DOI: 10.1177/0094306112449607 EDITOR … · The Outlook Company, then issued in 1912 by Doubleday, Page and Co. in Garden City, New Jersey, and reprinted once, in 1984. Booker Taliaferro

EDITOR’S REMARKS

B. T. WASHINGTON AND R. E. PARKFIND THE MAN FARTHEST DOWN

One of the lingering pleasures of the schol-ar’s existence resides, for a while yet, in glid-ing among the shelves of a large library, andfinding by the grace of Mertonian serendipi-ty a volume that should by virtue of its qual-ity and utility be remembered and consulted,but is not—the bookish equivalent to shop-ping in Filene’s Basement or the local Good-will store, uncovering a genuine preciosityamidst clutter, awaiting its rightful attention.The rediscovered book’s glory lies in its abil-ity to shed light on matters of continuing con-cern, to contextualize debates that have notsubsided, and perhaps most importantly, toillustrate yet again that social analysis hasbeen carried out with great skill and subtletylong before anyone still alive was involved.

So it was that The Man Farthest Down: ARecord of Observation and Study in Europe(‘‘The Struggle of European Toilers’’) authored‘‘by Booker T. Washington with the collabo-ration of Robert E. Park’’ recently came tohand by happy coincidence in this, its cente-nary year. It was copyrighted in 1911 byThe Outlook Company, then issued in 1912by Doubleday, Page and Co. in GardenCity, New Jersey, and reprinted once, in1984. Booker Taliaferro Washington remainsfamous through his autobiographies forbeing born into slavery in 1856, then miracu-lously achieving international celebrity asa champion of the oppressed. He vigorouslydisagreed with W.E.B. Du Bois concerningthe most effective political and economicmeans for liberating the American ‘‘Negro,’’a debate Du Bois recalled vividly in 1963shortly before dying (McGill 1965). By 1910Washington was enduring morbid hyperten-sion (at twice the normal rate), was ‘‘forced’’by his nervous Tuskegee Institute staff tovacation in Europe, turned 56 when the TheMan Farthest Down appeared, and died threeyears later from exhaustion—nearly 50 yearsprior to Du Bois’s death (who once said thatsome people assumed that he, too, had diedin 1915).

Robert Ezra Park, eight years Washing-ton’s junior, lived a life not unlike Du Bois’,and so unlike Washington’s, who workedwhen young as a miner in West Virginia.Park, who was the ASA President in 1925,was educated at Michigan with Dewey, prac-ticed journalism for twelve years in fivemajor cities, won an MA at Harvard withWilliam James, then pursued his doctoratein Germany under Simmel, Windelband,and the like. He spent 1904–05 at Harvardteaching philosophy (at the time his mentor,W. James, met with Max Weber), and eventu-ally became a stalwart of the Chicago School(from 1914 to 1933), finishing up at Fisk priorto his death in 1944.

He left Harvard to work for seven years(1907–14) with Washington at the TuskegeeInstitute as his ghostwriter and publicist:‘‘Park would say that he learned more abouthuman nature and society with Booker thanin all his academic study’’ (Norrell 2009,p. 372). ‘‘These seven years were for mea sort of prolonged internship during whichI gained a clinical and firsthand knowledgeof a first class social problem..I gainedsome adequate notion of how deep-rootedin human history and human nature socialinstitutions were and how difficult, if notimpossible it was, to make fundamentalchanges in them by mere legislation or bylegal artifice of any sort’’ (Odum 1951,p. 132). From this work he created the four-stage race-relations cycle still taught toundergraduates.

This unlikely pair, who became closefriends, toured Europe from August 20through October 9, 1910, ‘‘less than sevenweeks.but it seemed to me that I had beenaway for a year’’ (p. 377). Park had done allthe preparatory work for the trip, and hada large hand in writing up their report.Each day after seeking out the most exploitedlaborers in a given region, while traveling bytrain to the next stop, Washington would dic-tate their ‘‘findings’’ to his stenographer,

� American Sociological Association 2012DOI: 10.1177/0094306112449607

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409 Contemporary Sociology 41, 4

Nathan Hunt, who would type up the resultsand give them to Park for reworking intopublishable form (Mathews 1948, p. 260).Thus, Park’s long experience as a journalistserved the project well. Their goal was sim-ple: to ascertain the conditions of laborersthroughout Europe and compare what theyfound with the plight of ‘‘Negroes’’ in theUnited States. It was widely believed, espe-cially among whites, that blacks could ‘‘nev-er’’ ascend the U.S. achievement ladder, andWashington made it his mission to destroythis prejudice by any means possible. Thetrip to Europe was but one small part of hislifelong campaign. Park later feared thatWashington found abroad what he wishedto find, to prove his case rather than perceiv-ing what actually was before them, as theydashed through the least savory segmentsof European societies (Norrell 2009, p. 274).Nevertheless, and despite Park’s uncertainty,the book reads convincingly and is full ofremarkable ‘‘data.’’

According to a detailed itinerary map(between pp. 8 and 9 of the book, thoughnot available in the Googled version), theylanded at Liverpool, visited Andrew Carne-gie at Skibo Castle in northernmost Scotland,then to London, Belgium, Bremen and Ham-burg, Copenhagen, Berlin, Breslau, Buda-pest, Prague, northern and southern Italy,Sicily, then back north, departing from Ger-many. In his typical self-abnegating fashion,Washington insisted that they avoid all tour-ist traps and focus instead on work sites ofthe laboring class. They carried out a -worker-oriented ethnography far removedfrom museums, castles, concert performan-ces, libraries, and all the usual sites whichattracted intellectuals. Washington hadalready visited Europe as a tourist, and thistime had no patience for sight-seeing.

Instead, he and Park learned a great dealabout the ‘‘lower orders’’: that in London,he found ‘‘the human waste of a great city’’(p. 22), those 52 people who had starved todeath on the city’s streets in the precedingyear (p. 29), and worse, those more than100,000 in the East End, out of 2 million,who ‘‘are living on the verge of starvation’’(p. 38). After carefully documenting wide-spread misery, he comes to the crux of hisargument: ‘‘Not infrequently, when in mypublic speeches I have made some reference

to the condition of the Negro in the South,certain members of my own race in the Northhave objected because, they said, I did notpaint conditions in the South black enough.During my stay in England I had the unusualexperience of being criticised in the Londonnewspapers for the same reason, this timeby an American white man. . . I have neverdenied that the Negro in the South frequentlymeets with wrong and injustice; but he doesnot starve. I do not think a single case wasever heard of, in the South, where a Negrodied from want of food. In fact, unlessbecause of sickness or some other reason hehas been unable to work, it is comparativelyrare to find a Negro in an almshouse’’ (p. 31).

If this sounds preposterous to our ears,trained to imagine black life in the South c.1900 as mercilessly oppressive, there ismore: ‘‘Another thing in regard to the Negro:although he is frequently poor, he is neverwithout hope and a certain joy in living. Nohardship he has yet encountered, either inslavery or in freedom, has robbed the Negroof the desire to live. The race constantly grewand increased in slavery, and it has consider-ably more than doubled in freedom’’ (p. 26).At many turns throughout the book, and par-ticularly where the travelers encountered themost desperately poor and oppressed (as inBohemia or Sicily), Washington and Parkconsistently remark that the farthest mandown in Europe is not only a woman, butthat both she and her spouse are far worseoff by most measures of physical or mentalhealth than the Negro of the American South:‘‘I believe there are few plantations in ourSouthern States where, even in the smallone-room cabins, one would not find the col-oured people living in more real comfort andmore cleanliness than was the case here’’ [inBohemia] (p. 62). Or ‘‘No one who has notseen something of the hardships of the aver-age workingman in a great city like Londoncan understand the privilege that we in theSouthern States have in living in the countrydistricts, where there is independence anda living for every man, and where we havethe opportunity to fix ourselves forever onthe soil’’ (p. 52). Such repeated observationsmust have irritated many politically alertblacks of the time, and because the bookwas published so near Washington’sdeath, he was not around to defend his

410 Editor’s Remarks

Contemporary Sociology 41, 4

ethnographic accounts. And yet when hedied, his most famous and respected antago-nist, Du Bois, said this: ‘‘He was the greatestNegro leader since Frederick Douglass andthe most distinguished man, white or black,who has come out of the South since the CivilWar. His fame was international and hisinfluence far-reaching. Of the good that heaccomplished there can be no doubt (ChicagoPost, December 13, 1915; quoted in Mathews1948, p. 302).

There is a great deal to be learned from thisforgotten study, some of it startlingly con-temporary. For instance, Washington notedon several occasions that ‘‘the man farthestdown in Europe is woman’’ (p. 20), whomhe observed doing physically demandingwork with small reward, in addition to carry-ing grueling family responsibilities. But justas vital as those thousands of keen observa-tions about workers and the poor in Europe,one learns that many of our comfortablymaintained notions of the past are onlyhalf-right when not entirely wrong. Wash-ington had no reason to whitewash condi-tions in the American South regarding thelives of its former slaves, yet he was an hon-est observer whose message comes throughin The Man Farthest Down with undeniableclarity: the Negro, given education anda chance to work, would surely climb tothe top of the social pyramid in a way thatthe European peasant could not.

