Marx's critique

Marx was a critic above all else. His most comfortable intellectual stance was criticism -- most of the subtitles of his works involve the word "critique". He was, of course, a critic of other thinkers --Proudhon, Smith, Bakunin, for example. And here, the key to criticism is the unearthing of indefensible intellectual presuppositions. But even more importantly, he was a critic of the society he observed around him. The key here is to uncover systemic features of a given society that are fundamentally inconsistent with important human values. His earliest social criticism took its aim at the German society he inhabited in the 1830s and 1840s. But it is his critique of modern capitalist society that is the most enduring, and this critique took shape through his observations of the society and economy of Great Britain in the 1850s and 1860s.

I think that Marx's critique of 19th-century capitalist society can be summarized in three words: exploitation, domination, and alienation. These are simple ideas, but they invoke large and somewhat separate theories. The first has to do with economic relations in capitalism, in which one group extracts wealth from the work of another group. The second has to do with political relations in which one group has the power to compel subordination on the part of another group. And the third has to do with consciousness and the social psychology of the members of capitalist society.

You might say that it is the work of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 to address the first set of questions. Capitalism depends on free labor and freedom of property; it depends on a system of free exchange; so how can exploitation take place? The exploitation inherent in slavery or feudalism is apparent in the formal legal and political relations of those regimes: slaves and serfs are compelled to transfer part of the product of their labor to the masters through a juridical regime enforcing inequality. But how does this work in the system of free exchange in capitalism? Marx's answer, briefly, is that the privilege of ownership of the means of production allows owners to set the wage at a level that permits the creation of a profit; this profit is a form of surplus value.

Marx's political writings, and his writings about power within capitalism, are less systematic. But in his writings about French politics and the revolution of 1848 he expresses some of his ideas about how domination works through a political system (Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune). And in Capital he offers a vivid description of the social power wielded by the capitalist (link).

On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.

Marx's writings about alienation are among his earliest writings. The most systematic exposition occurs in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where he describes the social consciousness associated with the "modern" factory system. The worker is separated from the product; he is separated from the process; and he is separated from his own essence, his creative capacity for invention and creative labor. Here are a few representative passages (link).

We proceed from an actual economic fact.

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers[18]; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.[19]
...
All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.
...
Estranged labor turns thus:

(3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to himself, is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Each of these theories highlights a different dimension of the social reality of modern society, in Marx's worldview. Each implies a positive theory of a good society; it is one that emphasizes a kind of human equality, and a positive view of society as an environment that enables the full development of each as a condition of the full development of all. So equality and the fullness of human flourishing are the underlying values.

Finally, there are systemic connections among the three areas. It takes power to sustain an exploitative system; so exploitation and domination are interlinked. A specific group of individuals are privileged by both systems; and Marx has a subtle view of the ways in which the propertied classes wield power through a group of power specialists. Alienation, finally, is a predictable consequence of the circumstances of life created by the social relations of exploitation and domination. There is the alienation of the worker; but there is also the alienation of the consumer and the voter, each carried along by a system of activity that frustrates real human engagement and satisfaction.

Does any of this seem relevant in the contemporary world? The inequalities we see in the current economy certainly suggests the idea of exploitation of someone; wealth is being created and a large proportion of it is flowing to a small privileged group. Power is visibly concentrated in contemporary society -- whether it comes to legislation, regulation, or the influence of the media. This implies a degree of domination on the part of a small segment of society -- a "ruling elite". And few would doubt that there seems to be a growing sense of value-less-ness in contemporary society -- a condition strikingly like what Marx described as alienation. So it certainly seems timely for all of us to sharpen our critical skills and help figure out what we need to do to create the foundations of a more just and more humanly satisfying social order.

This is a short posting about a large subject. Is it possible to argue that these few paragraphs capture the heart of the view? Could Marx have formulated his key ideas in a posting in the New York Herald Tribune? Essentially, I'd like to argue yes. Much of Marx's work takes the form of detailed discovery of the facts that make this case and an unconvincing effort to formulate a mathematical economic theory, the labor theory of value. But what is probably of the greatest value today are the dimensions of social criticism outlined here, not the economic theory.

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Posted in: alienation,CAT_foundations,Marx,power

Dilthey on the human sciences

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) maintained that the human sciences were inherently distinct from the natural sciences in that the former depend on the understanding of meaningful human actions, while the latter depend on causal explanation of physical events. Human life is structured and carried out through meaningful action and symbolic expressions. Dilthey maintains that the intellectual tools of hermeneutics—the interpretation of meaningful texts—are suited to the interpretation of human action and history. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences takes the hermeneutic approach to understanding history a step further by exploring the idea of “objectification” – the specific ways in which persons establish their persona in the world through concrete actions and relations.

Here is how he introduces his approach in The Formation of the Historical World:

The human sciences form an epistemic nexus that strives to attain objectively engaged and objectively valid conceptual cognition of the interconnectedness of lived experiences in the human-historical-social world. The history of the human sciences shows a constant struggle with the difficulties encountered here. ... The investigation of the possibility of such objective conceptual cognition forms the foundation of the human sciences. In the following, I present some contributions to such a foundation. (23)

The human-historical world as it confronts us in the human sciences is not a copy, as it were, of a reality existing outside it. The cognitive process cannot produce such a copy. It is and remains bound to its means of intuiting, of understanding, and of conceptual thinking. Nor do the human sciences want to produce such a copy. Rather, they refer what happens and what has happened -- the unique, the contingent, the momentary -- to a system of value and meaning.  As it progresses, conceptual cognition seeks to penetrate this system ever more deeply. It becomes ever more objective in its grasp, without ever being able to surpass its own essence, namely, it can experience what is only through re-feeling and re-construing, through connecting and separating, through abstract systems and a nexus of concepts. (23-24)

Such conceptual cognition of the processes themselves in which the human sciences develop is at the same time the condition for the understanding of their history.  On that basis, one recognizes the relation of the particular human sciences to the coexistence and sequence of lived experiences upon which they are founded. (24)

And one last point becomes intelligible. The development of the human sciences must be accompanied by a logical-epistemological self-reflection, that is, by the philosophical consciousness of the way in which the intuitive-conceptual system of the human-socio-historical world is formed on the basis of the lived experience of what has happened. (24)

These are dense, difficult paragraphs, and they are worth spending time on unravelling.  What is Dilthey saying here? What is the philosophy of society, history, and cognition that he is expressing?

