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Contextualism, Lite and Supersized Author(s): Charles Camic Max Weber’s Methodologies: Interpretation and Critique by Sven Eliaeson; Sociology as Political Education by Karl Mannheim; Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education by Colin Loader; David Kettler Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 111, No. 1 (July 2005), pp. 284-289 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/431541 . Accessed: 11/09/2013 00:44 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Journal of Sociology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.60.206.43 on Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:44:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Contextualism, Lite and Supersized

Contextualism, Lite and SupersizedAuthor(s): Charles CamicMax Weber’s Methodologies: Interpretation and Critique by Sven  Eliaeson; Sociology asPolitical Education by Karl  Mannheim; Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education byColin  Loader; David  KettlerSource: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 111, No. 1 (July 2005), pp. 284-289Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/431541 .

Accessed: 11/09/2013 00:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toAmerican Journal of Sociology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 130.60.206.43 on Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:44:27 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Contextualism, Lite and Supersized

284 AJS Volume 111 Number 1 (July 2005): 284–89

�2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0002-9602/2005/11101-0007$10.00

Review Essay

Charles CamicUniversity of Wisconsin—Madison

Max Weber’s Methodologies: Interpretation and Critique. By SvenEliaeson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Pp. x�230. $72.95 (cloth); $33.95(paper).

Sociology as Political Education. By Karl Mannheim. Translated andedited by David Kettler and Colin Loader. New Brunswick, N.J.:Transaction Publishers, 2001. xvi�207. $44.95.

Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education. By Colin Loader andDavid Kettler. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Pp.x�233. $49.95.

CONTEXTUALISM, LITE AND SUPERSIZED

Nearly 30 years ago, this journal published an article (“On Understandinga Sociological Classic” [American Journal of Sociology 83 (September1977): 279–319]) in which Robert Alun Jones put “contextualism” squareon the map of sociologists who study the ideas of social thinkers fromthe past. Building on the arguments of Quentin Skinner and other intel-lectual historians, Jones warned sociologists of their tendency to readworks from the past in an anachronistic, or “presentist,” manner (as ifthose works belonged to current academic debates) and urged the im-portance of also seeking to understand such works historically; that is,by carefully reconstructing the intellectual contexts in which they werewritten.

In the years since, the fortunes of contextualism within sociology havewavered as the program has attracted dedicated adherents, who haveapplied contextualist methods to the study of various past social thinkers,and equally ardent critics, who have been doubtful of the sociologicalvalue of such research. This polarized situation has long left contextual-ism’s status uncertain. The marked contrasts between the recent booksby Sven Eliaeson and by David Kettler and Colin Loader, all of whom

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align themselves with contextualism, speak to the issue by exhibiting thevery different directions in which the approach has run.

The books differ greatly in focus and ambition. Eliaeson’s subject is alarge one: Max Weber’s “methodology,” as articulated in Weber’s sprawl-ing and often polemical writings on the nature, purpose, and subjectmatter of the historical and cultural sciences and on the mode of conceptformation appropriate for these sciences. Some of these writings hold apermanent place in the sociological canon; sociologists have read andreread them and produced around them a secondary literature consistingof hundreds of items. Yet, in Eliaeson’s view, “Weber’s methodologicalwritings are rarely taken seriously as a whole” (p. 163, n. 18). To fill thisgap, Eliaeson elaborately proposes to offer “a contextual reconstruction”that will “recapture Weber’s original context” and thereby furnish “a morereliable and less biased interpretation of his methodology, drawing onhitherto little noticed essays as well as neglected parts of his correspon-dence” (pp. 1–2).

Kettler and Loader’s project is more modest. In the summer of 1930,Karl Mannheim, newly appointed professor of sociology at the Universityof Frankfort, delivered an inaugural lecture course, General Sociology.Of the exact content of this course, Mannheim scholars were long in thedark until a transcript of Mannheim’s lectures came to light in the papersof his former assistant, Hans Gerth, following Gerth’s death in 1978.Seeking to make this esoteric document more widely accessible, Kettlerand Loader set about to translate it from German and to provide anintroduction. Eventually, however, as their introduction grew in length,their publisher decided to split the results into two volumes. The first ofthese, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education, is the expandedintroduction, Loader and Kettler’s effort to situate Mannheim’s 1930 lec-tures and related writings in their intellectual-historical context. The com-panion volume, Sociology as Political Education, contains the translatedtranscription of Mannheim’s course, plus translations of nine shorter itemsthat Mannheim wrote around the years 1921–33. Among these are threenewspaper articles, several letters, and an excerpt from his book on thesociological curriculum. While most of these additional items are fairlyslight—translations of Mannheim’s more substantial writings from theseyears have already been published—his youthful letters from Heidelbergprovide a sharp eyewitness account of the city and its university duringa period that was formative not only in Mannheim’s intellectual devel-opment, but also in the careers of such Heidelberg contemporaries asErich Fromm, Hans Speier, Hans Gerth, Hannah Arendt, Norbert Elias,and Talcott Parsons.