References

Mathews, Basil. 1948: Booker T. Washington: Educator

and Interracial Interpreter. Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press.

McGill, Ralph. 1965: ‘‘W.E.B. Du Bois.’’ The Atlantic

Monthly, 216: 5, November, pp. 78-81.Norrell, Robert J. 2009: Up From History: The Life of

Booker T. Washington. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press.

Odum, Howard. 1951: American Sociology: The Story of

Sociology in the United States. New York, NY:Longmans, Green, and Co.

About This Issue:

Someday a scholar with tremendous energyand perspicacity will decide to write a biogra-phy of Irving Louis Horowitz, who died onMarch 21 at 82. Abundant archival materialsfor such a work are housed in the Special

Collections unit of Penn State’s PaternoLibrary, and are also digitized for long-distance use. As many obituaries have noted,Horowitz was larger than life, a protean forceof nature, and any other cliche one might liketo invoke when describing someone whosegrasp of life and of intellectual matters sofar exceeds the norm that ordinary descrip-tors will not do. The scope of his scholarly,political, and publishing contributions tothe social sciences—as ‘‘controversial’’ asthey so often were—will not be matched inthe imaginable future, not only due to hisintrinsic qualities, but because he came intosociology and political science at ‘‘just theright time’’ given his interests and skills.

When he was not writing social science, hewas publishing someone else’s, and wouldproudlydisplay to visitors the thousands of vol-umes which Transaction Publishers under hisguidance had given printed life. (After readingan original printing of The Man Farthest Downand declaring in my remarks above that ithad not been reprinted since 1912, I discov-ered that in fact Transaction Publishers hadreissued the book in 1984, and with a newintroduction by St. Clair Drake, no less. Asin so many things, Horowitz had alreadybeen there.) It is both corny and accurate toobserve that he lived ‘‘for’’ scholarship rath-er than ‘‘off’’ of it, to borrow from both MaxWeber and Alvin Gouldner, two thinkerswho were never far from Horowitz’s imagi-nation. Perhaps anticipating fate, he sent toCS not long ago his concluding observationsabout C. Wright Mills, with whom he is sostrongly linked, a speech he was to havedelivered in Norway in May to commemo-rate the fiftieth anniversary of Mills’ deathat 45. There is nothing one can say that isadequate in measuring the loss of this schol-ar and publisher, so we will allow him tospeak his last words for himself.

Some time ago it seemed apposite to pub-lish in CS the occasional analysis of a so-called ‘‘classic work’’ from the social scienceswhich today’s practitioners might not know,or have forgotten. Given the wisdomrequired for such a work, it made sense toinvite Charles Lemert to take it on. That hechose a work composed between 400 and420 CE (or AD by the original author’sassumed preference) is not too surprising

Editor’s Remarks 411


given Lemert’s unique training in theology,philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the socialsciences. His essay, like its predecessors inthis series by Andrew Abbott on MorrisJanowitz (November 2009) and Julia Adamson James Coleman (May 2010), illustrates thegreat virtue of looking back with intelligenceand discernment as one considers the mostfruitful paths into our collective future. Wehope to offer more essays of this qualityand detail as they become available.

Lastly, and not at all less important, withthis issue CS begins what will become a reg-ular feature, what we are calling ‘‘retrospec-tive-critical essays.’’ As explained in myRemarks for March, the Editorial Board puz-zled over how to increase the intellectual

and professional legitimacy of writing forthis journal, and at the Las Vegas meetingwe came upon the idea of asking notablespecialists to canvass the most importantworks in their area published since about2000. Many such essays have since beencommissioned, and several have alreadyreached us, including the two—by DanielLee Kleinman and Christine L. Williams—which inaugurate what will surely becomean honored and useful resource for scholars,junior to senior, who wish to know whichbooks they might most fruitfully consultwhen pursuing a new area of research, orwhile refreshing an old one. Responsesfrom readers concerning the series will betaken seriously, of course.

412 Editor’s Remarks


FEATURED ESSAY

C. Wright Mills, 1916–1962: Bright Lights and Dark Shadows

IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ

Rutgers [email protected]

‘‘The follies of mankind are too obviousand too repetitious to make for utopianfaiths.’’

Ruth Benedict (December 20, 1939)1

I. Dark and Light Brews

There is a moment in time when specialistauthors, whether they are physicists or soci-ologists, become publicists, and pass fromthe realm of science to that of literature.There is a strange but inevitable processthat denotes a passage from the empiricalto the imaginary, or more accurately, froma search for truth in a personality to one ofmeaning in the world. And that is whereMills now stands and where I stand in rela-tion to his memory.2 His foibles and follieshave now entered our professional lives asthe stuff of serious biography at its bestand flimsy hagiography at its worst.

Such types of writing—high caste or lowestate—help explain how he wrote what hedid, or ignored producing what he mighthave. In the long pull of culture what remainsare glimmers of meaning as to the nature ofthe social system. Curiously, those who writedesperately about the social system rarelyprovide the sort of insights that inspire mean-ing, whereas those who take the stuff ofeveryday reality seriously sometimes informus of the larger images that guide us in moraljudgment; albeit not always wisely. C. Wright

Mills was smart enough to recognize this dis-tinction. He appreciated how the vagaries oftaste and the need to move beyond the presentmoment in cultural time dictate memorials.Mills had the honor of being one such person.

Part of the requirement of analysis froma distance in time and space—of fifty years—isclearly a measure for defining significance. It isfair to say that we in the social sciences areshort of heroes, and perhaps while also givento a priori animosities toward declared villains.In part this is so because so much of our livesare spent examining gray cats and mangydogs operating between good and evil, thatwe crave our social scientists to have sometouch of literary class—and that signifiesextreme opinion about individuals designatedas iconic figures.

The great dilemma comes when we recog-nize that our icons are made up of the stuff ofearth—and that means clay feet as well asheavenly discourse. A recent and disturbingbut quite pointed essay by Stanley Weintraubon ‘‘George Bernard Shaw and the Strong-man’’ in The Times Literary Supplement,illustrates the point with brutal frankness.3

1 Ruth Benedict, ‘‘The Natural History of War,’’in An Anthropologist at Work, edited by Margar-et Mead. New Brunswick and London: Trans-action Publishers, 2011 (originally publishedin 1959) pp. 369-370.

2 Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: AnAmerican Utopian. New York and London:Macmillan/The Free Press, 1982.

3 Stanley Weintraub, ‘‘Shaw and the Strong-man,’’ The Times Literary Supplement. WholeNumber 5652, July 29, 2011. pp. 13-15. Whilethere is little evidence of a personal relation-ship between Shaw and Mills—at least that Iknow of—reading the litany of antagonismsto which Shaw was drawn; what Weintraubcalls the ‘‘authoritarian wizards,’’ reads as fol-lows: Democracy is flawed and irreparable.Conflicting interests curdled reforms andimpeded efficient government. Money cyni-cally manipulates the economy. Class interestscommand society. Prejudice poisons morality.Media proprietors muddle minds. Elitismand ignorance impact elections. The profes-sions conspire in their own interests.’’ It ishardly a stretch of the imagination to entertaineccentric parallels.




at ASA - American Sociological Association on July 3, 2012csx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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The great playwright, critic of music andculture—founder and leader of Fabiansocialism and everything nice in Britishsocial welfare thinking, on closer inspection(to be sure not too close) turns out to beblinded by politics on the ground andmythologies in the culture.

It turns out that Shaw viewed democracyas a ‘‘putrefying corpse,’’ and wrote ‘‘indefense’’ of Benito Mussolini. He wasesteemed to be a ruler who brought compe-tence and discipline to a feeble government.Shaw himself referred to Oswald Mosley,the head of the British Union of fascists, as‘‘the only striking personality in British poli-tics.’’ In Shaw’s singular meeting with JosephStalin, he said ‘‘I expected to see a Russianworking man, and I found a Georgian gentle-man.’’ Despite Shaw’s abhorrence of AdolfHitler’s anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism,he found the space to speak of the Nazi Fueh-rer ‘‘as a man to be taken very seriously.’’Indeed, George Orwell saw this dark side ofShaw as ‘‘little else than a love of crueltyand wickedness for their own sake.’’4

While this may appear to be an unusualdigression from the topic at hand, a retrospec-tive on C. Wright Mills, it remains sorrowful-ly relevant. In my biography of Mills I dealtvery lightly with issues that, in my opinion,prevented him from reaching his full stature,or as it sadly did, a sense of self-esteem. Butthe fact is that on issues of gender, race andreligion, Mills had his own demons that heparaded about with a furious if highly per-sonal belligerence. He chose instead to buryexaggerated beliefs and biases by ambiguousjudgments in public statements. Such preju-diced sentiments were not unusual in theWaco, Texas of the 1930s, from whence heoriginated, but even in that time frame, cou-rageous figures from those environs movedagainst the ideological, gender, and racialgrain of a still recovering post-Civil WarSouth.