The first sentence defines two domains: the knowledge system of the human sciences and the dense reality of the social world. Through the knowledge systems of the human sciences we arrive at representations of the social-historical world.  The social-historical world is characterized in terms of the inter-connected lived experience of human beings; this implies communication, interaction, and subjectivity as crucial features of social life.  The knowledge systems of the human sciences are characterized as being "objective" and "conceptual".  The objectivity in question has to do with the fact that there is a reality associated with social life that serves as the object of knowledge; the conceptuality has to do with the fact that it is necessary to arrive at categories in thought in terms of which to organize and represent that reality.

This interpretation of the first sentence sounds rather Lockean or Cartesian; knowledge represents the world.  The first sentence of the second paragraph, however, unsettles that naive realism, because here Dilthey insists upon the distinctness of representation and reality.  Our knowledge of the social world is not a "copy"; it is an abstract representation. This observation seems to be analogous to the obvious point that a verbal description of an apple is not similar to the apple; rather it is a syntactic construction that attributes characteristics to the features of the apple.  The next several sentences in the second paragraph seem to change the subject slightly; Dilthey distinguishes between "copying or representing" and "interpreting and locating in terms of a meaning system." This point is understandable in terms of the hermeneutic method: discover the meaningful relationships among elements of the text (or ensemble of actions).  The "re-feeling and re-construing" seems to be an expression of the method of verstehen: to reconstruct the meaning of an action by placing oneself as fully in the position of the actor as possible.  And the final two sentences seem to suggest a refinement of knowledge through the discovery of finer detail in the interconnections among events and their connections to a system of meaning in the world of lived experience.

There seem to be three high-level features of this conception: first, that human reality is relational and meaningful; second, that the knowledge of human reality involves refined interpretation of actions and interactions in terms of the meanings attributed to them by the actors; and third, that the knowledge enterprise itself is a meaningful activity that requires critical self-reflection. And, finally, there is a respect in which Dilthey's method is empirical rather than idealist. The objectivity that he seeks in these paragraphs seems to have at least in part to do with the idea of evidence-driven discovery.

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,verstehen

What is the philosophy of history?

When philosophers have written about “history”, they have often had different and even incompatible goals in mind. One tradition of philosophers, generally pre-twentieth century and generally from continental Europe, have wanted to contribute to answers to large questions about the nature of history as it presented itself over time as a compound of individuals, actions, nations, and civilizations: Does history have a direction? Does history have meaning? Is there a plan to history? Do civilizations rise and fall? Is materialism or idealism the better framework for understanding the movement of history? G. W. F. Hegel, for example, wanted to discover the underlying rationality within history. This approach to the study of history is often referred to as “speculative” or “substantive.”

A second group of philosophers, also largely continental, were inspired by the strong connections that exist between individual human life and expression, and large collective events and processes. The theory of hermeneutics attempts to provide an intellectual framework for analyzing and interpreting meaningful human expressions – poetry, actions, thoughts, and motives. Hermeneutic philosophers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries extended this approach to efforts to understand large historical events and processes in similar terms. Wilhelm Dilthey was one of the early exponents of the hermeneutic approach to human affairs. Hermeneutic philosophy of history seeks to understand events, movements, and processes in terms of the meanings that they embody and the meaningful relations they bear to other historical events.

Another group of philosophers, often in the twentieth century and often English-speaking, have focused their attention on the nature of historical knowledge rather than the concrete events of history. Analytic philosophers have wanted to clarify the grounds of historical knowledge and explanation. Issues such as the nature of narrative, the role of general laws in historical explanations, and the objectivity or subjectivity of historical judgment have been taken up by Arthur Danto, Patrick Gardner, Carl Hempel, and others. This approach is sometimes referred to as “analytical”; more generally, we might say that it is epistemological and methodological.

New questions have emerged since World War II within the discourse of philosophy about “history” by philosophers, both analytical and continental. These new areas were stimulated, first, by the atrocities of the Holocaust, and the effort to make sense of this horrendous tear in the fabric of modern civilization. How are we to make sense of the Holocaust? How should we remember it? A second source of new thinking about history by contemporary philosophers is the linguistic and semantic turn that many of the human sciences took in the 1970s and 1980s (Rorty, 1967). A cohort of writers in the 1980s and 1990s undertook to approach history from the point of view of narrative and meaning. In some ways this was a return to the hermeneutic approach to human affairs of the nineteenth century; but it was also original in that it brought new thinking from the philosophy of language into the debate.

There is a valid but limited place for metaphysical research in the area of the philosophy of history. Fundamentally, we need to have a clearer specification of the meaning of key concepts that we use in analyzing and describing historical events and structures. Philosophers can help in probing and refining these concepts. These ontological questions are really about our conceptual schemes rather than about substantive historical facts. What presuppositions are we making when we divide history into epochs or regions? Does it make sense to refer to civilizations as a whole? So we need a more explicit theory of historical ontology, and the philosophy of history can help to provide such a theory. What we cannot hope to achieve is an apriori discovery of the reality of history – its meaning, direction, or foundational causes. This is not a limitation of our ability to discover historical truths, but rather a reflection of the fact that there are no general answers to these questions at all. Kant’s critique of substantive metaphysics is decisive here.

As this summary suggests, there are many unanswered questions that philosophers can usefully pose to the discipline and facts of history. For this reason it is timely to consider some new approaches to the philosophy of history. The past decade has seen several contributions that are difficult to classify according to the distinctions provided above. They are analytic but not reductionist; they pay attention to narrative but nonetheless attribute rational warrant to historical accounts; and they are respectful towards the actual practices of gifted historians, rather than assuming that the philosophy of history can proceed as a separate philosophical discourse. Significantly, new contributions to this subject come from philosophers, literary critics, anthropologists, and historians. Perhaps this is a clue for how the field might most productively move forward: by incorporating several philosophical perspectives, by raising new questions, and by reaching across the human sciences as well as philosophy to find some innovative new answers.

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,history,philosophy

A new tool for intellectual history

Google's NGram Viewer is a really amazing new tool for researchers in literature and the humanities (link, link, link, link).  What is perhaps not quite so evident is the power it may have for people interested in the evolution of the social science disciplines.