In execution, Eliaeson’s book and Kettler and Loader’s paired volumesdiffer still further. According to Eliaeson, understanding Weber’s meth-

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odology requires an examination of multiple contexts—neo-Kantianism,marginalism, the Methodenstreit, the Werturteilsstreit, the demarcationcontroversy, and “the theodicy crisis” (p. 4)—and the point is unobjec-tionable. But, after setting up such an ambitious prospectus, his bookcontinually disappoints. Having named these several complex (and alleg-edly understudied) contexts and trumpeting the benefits of contextualiz-ing, Eliaeson brusquely dispatches the contexts of Weber’s methodologicaloeuvre in a mere 11 pages that are almost wholly reliant on a few standardsources in the secondary literature. Later in the book, a handful of ref-erences to the work of thinkers who were part of Weber’s milieu and afew gestures toward Weber’s correspondence and lesser-known writingspunctuate Eliaeson’s pages, but that is as close as he comes to deliveringthe promised historical reconstruction of Weber’s methodology. What ismore, Eliaeson puts the points that he does make about Weber’s contextso opaquely that these will likely be lost on anyone not already wellinformed about the subject. In Eliaeson’s hands, Weber’s context blursinto a torrent of undefined -isms—idealism, romanticism, historicism, pos-itivism, Enlightenment polytheism, liberalism, conservatism, nominalism,essentialism, realism, intuitionism, value-relativism, and perspectivism—that rain down on the reader, after which Eliaeson’s effort to contextualizeends.

For its remainder, his book drifts, as Eliaeson offers disjointed and, attimes, inaccurate summaries of Weber’s methodological ideas (on the usualtopics: objectivity, ideal-types, etc.); shifts next to an extended analysis ofthe contrasting ways in which Parsons, Alfred Schulz, and Paul Lazarsfeldand Anthony Oberschall later appropriated Weber’s writings; and thenopines about the “continuing significance” of Weber’s work for mediatingthe “tension between history and theory [that] appears to be the perennialmain paradigmatic divide in social science” (p. 104). As he veers in thisdirection, Eliaeson loses his contextualist footing altogether, suddenly ad-juring efforts to recover Weber’s context (“Why should we bother?” heasks) and embracing a “selective presentism” (pp. 63, 102). It does notoccur to Eliaeson that his inability to build a persuasive case for “Weberas mediator” on contextualist grounds may be the result of the extremethinness of his own historical reconstruction of Weber’s methodologicalwork. Eliaeson’s book does, however, include ample end matter: an ap-pendix that speculates on whether Weber influenced Gunnar Myrdal,some 150 short biographies (e.g., “Durkheim, Emile, French educator andsociologist, known for, among other things, the concept of ‘social fact.’Inspired Parsons’s interpretation of Weber”; p. 171), and a conceptualglossary, with instructive entries such as: “Causality, the idea that a phe-nomenon (event or change) has a cause and a cause has an effect, that

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an event could be explained by a factor, like the apple falling to the groundbecause of gravity” (p. 186).

Of much greater substance are the Kettler and Loader volumes, which,with no elaborate fanfare about contextualist research, nonetheless re-construct the intellectual-historical context of Mannheim’s 1930 lecturecourse with a thoroughness and meticulousness that sociologists who studythinkers from the past have rarely equaled. That Kettler and Loaderdevote more than 200 pages to contextualizing lectures that run less than80 pages is indicative of the contrast with Eliaeson.