It must be said frankly that there is an his-torical argument that in Mills’ early years,issues of women’s rights and African Ameri-can claims were not on the table, and suchmatters as racial bias were not only toleratedbut bandied about. The problem with such

historical claims is that they are simplyuntrue: issues of women’s rights crestedthrough the early part of the twentieth centu-ry resulting in equal voting rights, and high(if unequal) participation of women in thework force. The Secretary of Labor underFranklin Delano Roosevelt, Frances Perkinswas a woman in power long before thedecent critique of Mills about women likeSimone de Beauvoir. In a stinging, and Ibelieve accurate, critique of early feministwritings, he noted that De Beauvoir ‘‘oftenconfuses the condition of women with thegeneric human condition.’’ And to empha-size this point of departure, Mills adds that‘‘in writing about the second sex, she reallyought to have thought more systematicallyabout the first sex and human beings in gen-eral.’’ As for activities relating to racial equal-ity, some of Mills’ best friends and colleaguesparticipated in campus struggles throughoutthe South while Mills was an undergraduateat Texas—activities in which Mills categori-cally refused to participate in for reasonsthat hardly need to be elaborated.

On political issues, Mills lined up squarelywith Dwight Macdonald, the editor of thejournal Politics to which Mills adhered. Hesaw the struggle between Hitler and Roose-velt as simply between two variants of impe-rialism, which was the official position of theTrotsky wing in the Fourth International.5

The support for this position, became thealliance of the Communist party with theNazi-tinged America First Committee dur-ing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Period of 1939and 1941. It says something about Mills’position that he retained the idea of WorldWar Two as a conflict of branches of imperi-alism, even after Stalin joined Roosevelt andChurchill in revising the notion of warfare asa struggle for the salvation of democracy.Curiously, this plague on both houses ofimperialism characterized Mills’ thinkingthroughout the Cold War.

Wright had no trouble going to work forthe Small Business Administration duringthe War, and hanging his hat in Washingtonduring his brief period at the University ofMaryland. He became enough of a paid

4 Gordon Bowker, Inside George Orwell. London:Palrgave-Macmillan, 1983, 495 pp.

5 Dwight Macdonald, Against the AmericanGrain. New York, NY: Random House, 1962,427 pp.

414 Featured Essay




research functionary to understand how bestto enlist the aid of business in the war effort!During his self-imposed visiting stints inEngland, he longed for the daily dose of TheNew York Times, and the joys of America.Even at the end of his career, after returningfrom Russia with a critical and indeed cyni-cal appraisal of the post-Stalinist system, heconcluded life with a utopian phantasmthat the Marxists were the new Pragmatiststhus linking up his first and last efforts, hisdissertation and the causes of World WarThree. Indeed for Mills, Premier Tito of Yugo-slavia served as the model in Europe andFidel Castro in Latin America of a newwave of Marxism-Leninism that wouldtranscend or at least put aside the horrors oftotalitarianism, and influence the process ofAmerican social democracy. How this wasto be achieved by a writer for whom Con-gress and the judicial process barely grazedhis horizon, and in which the military-indus-trial complex rode high, mighty, and virtuallyunchallenged was to be curbed, simply wasnever made clear by Mills.

It might be asked, and quite properly, whatthen is Mills’ heritage. The answer is every-thing else that mattered! In this, we havea true parallel with George Bernard Shaw—whose plays and musical commentariesstand the test of time even as the regimeswhich he praised with such unstinting flimsyapologetics perished long ago. Those whohave written of Mills as some sort of politicalliberal, or better, a prophet of the Left move-ment of the 1960s that he did not live toeven see, much less participate in, have a seri-ous problem on their hands. They are tryingto manufacture out of whole cloth, a puremoral soul committed to unstinting warfarewith the forces of absolute evil. Mythologydoes not mix well with sociology. Camushad it right: ‘‘myths have no life of theirown. They wait for us to give them flesh.’’6

II. Jewels in the Crown

My view is that Mills was one of those graycats whom we all think we know. My book C.

Wright Mills: An American Utopian did notlambaste the poor man, nor lionize him, asif The Sociological Imagination was some sortof professional manifesto that one couldwave about as an American equivalent toMao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book. It was nosuch thing. It was a collection of literaryessays—some brilliant, others pedestrian—that permitted the profession to engage inthe sort of self-analysis that too few peoplein the sociological positivism of the 1950swere prepared to engage in. True enoughPitirim Sorokin made a similar effort, but itwas so laden with moral judgments and psy-chological mysticism that it could not pene-trate to the heart of the issues raised by thedominant tendencies toward empiricism.Sorokin in his own distinct way, like Par-sons, became captive to generalizations thatwere so rich in tautology and platitudesthat we forgot how often devoid they werein specific reference points.

What made Mills’ Sociological Imaginationimportant was less the declared criticismsof major players in the field, so much asthe notion that sociology possessed somedivine power, a specific imagination! In hiseffort to assault the bastions of the establish-ment, Wright succeeded in the reverse: rein-forcing the idea that there was somethingspecial and something important about thefield! The volume served as a guidebook tocommon sense in social science: make sureto dot the lines between empirical facts andgeneral theories, keep in mind the place ofhistory in the analysis of current events,methods of work should be attuned to thegoals of the research being undertaken, andfinally that Weberian cultural values wererooted in Marxian economic interests. Whatmust now appear as simple homiletics,were in fact a coming-of-age to a field. Itwas an appeal for a public philosophy ratherthan a professional framework. That a half-century later such a framework for manyhas become a demand for ideological purityand correct thought indicates how far downthe Millsian canonical text has come. It helpsexplain how a discipline had become a curios-ity rather than a source of serious discourse.

The most overlooked work of Mills is hisco-authored text with Hans Gerth on Charac-ter and Social Structure. This is truly a shame.The work is bypassed not just by the general

6 Albert Camus, ‘‘Prometheus in the Under-world,’’ in Lyrical and Critical Essays, editedby Philip Thody. New York, NY: Alfred A.Knopf, 1968. p. 141.

Featured Essay 415




public, which may be understandable giventhe circumstances in which we live, but itwas self-consciously ignored by the profes-sion as well. In an otherwise quite decentessay honoring Robert K. Merton, theesteemed Talcott Parsons speaks reverential-ly of how the very notion of social structureis a product of the work of himself, Merton,and grudgingly, of the efforts of Marion J.Levy, Jr.7 Indeed, throughout this entire fest-schrift, the work of Mills remains the ghostin the closet, but it was precisely the enor-mous erudition in that work that presagedwhat came in the final decade of Mills’ brieflife. It was the sense of history as a source-book, and culture as the embodiment of civ-ilization, that served to give succor to thatforgotten text. The field at the time—atmid-century—was so busy proving itsworth and creating a sense of the uniquenessof the field of sociology—that it left out ofthe reckoning the notion of character.

In Character and Social Structure, Mills (andto a greater extent, Gerth) understood howindividualism is linked to collectivism, whichis to say how the person exercises a magisterialplace in the structure of society. So much non-sense of how the ‘‘Chicago School’’ embodiedactions and the ‘‘Columbia-Harvard Axis’’was the source of structures ignores the mostobvious relations of the two in the course ofeveryday life. As I have tried to make clear,the very trail of sociology from the North tothe South incorporated elements of both theEast and the Midwest styles of work. Placeslike the University of North Carolina at oneend of the core South and Texas at the otherwere recipients of this cross fertilization.Mills was the quintessential embodimentof such varied tendencies. As a result Char-acter and Social Structure expressed a broader,more humane and inclusive type of sociolo-gy. It is something of a tragedy that the twoauthors of this text, Hans Gerth and Wright,went their separate ways—to the benefit ofneither. Mills in particular became fixatedon issues of stratification, which, while fer-tile, separated him from the pragmatic tradi-tion in which he was embedded as a young

scholar, and alas, from the European tradi-tion that extended from Herbert Spencer toMax Weber and Karl Mannheim. The co-optation of the notion of social structure by‘‘establishment’’ figures at one end, andcharacterized by social psychologists whotransformed Freudian categories intoa world view put closure to what mighthave been, but was not quite to be, a synthe-sis of sociology as a science. The field gaveway to the battles of the day in the later,so-called mature work of Mills.

For my taste and proclivities, the trio of hisbooks in social stratification: The New Men ofPower, White Collar, and The Power Elite arethe most significant and lasting contribu-tions of Mills to American social history noless than professional sociology. Indeed, thefusion of history and sociology, which wasmuch sought after and proselytized by Mills,is fulfilled in that trio. It should be noted thatwhen Mills started out, he did not view thisas a trilogy. That is entirely my deduction asexpressed in my biography of Wright. Butwhat we have is a trio of works that summa-rizes the class formation as it evolved inpost-World War Two America. It is not a pret-ty picture, but it is a truthful picture as far asit went. To be sure people like David Ries-man challenged many of the hypotheses inWhite Collar, Sidney Lens did the same forThe New Men of Power, and Talcott Parsonsproperly took on the task of criticizing ThePower Elite in the cordial and gentlemanlyfashion that was not Mills’ style, but none-theless elicited his great respect for Parsons.This respect was something others denied toParsons—an old fashioned liberal, castigat-ed and demonized as some sort of reaction-ary by those academic revolutionaries whoshould have known better than to substitutefulmination for explanation.