Basically the concept is a simple one.  The Google Book project has now scanned and OCR'd millions of books published over the past several centuries.  With the announcement of NGram Viewer, Google has shared a vast indexed database of words and phrases included in this full corpus.  And its Viewer tool allows users to provide specific phrases and see a graph of the frequency of that phrase over time (1800-2000 by default).  It is important to bear in mind that the project measures the frequency of the phrase, not the absolute number of occurrences; so as the volume of words increases decade by decade, a phrase with a .005% share has an increasing number of occurrences.

Now consider this: to what extent is it possible to track themes, concepts, and theories in the social sciences by making use of the tool and a well-chosen list of terms or phrases?  For example, the classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, Marx) referred to their science as "political economy," whereas the economists defining the marginalist revolution (Jevons, Walras, Menger) tended to refer to their work as "economics." Classical economists operated under a fairly distinctive set of assumptions, including the labor theory of value, that differed sharply from the assumptions associated with the marginalist revolution and the creation of neoclassical economics.  So is it possible that we can we track the decline of classical economics and the rise of neoclassical economics by tracking "political economy" and "economics"?  Here is what that graph looks like:

The "political economy" line shows a gradually rising trend from 1800 to 1890, and then declines through about 1950.  Only in the 1980s does the term become more popular again -- perhaps corresponding to a resurgence of interest in the classical foundations of economic thought (Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa).  The term "economics" has virtually no use prior to 1880; it then begins to increase in frequency, passing "political economy" in frequency in 1910, and climbing rapidly into the 1980s.  The frequency of "economics" appears to be roughly eight times the frequency of "political economy" by 1980.

So how about other areas of the social sciences?  We might take a look at the development of anthropology using this approach; for example, how have the terms "anthropology" and "ethnography" changed in frequency in books during the past two centuries?  Here's the graph:

Through 1860 both terms are very infrequent.  After 1860, however, "anthropology" takes off, and "ethnography" continues at a low level through 1960, roughly at the time when Geertz and other path-breaking anthropologists began redefining the field in the direction of "local knowledge" or ethnography. From that point on both terms increase in frequency (with a large dip for "anthropology in the 1970s), with anthropology remaining a 3:1 favorite.

So now let's try out a somewhat more general question: how did political theory develop during the twentieth century?  We might probe this question by picking out a few important political theorists and examine the pattern of frequency that they demonstrate throughout the century; perhaps this will tell us something about them individually, as well as something interesting about the waxing and waning of interest in political theory more generally during the period.  Suppose we look at Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke as the central founders of modern political theory.  Here's what that graph looks like:

This is interesting in many ways.  First, individually: Rousseau comes on very strongly in the 1930s, whereas Locke is fairly flat during the period.  Second, comparatively: Locke and Rousseau are consistently more frequent in the book literature than Hobbes -- in spite of our tendency to think of Hobbes as the ultimate founder of modern political theory.  ("Life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, solitary, and short.")  And finally, there is a striking periodicity in the three graphs.  There are long waves of rise and fall of frequency over the century, and even more surprisingly, these waves are fairly closely correlated.  This implies one of two things: either political theory as a field waxed and waned through the century, with the frequency of references to the founders following along; or else this correlation is a symptom of a large artifact of the method itself.  We could test this latter idea by examining a larger set of authorities, including other areas of intellectual work.  So let's look at a final graph, including the three political theorists as well as Darwin, Newton, and Einstein:

Naturally enough, Einstein starts slowly in the early twentieth century, but then begins to rise in frequency after 1918 or so.  He passes Hobbes for good in 1938 or so.  Darwin, surprisingly enough, shows a falling trend through the century, recovering a bit after 1975.  But we were looking for evidence of artifact, and this graph seems to provide it; to the eye, there is a similar periodicity in the frequency of all these authors throughout the century, with a low point in 1945 (the end of World War II), and for all but Newton, another peak around 1965 followed by a trough around 1980.  So it isn't "political theory" that is oscillating in the ocean of words included in the universe of books, but intellectuals, philosophers, and scientists generally.  And this suggests that there's something going on that may have more to do with the measurements than the reality; more investigation is needed.

In short, it seems promising to think that there are some very interesting patterns to be teased out using this tool, and they are patterns that never could have been identified without the databases that Google has created.  A new form of our ability to probe and represent the growth of knowledge is made possible.

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Posted in: CAT_foundations

Granularity

If we think back over the history of sociology and political science since 1800, one thing that is striking is the trend away from the most macro-level frameworks of thought in the direction of more situated and proximate social and political arrangements. There was a tendency among the founders -- Montesquieu, Spenser, Comte, for example -- to pose their questions at the civilizational level. The largest social constructs were identified as worthy of study -- religions, kinds of governments, cultures. By the time we get to writers like Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill in mid-nineteenth century, we have thinkers approaching modern social life with a more limited gaze. They are more interested in particular, differentiating social and political arrangements, and they are interested in the particulars of human behavior within those arrangements. And they are much more interested in the empirical details, rather than general philosophical theories of democracy or religion.

Twentieth century thinking in the social sciences has generally continued this trend. What makes social science "scientific" is rigorous attention to empirical characteristics of the social world.  There is generally even less patience with large philosophical theories of society and history.  A good theory isn't of much interest unless it can be closely tied to particular bodies of empirical observation. It is hard to think of a 20th-century sociologist who took up the Comtean project of comparing the course of civilizations. And there is a growing consensus that the focus of social research needs somehow to capture the behavior of situated actors within socially specific arrangements -- in other words, a refinement of focus towards the more particular arrangements.

A partial exception to this trend is the field of comparative politics (Lichbach and Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure). This is a paradigm that undertakes to discover similarities and differences in large political institutions across settings -- with the implication that there is some reason to expect that "developmental states" will have some important similarities whether in Brazil, Nigeria, or Syria. How does "electoral competition" work in the United States, Mexico, and Poland? Hw do anti-corruption regimes work in Indonesia, Singapore, and Hong Kong? Comparative politics specialists have accepted the need for careful empirical investigation, to be sure, and they are mindful of differences as well as similarities. But the field is more macro than many other areas of contemporary social science.

Another exception seems to be "world systems theory", which locates social-historical analysis at the global level.  But as argued earlier (link), Wallerstein was in fact sensitive to historically specific "granularities" within the world system.  Here's what I concluded there:

But Wallerstein's practice as a sociologist is far more defensible than this language would suggest. He was in fact sensitive to causal heterogeneity, contingency, and variation in the systemic relations he meant to capture -- particularity as well as universality. So he doesn't actually treat the modern world system as if it were analogous to a set of gravitational objects governed by fixed laws of nature.

