merton, 1967). The former involved a potentially expansive canon of writers representing main streams of thought, as well as smaller tributaries leading away from what came to be the consolidated consensus of ‘systematic theory’. 1105421 JCS0010.1177/1468795X221105421Journal of Classical SociologyEditorial editorial2022
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Pub Date : 2022-06-09DOI: 10.1177/1468795X221105439
Gurminder K. Bhambra, J. Holmwood
We are pleased by the largely positive and warm responses to our book from the different contributors to this symposium. What is especially welcome is that they represent a variety of ways of taking the debate forward. We had intended our book to offer a reading of European social theory and its widely accepted canon of classics that was both generous and critical. We had not sought to dismiss the tradition out of hand, or to declare it outmoded, precisely because it continues to function as one of the means by which takenfor-granted assumptions are transmitted and reproduced to shape current debates. One response to arguments of the need to ‘decolonize’ the curriculum is to suggest that it is a politicization of the curriculum and a form of ‘cancel culture’. In the UK, this has prompted legislation to ‘guarantee’ academic freedom, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2021–2. This has been accompanied by think tanks monitoring changes to university curricula, in particular concerning how history is taught within universities.1 The argument is that ‘decolonization’ entails the curriculum being diminished and reduced. The evidence of the contributions here is that the opposite is the case. While sociology has been subjected to conservative critiques from the 1970s onwards, history has frequently been a discipline through which the political establishment has burnished its credentials for rule. Yet sociology and history are intertwined in the way in which sociology understands itself as a product of modernity and a discipline that is organized to provide a critique and analysis of modernity. As we have argued, the colonialism that was integral to modernity is largely absent from that scrutiny. In this context, ‘decolonizing’ sociology necessarily means adding to its range of topics, rather than reducing them. It is only once that is done that its consequence for the nature of sociological categories and
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Pub Date : 2022-06-07DOI: 10.1177/1468795x221099207
Elisabeth Anderson
Weber’s critique of modernity centred on how it shaped the habitus – life-conduct and motivations – of the modern individual. I explicate six habitus-types that appear in Weber’s work: the early-modern Puritan Berufsmensch, the modern specialist, the modern industrial worker, the politician, the civil servant and the citizen voter. In doing so, I identify the main characteristics of each type and the causal mechanisms through which Western modernity’s core features – capitalism and bureaucracy – brought them into being. Further, I discuss two habitus-related problems that concerned Weber: the general failure of the modern habitus to achieve ‘personality’; and the mismatch between habitus and occupational role in the Wilhelmine political sphere. I then explain the practical reforms through which Weber hoped to address these problems. Finally, I show how this analysis helps resolve two apparent contradictions which have long perplexed Weber scholars.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-02DOI: 10.1177/1468795x221097001
Esperança Bielsa
This article focusses on Walter Benjamin’s approach to the experience of modernity through his long-term engagement with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. Benjamin translated Baudelaire and produced a theoretical reflection on translation based on this experience in his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Years later, he would place Baudelaire at the centre of his attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modernity in his great unfinished work The Arcades Project. This article brings to light the relationship between translating and interpreting Baudelaire in Benjamin’s work, attempting to recover a systematicity in his thought that escapes from traditional disciplinary borders. In order to do so, it reads Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Task of the Translator’ in light of major issues that can only be clarified with reference to his later adoption of historical materialism and, conversely, it approaches Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire as the writer of modern life as a revision of philosophical concerns that were first approached in his metaphysics of language and translation. A concluding section explores how such an interpretation relates to a materialist physiognomics which puts language and translation at the heart of a critique of modernity.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-27DOI: 10.1177/1468795x221096542
M. Hammersley
In this paper some fundamental criticisms of Max Weber’s conception of the vocation of science are addressed. These well-known criticisms focus on his admission that science cannot demonstrate its own value, and his broader claim that there can be no rational basis for committing oneself to one set of ultimate values as against another. Instead, he insisted that the adoption of such values is necessarily a matter of individual decision. Influential critics have argued that this amounts to relativism, or even nihilism: that, if it were true, neither science nor anything else could have genuine value, all value-judgements would be arbitrary or entirely instrumental (e.g. a matter of self-interest). I will outline Weber’s position, and then examine the arguments of some of his critics: focussing particularly on Midgley and Strauss. This provides the basis for a careful reassessment of Weber’s position, and for some suggestions about how he could respond to these critics. It is argued that fundamental values operate in a dialectical relationship with specific evaluations, and that they arise naturally out of more or less universal features of human beings’ life experience. While this does not provide a compelling rational basis for commitment to those values, even less for prioritising one over another, it tells us why we often feel a need to uphold them. Furthermore, despite the fact that it does not guarantee agreement, rational clarification of these values and their implications, as well as appraisal of their relative significance in particular cases, is possible.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-10DOI: 10.1177/1468795x221092667
Simon Lafontaine
Reconstructing the logic of everyday action between reproduction and invention of forms is a growing concern in contemporary debates on the praxeological foundation of sociology. This article argues for a renewed understanding of action in its contingency and creativity. Building on current developments on the role of projectivity and imagination in the emergence of the new and unexpected in action, it turns to Simmel’s undervalued essay “The Adventure” to examine a style of conduct characterized by deviation from predicable patterns and background assumptions in everyday life. To understand the emergent properties and intrinsic complexity of creative action, one must consider the philosophical discoveries of Simmel concerning the form of adventure in the subjective flow of time. The adventure is elaborated as an action involving curiosity, unfamiliar detours, and a sense of presentness as striking features that benefit insights from his later work on life’s transcendence.
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