Mills developed a populist appreciation ofAmerican life and a utopian approach to itsproximate future. The first of the trio, TheNew Men of Power, saw labor leaders ofunions as a source of political energy, notso much to engage in class warfare, as tobring about a redistribution of wealth. He re-cognized the truths of union corruption, par-asitism in the leadership, and the limitationsof trade union ideology as an impediment togovernment bureaucracy. White Collar offersa psychological profile of ordinary people

7 Lewis A. Coser, editor. The Idea of Social Struc-ture: Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton. NewYork, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1975,556 pp.

416 Featured Essay




who comprise a broad new base of peoplewho are powerless. At that time, and nowas well, few had the protection of unions orfor that matter courts. There is a grim sad-ness in ordinary people locked into routinejobs often located in offices, retail salesorganizations, and secretarial positions thatare gender specific with nowhere to go.Whether in fact the phrase ‘‘white collar’’fully expresses social class interests was nev-er defined by Mills. He came close to a LloydWarner anthropological vision of stratifica-tion within the American class system, andhence dooms this vast economic force to sen-timental support, sometimes disguised asserious analysis.

The work on The Power Elite was unques-tionably the most significant reformulationof the Italian School of Roberto Michels, Gae-tano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto. In so doingMills took on the near dogmatic acceptanceof the Weberian formulas that acceptedeconomics as a source of interests and reli-gion as a source of values, but left unac-counted the political system and themilitary forces—in short the stuff of govern-ment as it evolved over the centuries inEurope and exported to America. The forceof Machiavelli and Hobbes was sharplyetched in The Power Elite. And while Mills’critics noted that his theory of governmentdoes not properly account for legislativeand judicial limitations to executive powerand uses of force, it did refocus Americanpolitical theory from patterns of voting andredistribution of electoral districts. The argu-ments adduced against his work that thereare a whole variety of psychological as wellas sociological variables that interfere with,frustrate, or limit the exercise of raw politicalpower may be true in concrete circumstances,but Mills’ response merits serious consider-ation, to wit that in the big picture, the largeissues, the animosities, and even antago-nisms expressed within people of power areput aside if not entirely overcome when thesurvival of the elites as such is placed in jeop-ardy. This idea, taken from Paretan notions ofelite rotations, may not overcome the primaryobjections in which the power elite do man-age to form a consensus, even if it is left unan-swered as to the very existence of anidentifiable power elite, especially the ambi-guity that goes into the heart of the political

economy. The trilogy gave voice to Mills asa great analyst; it also gave evidence of hisserious limitations as a synthesizer. In a nut-shell: Mills properly appreciated the exis-tence and dynamics of the concentration ofpower. At the same time, he failed to under-stand that such political stratification didnot stimulate or even allow for any unity ofsocio-economic purpose and policy.

Mills was thus led to a point in his briefcareer that many have tread, but few havemastered: how to bridge the all-too-humangap between the analytical and the ideologi-cal. More simply, how does the person ofideas carry on with the tasks of understand-ing the world and the far more complextask of changing the world. From Plato toMarx such a dilemma has plagued eventhe best and the brightest. Part of the prob-lem might well be that the issue has beenframed in such either/or terms that noauthentic answer is even feasible. Oneneed not choose between options. It is farmore reasonable, albeit rare, to deal withthe world as a series of both/and. But Mills’growing commitment to criticism of Amer-ican life, which started with class and pow-er imbalances, increasingly moved toforeign policy considerations. As with thework of his older colleague, Dwight Mac-donald, criticism of established ordersmorphed into defiant opposition. It wasoften fueled by anger self-perceived ascourage in an academic environment ofcowardice.

The works of Mills that followed the com-pletion of the great trilogy on organized labor,the middle classes, and the power elites, fellinto a far more bellicose and militant posture.From a compilation of essays to briefer polem-ical opinion-editorial pieces, Mills shiftedground. Empirically-grounded efforts dis-solved in an onslaught of commands to a fieldthat had moved beyond him. The anomaly isthat it was precisely such works that gavehim the fame he quite openly craved. Thereis a question whether his more substantialworks would provoke such post mortem festi-vals. They certainly would remain part of thestaple of professional reading matter. Butthere is a question on the other side: whatwould he have done had he continued tolive? I have addressed this in part in my bio-graphical work. Its subtitle, ‘‘An American

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Utopian’’ is indicative of a long-standing hopefor a more perfect future, hamstrung by anentirely imperfect present.

The search for the good society in place ofthe study of the true society became a power-ful pre-occupation for Mills. He already hadwritten in broad outline his critique of theUSSR, entitled Confronting the Enemy. Millsclearly was dismayed by what and whomhe met in Soviet Russia. The adulation withwhich he was received notwithstanding, heunderstood that communist Russia was anunhappy place. His observation, instinct,and imagination made him displeased withSoviet power, or the Soviet ideologists cumsociologists with whom he met. But everthe utopian, and in tune with his intellectualbackground, the realities of social ordersonly intensified his search for alternativesin nation-building and preferences in theoryconstructions.

Mills started thinking of a trilogy on inter-national development, with a heavy emphasison prospects for a Third World that wouldembrace places as far apart as India, Yugosla-via, and Cuba. Although he did not do anywriting on the subject, he was engaged inheavy reading in international affairs—witha special bow to Foreign Affairs, which hefelt to be the quintessential voice of Ameri-can power, hence fit to be read by critics.My own feeling is that the themes and theambitions were simply too great for him tocarry off in literary terms. Wright did puta down payment on the project with ananthology on The Marxists. I was helpful tohim in developing sources and orientationsfor that work, a subject with which he wasnot entirely familiar. The idea of pluralism,borrowed from his early days as a pragma-tist, combined with a search for some unify-ing as well as liberating framework thatcould extend far beyond the sociological.This directed his efforts to see multipleforms of Marxism gripping the world. Thecollapse of East European democratic com-munism, and the growing divide along reli-gious and economic terms in Asia, put a capon the Millsian vision by the close of the1950s. Once again reality trumped utopian-ism. But for Wright the search for politicaloptions continued.

There were a series of aborted efforts, likea proposed volume on African American

identity tentatively called Nigger. A blackcomedian, Dick Gregory later co-opted thetitle, and for all we know the organizingpremise. Neither in black nor white werewe faced with a serious challenge to novelistRalph Ellison’s classic, Invisible Man. As inother areas, Mills had a keen sense of publicappetites, but not necessarily the limits oftaste, or for that matter, what he could carryoff with some sense of the subject at hand.That was left to Gunnar Myrdal, the Scandi-navian giant who gave honor to the subjectof The American Dilemma of race and ethnic-ity, while not neglecting hopes for a betterfuture that indeed have partially been real-ized. Just what a fugitive from south Texaswould have to say on the subject of racewould have been interesting, but I suspectnot especially novel. He was after all tradingon turf well explored by others.

With the sociological imagination turninginto psychological grandiosity, Mills finallymet his match—his own huge aspirations.He was a smart man. He knew the gamewas up; that delivering on a host of pledgesand promises was not really in the cards. Along-standing heart patient, with personalenergies and habits that could fell an oaktree, his life was cut short at the age of 45,and the New Left in America had its first pro-fessional icon—an early victim of the ColdWar and the Military-Industrial Complex. Isuspect that he could have lived throughthe Cold War, communes, and libertarianconfusions. But I suspect that he wouldhave had a more difficult time living withacademic indifference to his searches.

III. From Sociology as Science toPolitics as Passion

Let me note what should be apparent: whatis good for the goose is fit for the gander.In serving as advisor and supporter of Millsduring his lifetime, and editor and biogra-pher after his death, harsh criticisms weremade of my own position. To start with,when I wrote a piece on ‘‘The Stalinizationof Fidel Castro’’ in 1964 for New Politics,8

8 Irving Louis Horowitz, ‘‘The Stalinization ofFidel Castro,’’ in New Politics, Vol. 4, No. 4,1965, pp. 61-69.

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I was reminded in quite frank terms (and inthe publication as well) that whether I wasright or wrong in my evaluation of Millson Cuba, it was considered disgraceful thatsuch political differences should be madepublic—especially at a time when theCastro regime was at the pinnacle of its ideo-logical assault on the bastions of Americanimperialism.

Several years later, a rather influentialpiece in a political science journal highlightedthe ‘‘contradictions’’ of my writings—theattempt to champion the causes of democra-cy and the free market at one and the sametime. Why this should be a contradictioninstead of simply a fusion of political faithsand economic systems was never made clear.What was made clear by the writer was thata true believer in the work of Mills wouldnever fall prey to such an impossible fusion.Finally there was a spurious allegation thatI had taken files from Mills’ home in 1962,and worse refused to share them in 2009with an historian wishing to extract Englishlanguage versions of my second volume (inSpanish) of the papers of Mills. In point offact, the final Mrs. Mills assisted me in mov-ing three massive filing cabinets to my auto.She clearly appreciated the fact that thesewere necessary to maintain the legacy ofMills. Later on she or a designated heirimposed draconian restrictions on accessingthem much less than utilizing his mainarchives.

Each of these attacks was painful, mademore so by a jagged edge which presumedthat any serious study and criticism of Millswas essentially subversive of his legacy,and hence beyond the pale of good tasteand academic manners. I mention thesereally small blips not to excuse errors orshortcomings in my intellectual position,but how, when confronting the work ofsomeone declared to be an icon free of errorby rabid followers, one becomes himself anenemy of the people, and no longer thedefender of the faith.