So we might say that two of the large features of modern social science research paradigms are these: the conviction that a researcher needs to formulate questions that permit careful empirical observation and assessment; and the idea that the scope of research should be tailored to capture social behavior and organization at an intermediate level. We need to formulate research questions that capture enough social behavior to be interesting, while at the same time permitting careful, rigorous empirical investigation and assessment.

This is where the metaphor of granularity comes in. It suggests the idea of a deliberate choice of levels of analysis, a deliberate selection of the zone of focus we choose for the investigation. Go too fine and you lose sight of the structures that will turn out to be interesting. Go too gross and, once again, those structures disappear. Then there is the important idea of heterogeneity -- the idea that stuff is not uniform in structure all the way down (link); so it matters what level we choose to focus on.

The scanning electron microscope image above (center) is illustrative of this fact with regard to the natural world. Carbon appears uniform at a gross level (anthracite), and it is also uniform at an atomic level.  But there is an intermediate level of resolution where there are structures that are very important for the physical properties of the stuff; and we won't find these structures unless we look at this intermediate level.

Something very much like this seems to be true about the social realm as well.  If we ask questions about "citizens" or "consumers", we have characterized the actor in a highly abstract way, with no indication or recognition of the more specific circumstances in which the actor conducts his/her life.  If we provide more institutional, organizational, and motivational context, however -- that is, if we increase the level of resolution in our depiction of the social actor -- we are likely to find more illuminating features of behavior, and we are likely to find discriminating explanations for differences in behavior.

Perhaps an illustration is found in the kinds of social action that Erving Goffman investigates -- the stylized behaviors and interactions of restaurant workers, for example (link). Go too deeply into the personal stories of the persons involved and you lose what is distinctive about the social context of the restaurant. Aggregate facts about service workers everywhere, and once again, the distinctive behaviors disappear.  And, if we abstract too severely from the specifics of the social setting of the restaurant worker -- that is, if we zoom our microscope out to the level of pure rational choice theory -- then we will overlook the differentiating social circumstances that influence behavior in real hotels and restaurants.

We might say that all of this is pointing towards a certain kind of sociological research that focuses on the proximate social settings within which people act and interact. This takes us towards what I call methodological localism (link). But it also conforms to the sociological frameworks of the new institutionalism (link, link) and even with the emerging emphasis on explanations based on social causal mechanisms (link).  

In seeking out the concept of granularity here, I've actually invoked several different contrasts: abstract to concrete, apriori to empirical, and macroscopic to microscopic.  If we put all these together, we might say that a "granular" approach to a social phenomenon is one that achieves a degree of specificity in conceptual definition, a robust degree of empirical detail, and an intermediate analytical and representational perspective that permits discovery of the mid-sized structures that influence the behavior of the whole.

(This issue has come up previously under the topic of "macro, meso, micro" (link).)

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,localism

Weber in America

Lawrence Scaff offered a fascinating preview of his forthcoming book, Max Weber in America, at a sociology seminar in Ann Arbor this week.  Scaff has written extensively on Weber in the past, and this current research is particularly intriguing and stimulating.  The book offers a careful reconstruction of Weber's visit to the United States in 1904, and it then goes on to provide a brilliant interpretation of the "discovery" of Weber in the United States in the 1940s and forward.

Let's start with the obvious: it is startling for those of us who are not Weber experts to learn that Weber spent time in the United States at all.  It's weirdly dissonant for me to imagine this quintessentially German sociologist, wandering the streets of Chicago and the plains of Oklahoma.  What did he make of Chicago 1904?  How did it influence his development as a sociological thinker?

It's even more eye-opening to learn that Weber met W. E. B. Dubois during his visit, and may have shifted some of his later thinking in fairly important ways as a result of his exposure to some of Dubois' ideas about race in America.  (Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk appeared in 1903.)

Scaff also writes quite a bit about the intellectual connections between Weber and William James during this period.  He explores important parallels between The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  This is significant, because the first part of The Protestant Ethic was written and presented for publication just before the trip to America, whereas the second part was written after the visit.

Scaff seems to have done a great job of piecing together archival materials to arrive at a new telling of the story of the trip to America with Marianne.  So this addition to the biography of Weber is of great value all by itself.  (Marianne Weber's biography of Max provides only limited information about the trip; Max Weber.)

But even more important is the effort that Scaff makes to get inside the developing sociological imagination of the thinker.  This is what is most intriguing about the book, and what makes me most eager to read it when it appears in early winter.

Scaff makes a point that I find really intriguing about the way in which "Weber" was constructed as the founding sociologist we now summarize in courses on sociological theory.  This falls generally into the topic of the sociology of knowledge: how did concrete historical and institutional processes influence the construction of "sociology" or "physics"?  Scaff argues that much of our current representation of Weber derives, not from Weber directly, but from the ways in which Weber was appropriated and "re-broadcast" by American sociologists in the 1940s and 1950s, including especially Talcott Parsons. (Ironically, Scaff argues that the "Weber" who became important in German sociology in the 1960s was this American version, not a systematic re-reading and re-thinking of Weber's corpus.  Weber was more or less forgotten in German intellectual circles during the Nazi period.)  So this standardized version of Weber's sociology reduces the rich sociological thought of the thinker over a long career to a few standard theses.

One of Scaff's goals, then, is to "blow up" the sociology expressed across Weber's writings and try to see how the parts might be fitted together in other ways. Can the canonical Weber be interpreted in significantly different and more nuanced ways? This is a particularly interesting and fertile question, and it contributes directly to the important project of trying to rethink the making of modern sociological imagination and frameworks.

Several members of the Ann Arbor seminar commented on the fact that there are some parallels between Weber's interpretation of the "American difference" (chiefly a higher level of civic involvement than in Germany) and the main lines of Tocqueville's observations of America in Democracy in America.  Scaff shared that two things are known about this question -- first, that Weber never refers to Tocqueville anywhere in his corpus; and second, that he read Democracy in America in French at some point, since an edition of the book annotated in his hand is contained in his book collection in Heidelberg.  (Klaus Offe comments on this parallel in Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States, based on the Adorno Lecture that he presented in Frankfurt in 2003.  Here is a limited Google Books view (link).)

This is all really important material for those of us who are interested in the contingent development of modern sociology.  So Scaff's book is one that I'm eagerly anticipating when it appears in January.

Here is the table of contents for the book.

