Preaching and Praxis

...politics begins with differences over the strategies, means and agencies that will bring us closer to it...

...Gouldner's new book is a collection of 16 essays written between 1955-72, which, he tells us, either look backward to the origins of the ideas in The Coming Crisis, respond to that book's critics, or suggest the direction of work in progress...

...Gouldner is alive to the danger that Reflexive Sociology "will inevitably be subjected to pressures that aim to transform it into just one other technical specialty, and to make it serve as just one other topic for specialized panels at professional congresses...

...Sociology is agnostic vis-a-vis the order of being with which religions, authorities, and traditions purport to be in contact...

...Where Mills wished to rescue "the sociological imagination" from the deadening embrace of the academics, Gouldner in his call for a "Reflexive Sociology" aimed at revitalizing sociology itself...

...Nor do any of them fail "to distinguish the side to which they are attached, from the grounds on which they are attached to it," as Gouldner puts it in one of his most apt formulations of the sociologist's ability to free himself from both the illusory claim of "value-neutrality" and an inevitably blind partisanship...

...They will impugn the grounds human beings adduce to justify their conduct...

...What was novel and surprising was that The Coming Crisis was very much the work of a thoroughly academic (or "professional") sociologist, whose centerpiece was a prodigiously detailed dissection of the formidably abstract and notoriously obscure (both Mills and Gouldner would say "obscurantist") ideas of Tal-cott Parsons...

...who, in the name of "reflexivity," have inserted banal autobiographical chapters into their doctoral dissertations...

...Nor—and here we approach shakier ground—is the sociologist who does not exist in "tension, conflict, opposition and resistance to established authority, institutions, and culture...

...Gouldner maintains that "Establishment critics have done just about everything, short of a book-burning, to discredit the Crisis...

...he insists that the sociologist expresses his "whole social being" in his work, and argues that intense moral and philosophical self-scrutiny is a prerequisite for the fully rational study of society...

...Gouldner's Reflexive Sociology, or sociology of sociology (he uses the terms interchangeably), is essentially an affirmation of the dignity and importance of the intellectual's calling, the kind of statement that in the 1940s and '50s was more commonly made by literary critics or "men of letters...

...There is a level where all visions of the Good Society, or Utopia, resemble one another...

...One wonders whether Shils would be admissible into Gouldner's community of theorists...

...The sociologist who postures as a radical in the classroom but truckles to deans, or who proclaims his belief in universal fraternity but plays a mean game of academic politics, is obviously not a fit candidate for membership in this new community...

...The delay of a month before agreeing to publish Gould-ner's reply occurred because the journal office was closed for vacation (as I ascertained at the time, after Gouldner sent me, as well as others, a cable requesting intervention with the AJS...

...In any case, Gouldner takes pains to insist that in urging theorists to be conscious of their practice, or "praxis," he did not mean that they should become instant political activists...

...But the two leading American sociological journals between them published five longer-than-usual reviews of the book...

...Instead, he was saying that the theorist must "deepen [his] awareness of who and what he is as a member of a specific society at a given time, and of how his social roles and his personal life affect his professional work...

...and who have loftily doubted the value of information about voting and political parties on the grounds that it fails to illuminate the "relation between the State and Society...

...Mills spoke deprecatingly of his The Sociological Imagination, asserting that he would "rather do the stuff [sociology] than write about it...

...The magazine, in fact, later departed from tradition by allowing Gouldner to have the last word (happily not reprinted in the present book) after Lipset and Ladd had responded to his first rebuttal...

...Gouldner contends, Maoism achieves the ultimate in the critical self-understanding of Marxism...

...attacked him on the question of sociologists' politics, a subject on which the authors frequently collaborated in the past...

...None of these men deludes himself that he speaks with the voice of impersonal scientific truth while the other fellowS views are distorted by ideology?the delusion that is Gouldner's main target...

...But I am not so sure he would agree that "Establishment sociology" has been disestablished...

...At present it competes with a variety of "new" sociologies (having in common only their aversion to positivism) for attention—and for students...

...But radicals are not necessarily more likely to do this than are conservative or liberal thinkers...

...Gouldner to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not the regular custom of academic journals to solicit replies from criticized scholars for publication in the same issue as the criticism...

...He must do this for the sake of theory as a "world-creating" venture, suggesting the possibility of new "theoretical collectives" founded on rational communication and free of false "objectivism," ideological mystification, and relations of domination between men...

...It was not simply that the 528-page volume received four reviews in the New York Times and equally impressive attention elsewhere—that had happened to other books by sociologists, including several by Mills...

...The old order has the picks of a hundred rebellions thrust into its side...

...Far be it from me to say a good word for base empiricism, but a little philosophizing can still be a dangerous thing, and explorations of the social world off-campus may indirectly promote greater self-understanding than undisciplined reflection...

...Comparing the critical theorists with the structuralist followers of Louis Althusser, Gouldner notes with evident approval the disinclination of the former to see their values embodied in the organizational instrument of a party, movement or regime...

...In extolling "the purer morality of ordinary people rather than . . . the theoretical acumen of a privileged elite...