Encountering the weakness of the literarytradition or in broader terms the culturalframework of a nation with so many figuresas the United States, one must develop a thickskin in order to survive. For the new mediaage demands of its major figures not simplytalent and integrity, but a moral purity given

the very few, and bestowed on them by thedark practices of the many. Mills might wellhave liked to absorb debates and argumentsthat devour pages of writings in literary jour-nals. For in truth, it was precisely the sense ofMills as a polemicist, essayist, and blunt writ-er of prose often untouched by literary fig-ures that made him so popular in literarycircles. He was, after all, a free-wheelingintellectual in the Mannheim tradition, a fig-ure that could be read and enjoyed by peopleoutside the profession of sociology, one of thefirst ‘‘public intellectuals,’’ a phrase now somuch in the vogue. Like Jean-Paul Sartreand Albert Camus in France, Oscar Wildeand Bernard Shaw in England, or GuentherGrass and Herman Hesse in Germany, hewas measured not by the ordinary canonsof professional life, but by his public expres-sion. He was a singular voice who couldsomehow capture the mood of the timesand the spirit of the people. I hold that Millsshould be seen and judged in such broaderterms.

The task of social science, insofar as itsclaims to be a science are valid, is to focusfairly on its real achievements in extendingknowledge; and appreciate the fact thateven the most talented individuals comestained with the curse of being human, thatis of making mistakes or simply having short-comings. Moreover, mores change and so toodo human preferences. Measuring suchchanges becomes a dismal science unto itself.To avoid such a clear reckoning of scientifictalent apart from ethical shortcoming is itselfa form of academic suppression of the truthwe all posses: the truth of the lows as wellas the highs, the perils as well as the rewardsof high cultural recognition. In my work onMills I have attempted to do just that. If dif-ferences remain on assessing Mills, then sobe it. That is inevitable. By the same token,a clear sense of our humanity is improvedin a recognition of how weakness no lessthan strength, co-exist in mind as in body.The democratic heritage and scientific meth-od will benefit by such remembrances ofthose we respect in life and cherish inmemory.

The Decomposition of Sociology was rootedin the abandonment of the field itself by itsbest and brightest. With Mills’ death thefield had a choice to make: the road taken

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in the collection known as The New Sociology9

by means of which empiricism was linked tocriticism; or the abandonment of sociologyas a science in favor of the enthrallment ofmoral posturing. It should be appreciatedthat Mills himself did not live to see, ortherefore personally provide leadership, toend this battle of a decade. Indeed, Millshimself could sing the praises of Castro’sCuba at its birth, while at the same time,embark on work to define post-StalinistUSSR at the sure signs of its death. Millsreturned to his World War Two stance:a plague on both varieties of imperialism—capitalistic America and communist Russia.How easy it became an option for the actualstudy of nations and systems. The ideologyof the Fourth International became the orga-nizing premise at the end of Mills’ life. Thesmall comfort of radicalism without empiri-cal redress became home to Mills, much theway the securities of the past became hometo the new conservatism then sprouting itswings. In the process, the new sociologybecame the new radicalism. Egalitarianmodels displaced empirical realities as thesourcebook for doing sociology. Dogmaticteleology replaced experiential causality.

Wright himself helped to bring about theend of the sociological imagination as a self-contained field. It became an encumbrance.Its warnings and reservations could scarcelylead to the charge in arguing and opposingthe dangers of World War Three or the Amer-ican military-industrial establishment. Millsserved as a progenitor of a new politics ratherthan a new sociology. There was a certain lus-ter in the media limelight—one that he thor-oughly enjoyed. But in the process hesurrendered a place in the professional crevi-ces; those hovering ghosts in the academiccloset basically prevailed. The new politicsbecame part of the exaggerated mannerismsand the culture of the sixties, while the newsociology became a lost professional stand-point in a world of political causes of a profes-sion that changed the nature of a field fora generation. That we are now, a half centurylater, returning to a consideration of what

sociology can contribute to the social sciencesat one end and to public discourse at anotherindicates that there remains hope. Still thedecomposition of a small field is not theend of the struggle for a kinder or more com-passionate world. Innovation and new fieldsarise and will continue to do so. To somedegree Mills helped define the parametersof a world constantly being reborn in struggleand with human reason as a normativeframework.

With all of his urgings that a broader, morehumane usage of the sociological imagina-tion be undertaken by his colleagues, Millsreserved for himself an ever-increasing reli-ance upon political instinct and media mes-saging. And in many times and issues thisserved him well. His coworker Rose Goldsen,a fine sociologist at Cornell and person in herown right, said Wright could go throughSpanish Harlem in a fast-traveling auto, andmake judgments and venture opinions onthe status of Puerto Rican immigrants toNew York that were more insightful andaccurate than those made by policymakersstudying ethnicity in the city for decades.He could do the same with respect to strug-gles between military personnel in LosAngeles and Mexican American immigrantsduring World War Two. This capacity tomake insightful and often proper urban judg-ments was a characteristic of Wright that didnot exactly endear him to his colleagues andproject directors. At times, as in the DecaturProject this talent caused Wright difficulties,such as demands for evidence that werehard for him to locate or produce. The war-time and postwar period in America wasone in which paid-for-hire research becamean important part of the rise of sociology toa new status as such. But the driving forceswere often not so much imagination as thecapacity to produce quick policy results.The need to satisfy terms of grants did notfit easily with the desire to serve as the clarionof the people writ large and presumablybeing served.

This duality was, to be sure, hardlyWright’s personal problem. Much of the pro-fession, in particular those marching underthe brand name of political sociology, facedthat issue with equal discomfort. The finalyears of his life, from 1958 to 1961, in whichThe Causes of World War Three and Listen

9 Irving Louis Horowitz, The New Sociology:Essays in Social Science and Social Theory, inHonor of C. Wright Mills. New York, NY:Oxford University Press, 1964, xv +512 pp.

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Yankee were produced, made it plain that acertain rock-bottom friction existed betweenthe sociological and the political. The Amer-ican public and the great majority of foreignpolicy gurus were not quite prepared to castequal blame for the Cold War on a democrat-ic capitalist society like America, and a total-itarian communist society like Soviet Russia.And while that same public was fascinated,even enthralled, by the story of the guerrillainsurgency that triumphed in Cuba, theretoo expert opinion was at best divided onthe implications of such a dictatorial regimein the Caribbean. Wright was not preparedto debate or for that matter argue with otherpeople with equal passions and probablygreater credentials, so his primary tacticwas simply to ignore or dismiss critics—atleast not in public discourse. The famousdebate arranged by the National Broadcast-ing Corporation between himself and AdolfA. Berle never came off, not becausesuch a debate was impossible to emergevictorious—indeed his substitute for theevening, Robert J. Alexander, more thanheld his own. But then again, that wasa debate between two scholars who knewLatin America well; two men rooted in therealities of social science far more than theurgings of personal ideology and utopianlongings.

The closer Wright came to the issues ofmoment in the Eisenhower decade, and thefirst flush of political change in the Kennedypresidency, the further he strayed from whatgave him his self-declared strength: the socio-logical imagination. He was gripped bymedia appeals to large publics as readers,agents promising a future lined with fortuneand fame and a capacity to become part of themedia world he did so much to uncover. Thiswas, after all, a time in which media studiesand communication research was at besta panel at an American Sociological Associa-tion meeting, not an independent branch ofsocial research now ten times the size of thesociological profession and still growing.Political sociology became a tug of warbetween two worlds that seemed to be head-ed in profoundly radical directions: politicalscience as the study of law, order, and sys-temic legitimacy adopted by elites andendorsed by masses, in contrast to sociologywhich increasingly has come to consider

politics as a vital instrument for those seekingto change or redirect the world.

It is as if Wright the sociologist saw himselfas providing utopian voice to those amor-phous but volatile masses. He called on thepublic space to make sociology a specialinstrument of social reconstruction. But inconsequence, he found himself at unbridge-able odds with those who viewed the politi-cal research field as a place of increasingprofessionalism and self-satisfaction. Thiswas not a contradiction Mills could possiblyresolve in social science terms, since it waspart of the fabric of contradictions that laidclaim on an America that even fifty years lat-er has yet to face much less resolve: the rela-tionship between a nation of enduringpolitical stability and the quality of sociallife for those caught up in a variety of class,racial, religious, and gender instabilities.The oft-heralded emotional make-up of theman from Texas only accentuated these largerdivisions within American life.

To reflect on Mills a full half-century afterhis death is to review the fate of a professionno less than a person: inherited values mov-ing in opposite directions among its practi-tioners. What was and still remains thepolicy charge for those of who care is theemergence of a sociology of knowledge ofa particular sort, a sociology of sociology.Self examination was never a strong suit inMills, and with the exception of a preciousfew, nor is it now in the profession assuch.10 Thus to take the time to examinethe life and work of this extraordinary figureis a worthwhile ongoing chore. In so doing,arguably, a semblance of the sociologicalimagination as it plays out on a broad

10 The honor roll of books on sociology by so-ciologists is small, but well worth examining.They include Larry T. Reynolds and JaniceReynolds, The Sociology of Sociology: Analysisand Criticism of the Thought, Research, EthicalFolkways of Sociology and Its Practitioners.New York; McKay, 1970, 438 pp.; Robert W.Friedrichs, A Sociology of Sociology. New York:The Free Press, 1970, 429 pp.; Joseph Lopreatoand Timothy Crippen, Crisis in Sociology, NewBrunswick and London, New Brunswick,1999; and Stanton C. Wheeler, Sociology of Soci-ology: How the Discipline is Being Taught Today.London and New York: Edwin Mellen Press,2006, 151 pp. would do for starters.