MAX WEBER IN AMERICA

Lawrence A. Scaff

Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction

Part I. The American Journey

Chapter 1 Thoughts about America
Traveling to Progressive America
The Horizons of Thought
A “Spiritualist” Construction of the Modern Economy?

Chapter 2 The Land of Immigrants
Arriving in New York
Church and Sect, Status and Class
Settlements and Urban Space

Chapter 3 Capitalism
The City as Phantasmagori
Hull House, the Stockyards, and the Working Class
Character as Social Capital

Chapter 4 Science and World Culture
The St. Louis Congress: Unity of the Sciences?
The Last Time for a Free and Great Development: American
Exceptionalism?
The Politics of the Arts and Crafts
Gender, Education and Authority

Chapter 5 Remnants of Romanticism
The Lure of the Frontier
The Problems of Indian Territory
Nature, Traditionalism, and the New World
The Significance of the Frontier

Chapter 6 The Color Line
Du Bois and the Study of Race
The Lessons of Tuskegee
Race and Ethnicity, Class and Caste

Chapter 7 Different Ways of Life
Colonial Children
Nothing Remains except Eternal Change
Ecological Interlude
Inner Life and Public World
The Cool Objectivity of Sociation

Chapter 8 The Protestant Ethic
Spirit and World
William James and His Circle
Ideas and Experience

Chapter 9 American Modernity
Strange Contradictions
Becoming American
Cultural Pluralism

Chapter 10 Interpretation of the Experience
The Discourse about America
A Way Out of the Iron Cage?
America in the Work

Part II. The Work in America

Chapter 11 The Discovery of the Author
Author and Audience
Networks of Scholars
Translation History
The Disciplines

Chapter 12 The Creation of the Sacred Text
An American in Heidelberg
Parsons Translates “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism”

Chapter 13 The Invention of the Theory
Gerth and Mills Publish a Weber “Source Book”
Parsons’ “Theory of Social and Economic Organization”
Weber Among the Emigrés
Weberian Sociology and Social Theory
Weber Beyond Weberian Sociology

Appendix I: The Webers’ Itinerary
Appendix II: Selected Correspondence with Americans, 1904-1905
Bibliographic Notes
Index

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,Weber

Merton's sociological imagination

Robert Merton began life as Meyer Schkolnick, son of impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, and he became one of the most influential American sociologists of his generation.  He is most often associated with a couple of phrases that came to embody common knowledge in the social sciences -- "theories of the middle range," "unforeseen consequences," "focus group," and "standing on the shoulders of giants."  But what, precisely, was his conception of sociology as a science?  What sort of knowledge did he believe that sociology should aspire to?  Did he offer anything like a "paradigm" for sociology as a body of research, theory, and explanation?  And what does his work have to offer to today's generation of sociologists?

Craig Calhoun and others organized a conference at Columbia in 2007 involving a group of pathbreaking sociologists in a variety of sub-disciplines to consider the legacy of Merton, and the result is a highly interesting volume of essays, Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociology as Science.  Contributors include Craig Calhoun, Alehandro Portes, Charles Tilly, Robert Sampson, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Viviana Zelizer, Thomas Gieryn, Aaron Panofsky, Alan Sica, Ragnvald, Kallebert, Peter Simonson, Harriet Zuckerman, and Charles Camic, and jointly they consider a very wide range of themes and perspectives from Merton's work.  The volume isn't presented as a festschrift; Gieryn provided just such a collection in 1980 during Merton's life (Science and Social Structure: A Festschrift for Robert K. Merton).  Instead, this volume is conceived as a way of taking the measure of Merton's contributions to sociology as the field continues to develop, and to sound out ways in which Merton's theories and ideas have either flourished or declined in the decades since the most influential ideas were published.  The volume therefore serves very well as an avenue through which to ask the analytical question: what defined Merton's sociological imagination?

In his introduction to the volume, Craig Calhoun presents one important part of Merton's work as being the job of "professionalizing" sociology.  But he also believes that Merton's contributions were substantive and fundamental.  He quotes Merton from "On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range" on the overall purpose of sociology:

Each to his last, and the last of the sociologist is that of lucidly presenting claims to logically interconnected and empirically confirmed propositions about the structure of society and its changes, the behavior of man within that structure and the consequences of that behavior. (14-15)

This is a very focused statement about the nature of sociology; it involves <empirically justified> <theories> about social <structures> and social <behavior>.  It defines a method (empirical, fact-based research), a research product (a body of "logically interconnected statements"), and a subject matter (social structure and behavior).  At the same time, it isn't a wholly informative statement.  What falls under the topic of "social structure"?  Is the theory of organizations a component of a theory of social structure?  How deeply into the intricacies of social psychology should the sociologist go in researching social behavior?  Calhoun makes it clear that he believes that Merton's "philosophy of sociology" becomes more concrete through his efforts to clarify the concepts and theories that sociologists advance.  This is a move from the more abstract to the more concrete -- and very consistent with the idea of "theories of the middle range."  And in fact, much of the value of the volume comes from the efforts made by the contributors to delve more deeply into some specific areas of research and theory formation in which Merton involved himself.

The sociology of science is certainly one of the important areas where Merton made a lasting contribution, and several essays in the volume are devoted to this field.  Thomas Gieryn asks whether Merton formulated a paradigm for the sociology of science -- a good question, since Merton himself was one of the first (along with Thomas Kuhn) to use the word "paradigm" to analyze scientific and intellectual activity.  Gieryn does a very useful job of collating the many things that Merton attributes to his core uses of the concept of paradigm throughout his work from 1968 to 2004 (115):

• assumptions
• problem sets
• problematics
• key concepts
• generalizable concepts
• central concepts
• conceptual apparatus
• logic of procedures procedures of inquiry
• scheme of analysis
• vocabularies 
• postulates
• classification
• ideological imputations
• inference
• substantive findings
• inventory of extant findings
• types of pertinent evidence
• basic propositions
• interpretative schemes
• provisional agreement

Gieryn attempts to codify this list into three areas: "what we know about the social world ... ; how sociologists should study the social world ... ; prototheories that explain in causal fashion why society is the way it is" (115).  (Another way of boiling these elements down would be along these lines: concepts and interpretive schemes; inference and evidence;  broadly accepted substantive findings.)