Kettler and Loader invite those interested in Karl Mannheim to lookbeyond the pages of Ideology and Utopia (originally published in 1929)to the milieu in which Mannheim was embedded in the 1920s and, by sodoing, to appreciate—to an extent not possible before the discovery ofthe 1930 lectures—that his work was part and parcel of his overriding“educational mission” (p. 17, n. 9). The turbulent Weimar era, as Kettlerand Loader explain, was the scene of a massive crisis in German highereducation, a crisis that pitted defenders of classical and romantic con-ceptions of education as aristocratic cultivation against modernist criticswho favored a democratic overhaul of the universities and ways of keepingschooling in step with the growth of specialized scientific knowledge andthe demands of the market for educated labor. Faced with these alter-natives, Mannheim, according to Kettler and Loader, sought to recast and“to revitalize the ideal of cultivation through the infusion of modern el-ements through sociology” (p. 15). Seen in this light, Mannheim’s deter-mined effort to construct the sociology of knowledge—understood as afield that would facilitate a synthesis of divergent contemporary ideolog-ical perspectives—was simultaneously a program of political education:a way to develop in academic and lay audiences the enlarged social aware-ness and sense of public responsibility required by modern industrialdemocracies.

To build this original and convincing interpretation, Kettler and Loaderproceed in steps. First, they trace German notions about education ascultivation back to Kant and Humboldt. They then examine how Weimarstate officials planned to modernize traditional ideas about cultivationusing the discipline of sociology, and how their plans provoked widespreadcritical reaction. Finally, Kettler and Loader analyze competing concep-tions of sociology presented to Mannheim by other thinkers from theperiod, including Max and Alfred Weber, the apolitical sociologist Leopoldvon Wiese, the fascist theoreticians Hans Freyer and Carl Schmitt, andvarious figures in different branches of the Marxist tradition, among themGeorg Lukacs, Max Adler, Emil Lederer, and the members of the Frank-furt School. Kettler and Loader carefully consider Mannheim’s links toall of these thinkers and quote extensively from their writings.

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Sometimes this analysis can feel almost like too much contextualization.When, for example, Kettler and Loader comment that “to understandwhy Mannheim comes to treat the antithesis between fascist social thoughtand his own reflexive sociology as the prime constituent of the ‘dialectics’he puts forward, . . . it is necessary to review Heidegger, Schmitt, andFreyer in some detail” (p. 114), and when the authors then plow aheadon this course for some 15 additional pages, I thought I was being offeredfar more than I would ever need to know to understand this particularwrinkle in Mannheim’s thought. Still, while Karl Mannheim’s Sociologyas Political Education is overwritten in a few spots (and clumsily writtenin more than a few spots), the yield from Kettler and Loader’s massiveexcavation is impressive. Before taking up their book, I read the Mann-heim text that it is designed to introduce, barely catching the gist ofMannheim’ s statements, but my confusion was gone when I returned toMannheim after reading Kettler and Loader. Indeed, not only does theiraccount substantially clarify the specific argument of Mannheim’s GeneralSociology course and the companion items, but Kettler and Loader’s anal-ysis also lays the groundwork for a rethinking of Mannheim’s work as awhole. Further, while Mannheim is the focal subject, Kettler and Loader’sstudy, because it does range so broadly across the academic context ofthe Weimar era, is a work of more general import, offering a well-posi-tioned window into the field of German social science during a criticalperiod in the historical development of social scientific thought.

Nor are the Kettler and Loader volumes of “mere historical” interest.Kettler and Loader’s contextual reconstruction of Mannheim’s programfor sociology points up (as they observe) parallels between the situationthat confronted Mannheim and current-day controversies about highereducation and speaks as well to recurrent debates about the political usesand public role of sociology. But Kettler and Loader stop short of drawingout the contemporary implications of their research for the subfield that,ironically, is most associated with Mannheim’s own name: the sociologyof knowledge. Their nuanced analysis of Mannheim’s efforts to configuresociology in response to the educational agenda of Weimar officials and,at the same time, to differentiate his conception of the discipline from thecontending views of social thinkers on the right and the left implicitlyprovides a rich case study of the social dynamics of an intellectual field—a case study that calls out for theorization in light of recent work on thistopic by those such as Andrew Abbott, Pierre Bourdieu, and RandallCollins (to go no further than the ABCs of the literature). Yet, Kettlerand Loader neglect this work (as does Eliaeson, in a telling instance ofcorrespondence among these different authors), missing the chance to turntheir contextualization of Mannheim into an explicit contribution to the

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sociology of knowledge. That such a turn might further enrich contex-tualist research, while demonstrating to critics the sociological significanceof contextualism, is a possibility that scholars in the area may hereafterwish to consider.

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