...I am not entirely sure whether he means to express his sympathy with the Maoist policy of hastening what might be called, paraphrasing Keynes, the "euthanasia of the academic intellectual," but Alvin Gouldner is just about the last person I can imagine intoning mea culpas for his sins of intellectual pride and offering to work in the fields to atone for them...

...Thus, in the title essay of the present volume, he accuses the American Journal of Sociology of devoting a special issue to demolishing The Coming Crisis, of neglecting to invite him to reply in the same issue and of ignoring for a month two overseas cables from him requesting a future reply...

...But it closes with some remarks on Maoism that I find questionable...

...Eleven years later, however, the reception of Al-vin W. Gouldner's thematically similar The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology suggested that such an Age had at last dawned...

...Moreover, it seems to be just as easy to discover "contradictions" in any and every social phenomenon as it used to be for functional sociologists to find "functions" for everything...

...Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong Professor of Sociology, New York University C. WRIGHT MILLS may have been a bit premature in announcing that the Age of Sociology was upon us in The Sociological Imagination, published in 1959...

...The Coming Crisis, though obviously many years in the making, was unmistakably seen by its author as an attempt to forge a link between a "renewed" sociology and the protest movements of the late '60s...

...Nor is the sociologist who sees his discipline as a strictly technical specialty untainted by values and iso-lable from the nonprofessional lives of its practitioners...

...None was entirely denunciatory, the lengthiest was wholly laudatory and three were by radicals or Marxists who could hardly be described as upholders of any "Establishment...

...I have recently encountered students who, out of a half-baked grasp of new phenomenological, neo-Heg-elian, or structuralist approaches, regarded it as infra dig when they were expected to know something about, say, income distribution in American society...

...Actually, only two out of 10 articles in the issue dealt with his book: The first was a by no means unap-preciative critique...

...One wonders, too, about such conservative or liberal, rather than radical, thinkers as Robert Nisbet, Raymond Aron, Ralf Dahrendotf, and David Riesman...

...The Two Marxisms" whets our appetite for Gouldner's next book...

...This has now happened, the "coming crisis" has come and gone, and "Establishment sociology" has been disestablished...

...In his most recent essay, "The Two Marxisms," Gouldner reveals that one result of his European sojourn has been a closer acquaintance with and appreciation of the "critical theory" of the Frankfurt School...

...the second, by Seymour Martin Lipset (an old antagonist) and Everett Carl Ladd...

...Yet no one who rises to genuine theorizing merely, as that hackneyed phrase goes, "supports the status quo...

...In For Sociology, Gouldner passionately defends himself against the charge of "navel-gazing" leveled by critics from both the Left and the Right...

...In several essays answering his critics, Gouldner rejects separating the task of criticizing sociology from that of analyzing society...

...Gouldner would perhaps argue that only a political radical truly aspires to "human emancipation," to the "liberation" of men from domination and "false consciousness...

...No doubt, as Gouldner states, the self-aware theorist must maintain a certain distance from all political movements...

...It is no exaggeration to say that we theorize today within the sound of guns...

...I expect Gouldner would accept these caveats—an acute awareness of how the most noble ideals can be corrupted into self-serving apologias is one of his most outstanding gifts...

...The opening words of the Preface read: "Social theorists today work within a crumbling matrix of paralyzed urban centers and battered campuses...

...Leaving aside the fact that the Frankfurt critical theorists Gouldner admires have not taken Mao very seriously as a Marxist thinker, such notions sound to me like a kind of populism that is not unknown in these un-Marxist United States...

...Perhaps because he has been in Europe for the past two years, he seems unaware of another danger: that budding sociologists will equate philosophical and epistemological self-scrutiny with the entire content of sociology —a bit like those "literary men" of some years ago who were excited by Lionel Trilling or Leslie Fiedler without having bothered to read much poetry or fiction...

...In For Sociology Gouldner seems to mute his insistence on the interdependence of "good" theory and radical politics—partly, no doubt, because of the obvious anti-intellec-tualism of some of the attacks on him by radical activists, but mostly, one supposes, because the New Left, student rebellion and black militance have passed rather completely from the scene...

...Gouldner describes Maoism as the "most realistic Marxism," and suggests that it alone has acknowledged the contradiction in Marxism itself —that Marxism, as the creation of a Western, book-reading intelligentsia, is inherently elitist...

...Edward Shils, one of the few self-declared conservatives among contemporary sociological theorists, wrote in "The Calling of Sociology" that "the observations, insights and generalizations of sociology inevitably assert that things are not what they seem...

...at times he draws back from such a response...

...Does this last criterion mean that the reflexive theorist must necessarily be a political radical...

...Critical theory arose, of course, in reaction to the failures and defeats of Marxist movements: World War I, the Stalinist terror, the coming to power of Hitler...

...At times Gouldner appears to want to answer Yes...

...Yet the replacement of the writer by the sociologist as moralist, social critic and prophet par excellence of our culture could occur only with the emergence of a humanist sociology that repudiated the long-dominant science-building definition of the discipline...

...I both hope and expect that he will continue to read and to write books...