Gieryn goes on to offer his own account of a paradigm for sociology as a series of oppositions:

1. Science is social and cognitive
2. Science is cooperative and competitive
3. Science is institutionalized and emergent
4. Scientific objects in the world are real and constructed
5. Science is autonomous and embedded
6. Science is universal and local
7. Scientific knowledge is cumulative and ... not (120)

This formulation demonstrates one of the emergent values of a project like this one: inventive sociologists are led to push forward an important question ("What is a paradigm for sociology?") through careful consideration of Merton's work and its strengths and limitations.

An area where Merton is not so well known is in the area of "cultural sociology."  In fact, "culture" seems entirely absent from the short definition quoted above.  Merton is usually read as offering an abstract, structural-functional approach to the social world that pays little attention to cultural factors and meaningful behavior.  Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Viviana Zelizer take issue with this interpretation, however, in their chapters in the volume.  Epstein puts her perspective in these terms: "Many of Merton's key concepts for the analysis of social life centered on the cultural domain, mated with structural variables" (79).  And she thinks that a key part of Merton's approach to sociological thinking invokes a cultural interpretation of social life:

Learning to think like a sociologist, according to Merton, requires going beyond the individual as the unit of analysis, as is the focus of rational-choice theorists or mainstream psychologists today.  The sociologist is required to consider the cultural web in which individuals are embedded, the social context that causes them to make certain choices and to act in concert with others because they share or are persuaded by social conventions that lodge them in institutional frameworks, which in turn circumscribe their options. (81)

Merton's sociology of science is perhaps a particularly clear example of Epstein's point here; Merton invokes the idea of the ethos of science, the norms and values that govern the choices of scientists, as one of the key sociological facts about science as socially embedded activity.  And this ethos is plainly conveyed to scientists through concrete social arrangements of training and education.

Another area that is less familiar is "sociological semantics" and rhetoric -- basically, Merton's interest in tracing some of the metaphors and concepts that have been important in the ways that people have conceived of history and society.  His book, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, traces the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" as a metaphor for the advancement of science.  (He traces the lineage past Isaac Newton's usage of the phrase to Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century.)  Essentially, it is a phrase that captures the idea of cumulation and progress, incorporating and extending the body of knowledge received from prior generations.  Charles Camic notes that Merton often insisted on a sharp delineation between the history of ideas and the sociology of ideas (275).  But Camic argues that Merton actually pursued inquiries that crossed over this line repeatedly in his interest in tracing quotations, concepts, and metaphors through the history of science (278).  His treatment of "serendipity" is a good example; and Camic argues that Merton regarded this kind of analysis as a serious exercise in sociological research.

That Merton himself viewed these writings in light of a larger intellectual project, rather than as occasional amusements, is something he made increasingly explicit, however. (279)

Merton summarized this area of interest under the heading of "Neologisms as Sociological Concepts: History and Analysis" and as a "study in sociological semantics" (279, 280).  Camic quotes Merton as holding that "the frequency and nature of quotations in society [serve] as objects of study in themselves" (283), and he links this kind of inquiry to the study of propaganda and mass persuasion as well.

In short, Merton is a sociologist who repays careful, extensive review, and this volume is a very good start.  It proves the notion that we can not only stand on the shoulders of giants, but can also gain insights that go beyond and beside those predecessors.

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,sociology

Goffman's programme

Erving Goffman has had wide influence on American and French sociology, and I find his work highly interesting.  But it is hard to characterize, because it doesn't fit easily into the standard categories of sociological research and theory.  It studies individuals, but it is not individualist.  And it is evidence-based, but it is not empiricist.  In earlier posts I've characterized it as a particular kind of local knowledge, a sort of ethnography for micro-sociology (link, link).  But there is certainly more to say than that.

One key part of his work can be described as "close observation of individual behavior in social context."  This has two ends -- individual behavior and social context.  And Goffman wants to shed light on both poles of this description.  In particular, he almost always expresses interest in the social norms that surround action -- the expectations and norms through which other people interpret and judge the individual's conduct.

Consider these programmatic statements from several of Goffman's books:

I mean this report to serve as a sort of handbook detailing one sociological perspective from which social life can be studied, especially the kind of social life that is organised within the physical confines of a building or plant.  A set of features will be described which together form a framework that can be applied to any concrete social establishment, be it domestic, industrial, or commercial. (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, preface)

By and large, the psychiatric study of situational improprieties has led to studying the offender rather than the rules and social circles that are offended. Through such studies, however, psychiatrists have inadvertently made us more aware of an important area of social life -- that of behavior inpublic and semipublic places. Although this area has not been recognized as a special domain for sociological inquiry, it perhaps should be, for rules of conduct in streets, parks, restaurants, theaters, shops, dance floors, meeting halls, and other gathering places of any community tell us a great deal about its most diffuse forms of social organization.  Sociology does not provide a ready framework that can order these data, let alone show comparisons and continuities with behavior in private gathering places such as offices, factory floors, living rooms, and kitchens. (Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings, 3-4)

Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. Social settings establish the categories of persons likely to be encountered there. The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate his category and attributes, his 'social identity' – to use a term that is better than 'social status' because personal attributes such as 'honesty' are involved, as well as structural ones, like 'occupation'. (Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 11)

Within the terms, then, of the bad name that the analysis of social reality has, this book presents another analysis of social reality. I try to follow a tradition established by William James in his famous chapter "The Perception of Reality," first published as an article in Mind in 1896.  Instead of asking what reality is, he gave matters a subversive phenomenological twist, italicizing the following question: Under what circumstances do we think things are real?  (Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, 2)

In 1945 Alfred Schutz took up James' theme again in a paper called "On Multiple Realities." ... Schutz's paper ... was brought to the attention of ethnographic sociologists by Harold Garfinkel, who further extended the argument about multiple realities by going on (at least in his early comments) to look for rules which, when followed, allow us to generate a "world" of a given kind. (Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, 5)

I have borrowed extensively from all these sources, claiming really only the bringing of them together.  My perspective is situational, meaning here a concern for what one individual can be alive to at a particular moment, this often involving a few other particular individuals and not necessarily restricted to the mutually monitored arena of a face-to-face gathering. I assume that when individuals attend to any given current situation, they face the question: "What is it that's going on here?" (Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, 8)

The study of face-to-face interaction in natural settings doesn't yet have an adequate name.  Moreover, the analytical boundaries of the field remain unclear.  Somehow, but only somehow, a brief time span is involved, a limited extension in space, and a restriction to those events that must go on to completion once they have begun.... The ultimate behavioral materials are the glances, gestures, positionings, and verbal statements that people continuously feed into the situation, whether intended or not.  These are the external signs of orientation and involvements -- states of mind and body not ordinarily examined with respect to their social organization. (Interaction Ritual - Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, 1)

There are several orienting themes among these statements and within Goffman's work -- frames, we might call them.