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political canvas will help us recapture thelost glories of a discipline that this unusualman helped us all to advance.

Note

This text was prepared for presentation as aplenary address for an International Confer-ence on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversaryof the death of C. Wright Mills in March 1962.The event was held at the University of Bergenin Norway, May 23–25, 2012. Rights reservedand assigned by the author.

Major Works of C. Wright Mills

The items written by C. Wright Mills thatherein follow are for generic identificationpurposes only—and not therefore page spe-cific. They are listed by the year of first pub-lication, and the initial publisher.

C. Wright Mills and H. H. Gerth (editors),From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1946, xi, 1

490 pp.

C. Wright Mills, with the assistance of HelenSchneider, The New Men of Power: America’sLabor Leaders. New York: Harcourt, Brace,1948, 323 pp.

C. Wright Mills, Clarence Senior, and RoseKohn Goldsen, The Puerto Rican Journey:New York’s Newest Migrants. Russell & Rus-sell: New York, 1950, xi 1 238 pp.

C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The AmericanMiddle Classes. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1951, xx 1 378 pp.

C. Wright Mills and Hans H. Gerth, Characterand Social Structure: The Psychology of SocialInstitutions. New York: Harcourt, Brace,1953, xxi 1490 pp.

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. New York:Oxford University Press, 1956, 423 pp.

C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World WarThree. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958.

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination.New York: Oxford University Press, 1959,234 pp.

C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolutionin Cuba. New York: Ballantine Books, 1960,192 pp.

C. Wright Mills, The Marxists. New York, DellPublishing Company, 1962, 480 pp.

C. Wright Mills, edited with an introductionby Irving Louis Horowitz, Power, Politicsand People: The Collected Essays of C. WrightMills. New York, Oxford University Press,1964, and Ballantine Books, 1963, 657 pp.

C. Wright Mills, edited with an introductionby Irving Louis Horowitz, Sociology and Prag-matism: The Higher Learning in America. NewYork: Paine-Whitman Publishers, 1964, andOxford University Press, 1965. 475 pp.

C. Wright Mills, edited with an introductionby Irving Louis Horowitz, De HombresSociales y Movimientos Polıticos. [Social Menand Political Movements] Mexico-Argentina-Espana: Siglo Veintuno Editores, 1969. 321pp. [in Spanish].

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SPECIAL ESSAY

Sociology’s Third Problem

CHARLES LEMERT

Yale [email protected]

Sociology is a numeric art. Its work is tomeasure differences, of which, in socialarrangements, there are many, few of themvisible to the naked eye. Sociology’s aesthet-ic pleasure, when it takes it, is to imaginehow they—these innumerable differences—come together, when they do. For all practi-cal purposes, everything social is measuredagainst everything else; hence the art.

The question to be asked of sociology,therefore, is what is its base number? It iscommonly assumed—given the ubiquity ofthe Cartesian coordinate system with its x/y axes—to be two; which is to say 2. Yet2-fold schemes and their multiples rest onthe least stable of all prime numbers.Even 5, for example, is more stable because,putting its 2 aside, there is left over a 3—probably the most stable of all numbers. A2, by contrast, is nothing but two 1s, where-in twoness (so to speak) encounters the riskthat one of its 1s could be negative, in whichcase, the remainder is nothing. Since, insocial life, we know that negatives areeverywhere at once, then common sensewould require that, sociologically speaking(and contrary to almost everything webelieve), social things cannot survive asthey have if they are essentially binary. Wesurvive; ergo: 3 is our prime. No one has putit better than Charles Sanders Peirce: ‘‘Bythe third I mean the medium or connectingbond between the absolute first and last.The beginning is first, the end second, themiddle third. The end is second, themeans third. The thread of life is a third;the fate that snips it, its second’’ (Peirce1931 [1875]: 170).

Yet, as is well known, and to an increasingextent much discussed, sociology, its neces-sary obligations to numeric work notwith-standing, remains improbably committed

to binary thinking—as in, for example,micro/macro or agency/structures and soon and so forth. The sociological dilemmawith binaries of this sort, and their kin, isthat they allow, at best, for extreme differen-ces, hence immutable distinctions, such asmicro-sociologies versus macro ones oractions versus their limiting structures;thereby, they fail to resolve the problemsfor which they were conceived in the firstplace. Given structures, pure and simple,then actions must be external to the pure pri-mary; and vice versa. Hence, without furthercomment on the obvious, the reason toexplore the concept of the third.

Peirce was both a founder of pragmatismand of an American line of social semiotics.Yet, his value to sociology has been relativelyneglected with some notable exceptions(from Wiley 1994 to Cossu 2011, for exam-ples). One of the stumbling blocks to sociol-ogy’s use of Peirce is the seeming oddness ofhis trinitarian theory of signs and meanings.Where sociologists have taken an interest inclassical semiotics they have tended to selectsuch binary concepts of meaning-making assignifier/signified, speech/language, orperformance/competence derived from Fer-dinand de Saussure (and, often withoutacknowledgement, Roman Jakobson). Jef-frey Alexander and his colleagues in andbeyond his Yale workshop on Cultural

De Trinitate, by Augustine of Hippo.Carthage, North Africa: Aurelius,Bishop of Carthage [de facto publisher],400–426? CE; The Trinity, translated byEdmund Hill. Brooklyn, NY: New CityPress, 1991. 471pp. O.P. paper. ISBN:9780911782967.






Sociology are well known for their persua-sive applications of a politically robust simu-lacrum of Saussure’s binarism to civilcultures and related matters (in, inter alia,Alexander 2006: 48–67). Yet, again, pleadingthe severe constraints of time and space, Iwill forgo further comment on these linesof development with the stipulation thata relatively recent writer like Peirce, familiarto moderns by his originating influence onpragmatism, offers at least a hint of the pro-ductive value of trinitarian over binarianapproaches to a whole range of topics frommeaning and culture, to sign making, thuseven to agency and structure. Famously,Peirce’s triad of the sign, its object, and itsinterpretant is an intriguing resource notleast of all because of its eerie similarity toa key passage in the principal book of thisreview. Peirce, like Augustine, argues thatexplanatory values ascribed to binary cou-plets are ultimately ruined without a third,more active, and practical force that navi-gates the straits between the endless sandsof particulars and the hard rock of absolutes:

A sign stands for something to the ideawhich it produces, or modifies. Or, it isa vehicle conveying into the mindsomething from without. That for whichit stands is called its object; that which itconveys, its meaning, and the idea towhich it gives rise, its interpretant. Theobject of representation can be nothingbut a representation of which the firstrepresentation is the interpretant. Butan endless series of representations,each representing the one behind, maybe conceived to have an absolute objectat its limit (Peirce 1931 [1875]: 171; com-pare Kockelman 2005).

Simply put, the Third (here, the interpre-tant) never stands alone yet is always tied tothe string of what sociologists might preferto call actions, thus to suggest that practicalactions on the plane of performance can neverbe conceived (nor, in fact, can they be mean-ingfully thought) apart from this third factorthat links the agent to an (absolute) structure.

Peirce was a true polymath in the sensethat he seemed to have a clear grasp ofevery branch of science, mathematics, andphilosophy in his day (1839–1914). His

idea of the Third arose from mathematicsand philosophy, still he did not miss thepoint that one of the (to him) endless instan-ces of thirdness was the Christian doctrineof God as a trinity to which he made pass-ing reference (Peirce 1935 [fragment, n.d.]:501–02]. It is hard for anyone—even thosenumbed by ritual acquaintance with thisdoctrine—to overlook the salience of theclosing words of the lines, just quoted, sum-marizing Peirce’s theory of signs, as lodgedin a series of representations ‘‘each repre-senting an absolute object at its limit.’’

Peirce aside, the common sociologicalpractice of overlooking religious ideas asa source of sociology’s conceptual work (asdistinct from their being objects of its study)is very probably a sequela of the field’s cul-turally normal disposition to favor binarymethods which, unfortunately, short-changethe historical evidence. The idea of structuraland structuring wholes (whether social orotherwise) would very likely have beenunthinkable had it not been for the longWestern history of entanglements with thecultures of gods, in particular with monothe-istic absolute deities as in the three Abraha-mic faiths. For absolutes of any kind (evensocially structured ones) to be thought theymust be mediated and mediations of what-ever kind can never be achieved with theblunt instrument of 2s. A 3 is necessary.While versions of a dominant yet mediatedgod are present in many modern and pre-modern world religions, the monotheismswith their system of special god-like proph-ets (Moses, Mohammad, Jesus the son—notto mention Abraham himself) have beenconsistently preoccupied with the other-worldly/this-worldly dilemma. Yahweh,Allah, and God the father were so starklytranscendent that they made some principleof historical mediation necessary; hence, thethreeness problem: sign, object, interpretant.The spirits and traditions of the god-likeprophets are the interpretants that keep thewhole thing moving along over time—much as, more abstractly, sociology employsmediating concepts like practices, rules,norms, socialization, habitus, recursivityand the like as interpretants between struc-tures and actions. Without them, all wouldbe lost between a sea of particulars and anunreachable horizon.

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In the early fifth century of the commonera, Augustine of Hippo’s De Trinitate (here-after, The Trinity) is, among other of hisworks, the first, and until Peirce, the onlyfull-blooded attempt to work through a trin-itarian social psychology of cultural and his-torical meanings. All the more surprising isthe fact that the famous Bishop of the RomanChurch in North Africa was first and fore-most a theologian, then a philosopher bybackground and training, and a social think-er only by accident of circumstance. Augus-tine was born in 354 CE in Thagaste, thena Numidian town, soon to come under theadministration of Rome, but destined to beoverrun by Vandals in 430, the year of hisdeath. Today, Thagaste is Souk Ahras innortheastern Algeria.

Augustine’s parents were of modestmeans yet committed to their son’s educa-tion. As a result, his primary language wasLatin rather than the local Numidian. Aswe know from his Confessions (397–398),Augustine, the boy, felt himself to be at looseends—tempted by lust, drawn to vagrantphilosophies, and repulsed by the harshpedagogical methods of his secondary stud-ies away from Thagaste. He quit the schoolin Madaura, to return home before studyingfurther in the Latin language in Carthage. Asa result he failed to learn Greek, a fact that isvariously offered to explain the depth of hislearning (focused deeply on Latin litera-tures, Roman and Christian—among others:Virgil, Cicero, Tertullian, Pelagius, Jerome,and his mentor in Milan, Ambrose); or, inthe view of others, the ease with which inhis youth he succumbed somewhat uncriti-cally to philosophical ideas then current inthe Latin-speaking world. Of these themost influential to his early formation wereManichaeism in his early years in NorthAfrica and Neo-Platonism later in his Milanyears (384–387). Thus, in the still impression-able years of adult life, he had given himselfover to two of the more binarian philoso-phies. Whatever the truth of Augustine’smono-lingual limitations, just as importantwere the circumstances of his times in thelast years of the Roman Empire.

Augustine’s most important crypto-sociological writing is De Civitate Dei contraPaganos (Concerning the City of God againstthe Pagans) or, popularly, The City of God.

This enormous, sprawling book was com-posed over a decade and a half from 413,just after the sack of Rome by Alaric to 427,on the eve of Augustine’s death and the col-lapse of Christian North Africa. Augustinelived through and wrote about one of themost important historical conjunctures inhuman history. It would be a stretch todescribe Augustine as a sociologist beforethe fact; yet, it is not an exaggerationto describe The City of God as a work ofsocial history of the moral troubles ofRome in its declining years. Thus the readerfinds such pithy condemnations (in HenryBettenson’s lively and much admired trans-lation) as: ‘‘Remove justice, and what arekingdoms but gangs of criminals on a largescale’’ (Book IV: 4). Which is followed bythe near-famous parable which Augustinepoached from Cicero:

For it was a witty and truthful rejoinderwhich was given by a captured pirateto Alexander the Great. The king askedthe fellow, ‘‘What is your idea, in infest-ing the sea?’’ And the pirate answeredwith uninhibited insolence, ‘‘Thesame as yours, in infesting the earth!But because I do it with a tiny craft,I’m called a pirate, because you havea might navy, you’re called an emper-or.’’ (Book IV: 5)

These are but samples of Augustine’ssociological attentions to this-worldly mat-ters of justice, evil, and politics—in respectto which his writings led recent writers totheories of social and political realism (nota-bly Reinhold Niebuhr 1941–1943; compareLemert 2011; also Elshtain 1995, Wolfe 2012).

Yet, the justification for a long review ofThe Trinity, a hugely more obscure bookthan City of God, rests not on the clues that,had he been ours, Augustine might havebeen a sociologist. Rather, The Trinity meritsour attentions because it engages riddlesthat still beset our field—from the near-oxymoronic confusions of the concept ofa social self to the impenetrable dark spacebetween structures and practical actions.How can a self, the most interior of humanaspects, be social? How does the individualalone or, even, in concert with those near athand, act in measurable consistency with

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immeasurable structural forces? Augus-tine’s The Trinity does not, to be sure, answerthese still troubling questions, but it does seta cairn along the path to a vantage fromwhich we might see them amid the lowlandbrush of binarian thinking. Plus which andcuriously, Augustine may in fact expose thetheoretical benefits of threeness even morecogently than did Peirce (Manetti 1993).

The Trinity (like The City of God) was writ-ten over a prolonged time (399–c.426) whichin part accounts for its strange organizationinto fifteen books, of which the first sevenare, unsurprisingly, concerned with theChristian doctrine of the trinity. This firstsection can be and has been (Matthews2002) set aside as less interesting to the gen-eral reader. On the other hand, Edmund Hill,the translator of the edition I chose to review,offers that the first half (Books I–VII) areessays, first, on the trinitarian texts in theChristian scriptures; thence of the theological,linguistic, and logical elements in the doc-trine of the trinity. Though the material allud-ing to linguistic and logical considerations(Books V–VII) anticipate what is to come inthe latter half, they are written in the mannerof scriptural proof texting. By startling con-trast, the second half (Books IX–XV) is anexplicit exposition of what today we mightcall the social psychological and cultural ele-ments of a philosophy of (in Peirce’s word)the Third. In Hill’s view, Book VIII serves asa short transitional essay that folds the twoparts back over one another (Hill 1991: 21–27). I would emphasize that the first half ofthe book, while as charmingly translated asthe entire book, is of lesser scientific interest(which is not say that it is of no interest).

The second half of The Trinity is a brashstatement of theories of the trinity that notonly anticipates Peirce but in certain waysimproves on his modern semiotic of mean-ing, language, and sign making. For exam-ple, the following astonishing lines appearin the crucial Chapter X on mental images:

Now, let us put aside for the moment theother things which the mind is certainabout as regards itself, and just discussthese three, memory, understanding,and will. . . . These three then, memory,understanding, and will, are not threelives but one life, nor three minds but

one mind. So it follows of course thatthey are not three substances but onesubstance. When memory is called life,and mind and substance, it is called sowith reference to itself; but when it iscalled memory it is called so with refer-ence to another. I can say the same aboutunderstanding and will; both under-standing and will are so called with ref-erence to another. But each of them is lifeand mind and being with reference toitself. For this reason these three [memo-ry, understanding, will] are one . . . withreference to self. . . . But they are threein that they have reference to each other(Book X: 4, 17–18; Hill: 298).

To be sure, the skeptic would recoil frommention of three substances in one (nec tressubstantiae, sed una substantia) which has allthe glamour of a creedal recitation. Even sothe religious code here fades before a secularpurpose. Not only that but the memory-understanding-will conceptual series retainssuperficial traces of Platonic subdivisions ofthe psychos (or today, the psyche; then, mindor soul)—these no doubt leakages from hisNeo-Platonic days in Italy.

Yet, appearances aside, there is one keydifference from anything that had appearedto that point: memory. ‘‘When memory iscalled life, and mind and substance, it iscalled so with reference to itself; but whenit is called memory it is called so with refer-ence to another.’’ (Memoria quippe, quod vita etmens et substantia dicitur, ad se ipsam dicitur;quod vero memoria dicitur, ad aliquid relativedicitur [emphases added].) Any who remem-ber their high school Latin better than I docan judge the friendliness of Hill’s transla-tion. Still, anyone can see through theEnglish words to Augustine’s original andsubtle meaning. Where some interpretersclaim that memoria (memory) is a simple cog-nate for mens (mind), Augustine (and hereHill) spare the difference both in the locution‘‘is called’’ (dicitur) and in the plainly statedexception that memory can be called life ormind when the reference is the one remem-bering but memory as such must refer toanother.

It is also plain enough that Augustine’strinitarian concept of the self as threedynamic actions in one embraces or, at least,

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allows for a distinctive social element. Mem-ory, understanding, and will are each them-selves but also each and all in social relationsto the others. This to be sure is no more anunambiguous sociological trinity than isPeirce’s concept of the Third. Still, it may,like Peirce’s Third, serve us well. For one,it exposes the futility of binarism. The self(to use a term unique to our times andunavailable to Augustine) is not and cannotbe a straightforward ‘‘I’’ / ‘‘Me’’ dialogue (inGeorge Herbert Mead’s vocabulary) or, moregenerally an Ego/Other relation (in WilliamJames’ formula. With rare and arguableexception, all of the classical formulae(even W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of the double con-sciousness of the two souls of the AmericanNegro) lapse into overly strong discrimina-tions at the crucial point. To speak of the‘‘Me’’ or more generally of a social self asthe social factor in the formative process ofan individual’s identity is to create a distinc-tion that cannot breathe in the suffocatingbinary—neither by Mead’s airy dialogic inwhich the Me of one moment is the I of thenext nor by Freud’s more abstract theoryof introjections as it was adapted by TalcottParsons (1952). At a stretch, among thinkersat the turn of the previous century, the sole(if unselfconscious) concept of thirdnesswould be Freud’s tripartite taxonomy ofthe psyche, if the Ego is taken as the inter-pretant of the conflict between Superegoand Id. Only Peirce nearly a generationearlier stands alone as, if not heir, at leastlatter day apparition of Augustine’s socialpsychology.