• There is the idea of face-to-face behavior, in private, in public, and in everyday life.  
• There is focus on the social setting within which local behavior takes place -- the norms and constraints that are embodied in the group and constraining of the individual.  
• There is emphasis on the particulars of the place -- the factory, the asylum, the hotel.
• There is the social-cognitive situation of the individual -- the way in which he or she answers the question, "What is going on here?" 

So Goffman starts much of his work with fine-grained, detailed observations of behavior -- elements as subtle as the bodily signs of embarrassment in a conversation.  Second, he wants to discover some of the structures of mental processing through which individuals act in social settings -- the frames, scripts, and rituals that guide social perception and action for individuals.  Third, he wants to tease out the social judgments and norms that provide the normative and guiding context for the actor's movements -- the judgments surrounding "saving face," embarrassment, shame, pride, and proper performance.  

There is also a psychiatric dimension of Goffman's work: "abnormal behavior" and the description and contextualization of unexpected patterns of behavior are frequent elements of Goffman's discourse.  For example, in Stigma:

The term stigma and its synonyms conceal a double perspective : does the stigmatized individual assume his differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does he assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? In the first case one deals with the plight of the discredited, in the second with that of the discreditable.  This is an important difference, even though a particular stigmatized individual is likely to have experience with both situations. I will begin with the situation of the discredited and move on to the discreditable but not always separate the two. (14)

And psychiatric examples permeate Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings as well.

The Erving Goffman Archive at UNLV has some very useful materials relevant to Goffman's intellectual project (link). The site is of great value and is worth studying in detail.  Here is a link to one of Goffman's course reading lists from 1970.  The list is titled, "The Ethnography of Symbolic Forms: Frame Analysis," and is dated Fall 1970.  The list is very interesting, and particularly valuable is the first section on "Basic Materials."  This gives us an idea of some of the most important formative influences on Goffman.  Included on the list are several phenomenologists (Husserl, Kockelmans); several ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel, Schutz); a handful of analytic philosophers (David Shwayder, J. L. Austin, Nelson Goodman), and a playwright (Pirandello).

The 1960 reading list is also of interest; link.  This syllabus is titled Communication and Social Contact.  Goffman describes the course in these terms:

This course deals with face to face interactions in natural settings.  Interest will center on the components of the communicative act, the variables and models of interaction analysis, and the natural units of interaction for which a literature is available.

The syllabus breaks the course into a series of topics: Sign Processes, Expressive Behavior, Interaction, Substantive Areas, Conversation, Task Meetings, Two-Person Psychotherapy, Performances, Play-Games, Public Behavior, and Social Occasions.  This list has some of the surprising conjunctions evident in the 1970 list as well; for example, there is a significant amount of attention to game theorists (Von Neumann and Morgenstern, Schelling, Luce and Raiffa), as well as Freudian psychology.

Here is how Pierre Bourdieu distilled Goffman's originality (link):

The work of Erving Goffman is the product of one of the most original and rarest methods of doing sociology -- for example, putting on a doctor's white coat, in order to enter a psychiatric asylum and thus putting oneself at the very site of the infinity of minute interactions which combine to make up social life....  Goffman's achievement was that he introduced sociology to the infinitely small, to the things which the object-less theoreticians and concept-less observers were incapable of seeing and which went unremarked because they were too obvious, like everything which goes without saying.  These entomologist's minutiae were bound to disconcert, even shock, an establishment accustomed to surveying the social world from a more distant and more lofty standpoint. ("Erving Goffman, Discoverer of the Infinitely Small," Theory Culture & Society 2:1 1983, 112)

This is a nice description of Goffman's work.  It leaves out an important dimension, however, namely, the social and contextual side of Goffman's gaze. Goffman was always interested in the nuances of social expectation, norm, and script within particular social settings.  And this makes his work thoroughly sociological.

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,Goffman

Gabriel Tarde's rediscovery

Gabriel Tarde was an important rival to Emile Durkheim on the scene of French sociology in the 1880s and 1890s.  Durkheim essentially won the field, however, and Tarde's reputation diminished for a century. Durkheim's social holism and a search for social laws prevailed, and the sociology of individuals and the methodology of contingency that Tarde had constructed had little influence on the next several generations of sociologists in France.  In the 1990s, however, several important strands of thought were receptive to a rediscovery of Tarde's thinking; Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour each found elements in Tarde's thinking that provided intellectual antecedent and support for ideas of their own.  In the past fifteen years or so there has been a significant revival of interest in Tarde.

An important volume edited by Matei Candea represents the most extensive reconsideration of Tarde's views of sociology to date.  Contributors to The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments provide highly provocative and stimulating discussions of various aspects of Tarde's philosophy of sociology, and the book represents an important contribution to new thinking about the social sciences.  The introductory essay by Candea is very useful and is available for free as a sample of the Kindle edition.  Bruno Latour's contribution to the volume is available on Latour's website (link), as are two short pieces on Latour's thoughts about Tarde (link, link).

Several aspects of Tarde's philosophy of sociology stand out.  First is his rejection of Durkheim's holism.  He was consistently critical of the idea of finished social wholes; instead, he recommended a focus on the components of social interactions and practices.  This might be understood as a focus on the individual and his/her psychological properties (methodological individualism); but it also might be seen as a more radical disassembly of the social into sub- and supra-individual constructions.  This is where Latour finds inspiration; he suggests that Tarde is an intellectual precursor to Actor Network Theory (ANT), which does not give ontological priority to either individuals or social wholes.

Another important feature of Tarde's philosophy of the social is his emphasis on heterogeneity and contingency within the social.  He revels in the fact of variation among and within social processes, and he emphasizes the deep degree of contingency that characterizes social outcomes.  Here is one example in Social Laws: "Science is the co-ordination of phenomena regarded from the side of their repetitions.  But this does not mean that differentiation is not an essential mode of procedure for the scientific mind" (8).