Augustine’s theoretical method in TheTrinity transposed a theological doctrineinto a formal trinitarian theory by insertingmemory as the active tertium quid in theself/other, inside/outside, individual/socialcouplets as in the following:

So too we absorb the images of bodilythings through the sense of the bodyand transfer them somehow to thememory, and from them we fabricateimages with which to think things wehave not seen, whether differentlyfrom what they actually are or bya chance in a million as they are; butwhenever we correctly approve or dis-approve of something represented by

such images we have the inescapableconviction that we make our judgmentof approval or disapproval within our-selves by altogether different ruleswhich abide unchangeably above ourminds (Book IX: 2, 10).

There could not be a better, more succinct,if abstract, statement of the pragmatismPeirce and others were inventing a good mil-lennium-and-a-half later in North America.At the same time, Augustine broke thehold of doctrines that had flourished in histime—notably the Neo-Platonic ideologythat the mind is real even as in this life it istrapped in the body. For Augustine, bycontrast, the mind uses the body to imaginethe body without strict philosophical rulesof necessity. For us, just imagine how muchmore useful C. Wright Mills’ sociologicalimagination slogan would have been hadhe, Mills, read more Augustine, less socio-logical pragmatism. For Augustine thegenius of freedom from material proof isgained not by mental discipline but by mem-ory, hence: imagination. Memory thus is farmore than interior consciousness. Memory,he argues, is history:

Thus when I call to mind the rampartsof Carthage which I have seen, and alsoform a picture of those at Alexandriawhich I have not seen, and prefersome of these forms in my imaginationto others, I make a rational preference.The judgment of truth is shining vigor-ously from above, and it is firmly sup-ported by the wholly unbiased rules ofits own proper law, and even if it issomewhat veiled by a kind of cloud ofbodily images still it is not entangledand confused by them. (ibid.)

We require the embodied things we haveseen to imagine those we have not. Familiar-ity is the interpretant of the abstract. Thus inAugustine’s Roman world, references toramparts familiar and unfamiliar to himillustrate both the denotative value of thesign ‘‘rampart’’ or any other object repre-sented in language and also the connotativevalue of a prominent figure in the Romanworld, then teetering on the verge of ruin.In our days, these ramparts are memorials

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(so to speak); in his, they were already repre-sentations destined to endure as mental andcultural repositories of worlds that would beremembered long after Rome and RomanNorth Africa would disappear. Signs, thus,carry forward their meaningful objects bybecoming interpretants of what came before.Historical truth, like all social structures,resides not in the data but in the imagina-tion, where memory joins the past, thus tomake history possible.

Charles Norris Cochrane in Christianityand Classical Culture—which, long after itspublication in 1939, remains the greateststudy of religion and classical cultures—cuts quick to the undiminished importanceof Augustine’s trinitarian thinking: ‘‘The dis-covery of personality was, at the same time,the discovery of history’’ (1939: 457). Hence,correlatively, since history is collective mem-ory, then memory is identity. To which, inour time, Julian Barnes, the novelist, in Noth-ing to Be Frightened Of, remarks: ‘‘You arewhat you have done; what you have doneis in your memory; what you rememberdefines who you are; when you forget yourlife you cease to be, even before your death’’(2008: 138). Equally so, of the one and the all.Barnes adds, thus, that identity is memory;as memory is identity.

Correlatively, even William James’ axiomon personal identity entails, if implicitly,both memory and a robust social sensibility.‘‘I am the same self I was yesterday’’ (James1981 [1890]: 316). To be a self, one must rec-ognize one’s self—in the most intimate ofsocial relations, that between the self as otherto ego. Yet, for James and those amongAmerican pragmatists who followed himrather than Peirce, memory was neverregarded for its necessary function as theinterpretant of any and all recognitions.Without memory, there is no history; with-out history, collective society has no identity.Yet, James was, in a certain sense, still caughtin what had been, since medieval scholasti-cism, an Aristotelian psychology of memory.

Among sociologists, it was Goffman inStigma (1963) who, more analytically eventhan Maurice Halbwachs in La memorie col-lective (1950, posthumous), decomposed thecentrality of memory as the necessary thirdforce linking social and individual life.Many will balk at the suggestion that

Goffman’s method was trinitarian. Yet inthe early works, his ideas of face work andself as presentation clearly required thenotion, if not a formal concept, of an inter-preting mediator. Otherwise, the front/back stage figure would have remained anabstraction when it was clearly a frameworkfor an essential and omnipresent social pro-cess. Most explicitly, Stigma offers a trinitari-an theory of identity as a dynamic socialprocess by which information in respect todiscrediting personal identity markers iscontrolled or not. For Goffman, the activethird aspect between social and personalidentities is ego identity—decidedly nota faculty of the interior self but the effectiveaffective element by which discrediting per-sonal information is managed. Not inciden-tally the affections are on Peirce’s list ofthirds as ‘‘that by which I feel my neighbor’sfeelings’’ (Peirce 1931 [1875]: 171; comparePeirce 1934 [1903]). Still, in Goffman, egoidentity, more than either social or personal,is that identity learned and rememberedfrom social experience (Goffman 1963: 106).Goffman, whose University of Chicago yearsare too often taken as a reason to assimilatehim to the weak pragmatism of the SymbolicInteractionist school, was in his day the sin-gle most important American trinitarian the-orist. In its own way perverse, Goffman’stheory of identity is, first, necessarily socialbut, second, something quite beyond thebinarism found in Durkheim (Goffman’sone acknowledged classical resource) andAmerican social theory down to the presenttime.

Naturally, one is exposed to embarrass-ment upon attempts like this one to redrawthe map of intellectual history in order toalign Goffman, possibly Freud, certainlyPeirce, and Augustine. In defense, the linefrom Goffman back through James to Peirceis not so hard to imagine. At the least, itbrings Peirce’s third into the relative present.What then of the leap in time back toAugustine?

These days, to refresh is to click a buttonthat for an invisible instant dims the presentscreen to offer who knows what in its place.We hope it will be a version of what weknow. Hence, for starters, Augustine’s theo-ry of memory is, if not a refresh button, atleast a flash stick that stores the familiar by

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which we are able to recognize the unfamil-iar. Even the universe of digital notations is,first, storable, and second, decodable. Themediating code is the third by which theconcrete and abstract are put to practicaluses they can only effect together. Operatingcodes are always trinitarian. If so, then tootheories of all kinds; not to mention the oper-ating rules by which we individual ordinar-ies navigate the strange, intrusive world ofstructures.

References

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2006. The Civil Sphere. NewYork, NY: Oxford University Press.

Barnes, Julian. 2008. Nothing to Be Frightened Of.New York, NY: Alfred Knopf.

Cochrane, Charles Norris. 1957 [1939]. Christianityand Classical Culture: A Study of Thought andAction from Augustus to Augustine. New York,NY: Oxford University Press.

Cossu, Andrea. 2011. ‘‘The Encyclopedia and theSemantic/Pragmatic Divide.’’ Boston, MA[Department of Sociology; University of Mas-sachusetts-Boston]: International Conferenceon Italian Social Theory, unpublished.

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1995. Augustine and the Lim-its of Politics. Notre Dame, IN: Notre DameUniversity Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Man-agement of Spoiled Identity. New York, NY:Simon & Schuster.

Hill, Edmund. 1991. ‘‘The Structure and Contentsof De Trinitate,’’ in The Trinity. Translated byEdmund Hill, O. P. Brooklyn, NY: New CityPress, 21–27.

James, William. 1981 [1890]. The Principles of Psy-chology, I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universi-ty Press.

Kockelman, Paul. 2005. ‘‘The Semiotic Stance.’’Semiotica 157/1: 233–304.

Lemert, Charles. 2011. Why Niebuhr Matters. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press.

Manetti, Giovanni. 1993. Theories of the Sign inClassical Antiquity. Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press.

Matthews, Gareth B., ed. 2002. Augustine/ On theTrinity, Books 8-15. Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1941–43. Nature and Destiny ofMan. New York, NY: Scribner’s.

Parsons, Talcott. 1952. ‘‘The Superego andthe Theory of Social Systems,’’ Psychiatry 15:15–24.

Peirce, Charles Saunders. 1931 [1875]. ‘‘Third-ness,’’ in Collected Papers of Charles SandersPeirce, Vol. I, Principles of Philosophy. Editedby Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

———. 1934 [fragment; n.d.]. ‘‘Religion,’’ in Col-lected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol.VI, Scientific Metaphysics. Edited by CharlesHartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

———. 1935 [1903]. ‘‘Lectures on Pragmatism,’’ inCollected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce.Pragmatism and Pragmaticism. Edited byCharles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wiley, Norbert. 1994. The Semiotic Self. Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press.

Wolfe, Alan. 2011. Political Evil: What It Is and Howto Combat It. New York, NY: Knopf.

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Documents

DOI: 10.1177/0094306112449607 EDITOR … · The Outlook Company, then issued in 1912 by Doubleday, Page and Co. in Garden City, New Jersey, and reprinted once, in 1984. Booker Taliaferro