The contributors to the Candea volume illustrate this deep contingency in a different way; they ask the question of how the science of sociology might have developed differently if Tarde's views had taken deeper root.  Here is how Candea puts this point in the opening words of the volume:

Some theorists have intersected with history in such an odd way that they seem to require an introduction in the form of a thought experiment: What if Durkheimian sociology had had, from the very beginning, a thoughtful and vocal opponent; one who queries the 'thingness' of the social and the holistic, bounded nature of societies and human groups; one who accused Durkheim of disregarding the contingency of history in the search for scientific 'structure'; one who proposed a radical reversal of the organic analogy, claiming that organisms are societies and not the other way around; one who foregrounded imitations, oppositions and inventions where Durkheim saw conformism to a rule as the key component of the social; one who had already found a way to dissolve the linked contrasts between individual and society, micro and macro, agency and structure, freedom and constraint -- Durkheim's main (and for many, troublesome) legacy to twentieth-century social science?

And, of course, that critic is none other than Tarde.

Here are a few of Tarde's ideas as expressed in his 1897 volume, Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (translated into English in 1899).

Thus science consists in viewing any fact whatsoever under three aspects, corresponding, respectively, to the repetitions, oppositions, and adaptations which it contains, and which are obscured by a mass of variations, dissymmetries, and disharmonies. The relation of cause to effect, in fact, is not the only element which properly constitutes scientific knowledge. (9)

Here is a schematic philosophy of science -- an account of what sociology consists of.  Tarde emphasizes the discovery of both regularities and variations:

These reflections were needed in order to show what sociology must be, if it is to deserve the name of science, and along what paths sociologists must guide its course, if they wish to see it assume, unchallenged, its proper rank. Like every other science, it will attain this only when it has gained, and is conscious of possessing, its own domain of repetitions, its own domain of oppositions, and its own domain of adaptations, each characteristic of itself and belonging wholly to itself. Sociology can only make progress when it succeeds in substituting true repetitions, oppositions, and harmonies for false ones, as all the other sciences have done before it. And in place of repetitions, oppositions, and adaptations that are true but vague, it must find others that become ever more exact as it advances. (10)

And on a central tenet of methodological individualism--the idea of the strict determination of the whole as a consequence of the characteristics of indistinguishable individual components:

I believe that none of the above-mentioned differences, including even the mere variety of arrangement and random distribution of matter throughout space, can be explained on the theory of exactly similar atomic elements—an hypothesis so dear to chemists, who are in this respect the real metaphysicians; I do not see that Spencer’s so-called law of the instability of the homogeneous explains anything. And hence, I believe that the only means of explaining this exuberant growth of individual differences upon the surface of phenomena is by assuming that they spring from a motley array of elements, each possessing its own individual characteristics. (15)

And rather than seeking out high-level generalizations and regularities about the social world, Tarde advocates for more specific and granular studies:

Fortunately, screened and sheltered from view by these ambitious generalizations, certain less venturesome workers strove, with greater success, to formulate other more substantial laws concerning the details. Among these should be mentioned the linguists, the mythologists, and above all the economists. These specialists in sociological fields discovered various interesting relations among successive and simultaneous facts, which recurred constantly within the limits of the narrow domain they were examining. (18)

Tarde explicitly rejects John Stuart Mill's particular version of methodological individualism:

In some quarters the feeling has existed that we must look to psychology for any general explanation of the laws and pseudo-laws of economics, language, mythology, etc. No man held to this view with greater force and clearness than John Stuart Mill. At the end of his Logic he represents sociology as a species of applied psychology. Unfortunately he did not analyze the concept carefully enough; and the psychology to which he looked for the key to social phenomena was merely individual psychology—the branch which studies the interrelations of impressions and imagery in a single mind, believing that everything within this domain can be explained according to the laws of association of these elements. Thus conceived, sociology became a sort of enlarged and externalized English associationism, and was in a fair way to lose its originality. (19)

And here is an explicit rejection of a particular kind of Durkheimian social fact -- the idea of a national character:

Sooner or later, one must open his eyes to the evidence, and recognize that the genius of a people or race, instead of being a factor superior to and dominating the characters of the individuals (who have been considered its offshoots and ephemeral manifestations) is simply a convenient label, or impersonal synthesis, of these individual characteristics; the latter alone are real, effective, and ever in activity; they are in a state of continual fermentation in the bosom of every society, thanks to the examples borrowed and exchanged with neighboring societies to their great mutual profit. (27)

Here is how Bruno Latour summarizes his appreciation of Tarde in "Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social" (link):

And yet, I want to argue in this chapter, through a close reading of his recently republished most daring book, Monadologie et sociologie (M&S), that Tarde introduced into social theory the two main arguments which ANT has tried, somewhat vainly, to champion:

a) the nature and society divide is irrelevant for understanding the world of human interactions ;

b) the micro/macro distinction stifle any attempt at understanding how society is being generated.

In other words, I want to make a little thought experiment and imagine what the field of social sciences would have become in the last century, had Tarde's insights been turned into a science instead of Durkheim's. Or may be it is that Tarde, a truly daring but also, I have to admit, totally undisciplined mind, needed a rather different century so as to be finally understood. 

Latour ends his contribution to the Candea volume with an intriguing section called "Digital traceability ... Tarde's vindication?".  The key idea here is that the twenty-first century permits social scientists to go decisively and transparently beyond the primitive aggregative statistics that underlay Durkheim's approach to the "social whole."  Tarde, and Latour, look at Durkheim's social whole as no more than a crude statistical aggregation of data; and, according to Latour, Tarde had envisioned a time when the statistics and quantitative data deriving from social behavior would be transparent and visible.  This, Latour suggests, is becoming true.  Today we can look at social data at a full range of levels of aggregation, moving back and forth from the micro to the macro with ease.  Here is Tarde's version of the vision:

If Statistics continues to progress as it has done for several years, if the information which it gives us continues to gain in accuracy, in dispatch, in bulk, and in regularity, a time may come when upon the accomplishment of every social event a figure will at once issue forth automatically, so to speak, to take its place on the statistical registers that will be continuously communicated to the public and spread abroad pictorially by the daily press.

And here is Latour's comment:

It is indeed striking that at this very moment, the fast expanding fields of "data visualization", "computational social science" or "biological networks" are tracing before our eyes, just the sort of data Tarde would have acclaimed. ... Digital navigation through point-to-point datascapes might, a century later, vindicate Tarde's insights.

This is only the briefest of samplings from Tarde's work, from one short book.  But it is perhaps enough to give substance to the idea that Tarde is as much of an innovative founder of scientific sociology as Weber, Marx, or Durkheim; and he is a thinker from whom a new generation of sociologists can gain new ideas.

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Posted in: assemblages,CAT_foundations,contingency,methodological individualism