HUMAN STUDIES 5, 1-12 (1982)
On the Possibility of Society: Classical Sociological Thought DEENA WEINSTEIN Department of Sociology DePaul University
MICHAEL A. WEINSTEIN Department of Political Science Purdue University
The seriousness of an inquiry is determined by the depth and significance of the question that it poses. A tradition of thought is sustained by a continual renewal over many generations of a fundamental doubt, a conscious disquiet that is not stilled, perhaps because the mind does not and cannot, on account of its finitude, marshal the resources to provide an adequate resolution. The quality of thought is a function of the quality of doubt. The more important the question raised by inquirers, the more thoroughly will their wits and energies be mobilized to answer it, and the more critical they will be of one another's responses. When the importance of a query is at its maximum the very lives of those who pose it will be drawn into its resolution. At such a high level of attention, the boundaries between private life and public function, individual interest and social obligation, will collapse, not by defect or privation, but in the service of a comprehensive integrity. All of the investigator's resources, conscious and unconscious, will be deployed to respond to the question; and it will be impossible to determine whether the inquirer subserves the project or the reverse. Such a genuine synthesis occurs only when a significant question is raised, because only such a question demands the commitment of the totality of experience for an approach to an adequate response. Only a few inquiries among all of those undertaken in society are serious in the sense that they require for their fulfillment a dedication of the inquirer's life to their service. The leading example of such a serious inquiry and the one which provides all others with significance and depth by contact with it is philosophy, particularly metaphysics and cosmology. It was a philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1962), who called attention in the twentieth century to the great extent to which the very structure of life is formed by the character of questions that guide inquiry. According to Heidegger, the fundamental question of philosophy--Why are there things rather than not?---is, when it is genuinely raised, the medium of authentic existence. Meditation on this question, for Heidegger, evokes wonder at Being for
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the one who raises it. Such wondering doubt is, itself, a mode of existence, which disposes the philosopher to Being in a special manner, in an attitude of thanksgiving and gratitude. The Heideggerian philosopher is not a technical specialist but a person delivered to a vocation. By raising the question of the meaning of Being, the Heideggerian philosopher challenges others who suppress wonder in themselves, to recover a proper relation to Being. An inquiry with a similar seriousness to that of Heidegger was undertaken during the same historical period by Alfred North Whitehead (1955) who, in his Process and Reality, taught that the fundamental question for thought is cosmological: How do the many become one? For Whitehead, the basic terms of discourse are not, as in Heidegger's thought, "Being" and "Nothing," but "cosmos" and "chaos." Whiteheadian wonder is evoked by the presence of a cosmos, or of an order of experience, which does not explain its own necessity. The coherence of experience, imperfect as it is, may be contrasted with a possible chaos or formlessness, which often frays the edges of consciousness and even disorders its center. Just as Heidegger's philosophical opponents are those thinkers who assert that Being is merely the most abstract of concepts, a mere word denominating any-thing, so Whitehead's adversaries are those who claim that unity is an a priori condition of the cosmos. Both Heidegger and Whitehead call attention to the character of experience as an achievement, which is not something to be taken for granted. Heidegger, the "fundamental ontologist," wonders at the appearance of entities and searches, their foundation in Being. Whitehead, the "cosmologist," wonders at the coherence, consistency, and integrity of things, and seeks to explain it. Both great metaphysicians raise their questions in terms of a radical contrast. For Heidegger, Being is etched on Nothing. For Whitehead, cosmos is interpreted against the background of chaos. The thinking of both Heidegger and Whitehead has in common the evocation of contingency in its fullest sense. In their very questioning is presupposed a scope for thought beyond that tarovided by the empirical sciences. For an empirical science the object of inquiry is positive in the sense that it is the unquestioned starting point for investigation. The experimental sciences do not question the possibility of their objects, but instead attempt to determine the precise relations, insofar as precision can be achieved, among observable states of those objects. An experimental or empirical science may, indeed, question its initial object by postulating entities of which it is composed, but it does not wonder at the contingency of that object. Modem science, in fact, may be understood as a kind of thinking that aims at eliminating the attitude of wonder and at substituting for wonder technical control over things. As Emile Durkheim (1964) noted in The Division of Labor, the development of scientific activity consists in the specialization of inquiries determined by the precise and restricted definition of objects. Specialization makes objects manageable and manipulable, bringing them under conscious control. As the degree of manipulability increases, however, the seriousness of inquiry dissipates, because the object is no longer significant enough to call forth the complete
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resources of personality. The more positive a science becomes, the more precisely the relations among the states of its objects are defined, the less contact that science has with philosophy. The consequence of the detachment of the special sciences from philosophy is their attachment to and dependence on the functional organizations of modem complex society. In essence, the transition from Medieval to modem science is a transfer of dependence of inquiry on the Church, which suppressed wonder with belief, to dependence of inquiry on functional organizations, which suppress wonder with technique. During the several centuries in which the process of transfer occurred and in which the organizations that the completion of the process required were developed, the empirical sciences enjoyed an independence of inquiry and a reciprocity with philosophy. In the twentieth century, both the independence and the reciprocity have been brought to an end. At the antipodes of investigation grounded in wondering doubt is that guided by the impulse to "puzzle-solving." The activities of "normal science," in which inquirers direct their attention to specific problems that appear within a conceptual scheme that they accept without question, lead to the separation of personality from inquiry. (See, for a fuller explanation of "normal science" as "puzzlesolving," Kuhn, 1962.) "Puzzle-solving" activity is the basis for the metaphors of game, play, and fun which characterize so many conversational accounts of their work by scientists, particularly those in the social fields. The images of "playing around" with data, "fooling around" with problems not only evince a lack of respect for one's work and for oneself, but refer more deeply to the fact that one is free from one's work, that it is not compelling enough to elicit a commitment, that it can be picked up and put down at will. The puzzle-solving investigator has a negative freedom with regard to inquiry, the freedom "to take it or leave it," not the positive freedom of voluntary and wholehearted commitment to the resolution of a significant question. Engagement in serious inquiry, because it calls forth the full resources of life, generates for investigators the belief that their efforts are irreplaceable, that they are making a unique contribution. Even if their aim is universal validity for their work, even if, in principle, others could be substituted for them, there are in fact very few, if any, equal to the same task. The puzzle-solvers, on the contrary, know that any of an army of researchers could substitute for them. One of the inquiries to have detached itself most recently from philosophy is sociology. The detachment, in fact, is not yet complete and may never be carded out thoroughly. During the 1970s, within the discipline of sociology, perspectives with close connections to philosophy, such as phenomenology, critical theory, neo-Marxism, pragmatic naturalism, and structuralism, have been revived as alternatives to the predominant positivistic approaches. The resistance to the thorough-going constitution of sociology as a positive science, patterned on the model of the experimental or natural sciences, shows a widespread unwillingness to confine inquiry into society merely to the determination of the regularities in the
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dynamics of observable phenomena. Coincident with the reconsideration of nonbehavioral perspectives has been increased attention to and interest in the work of the "classical sociologists," such as Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber. (See, for example, Giddens, 1971). Historically, the generation of the classical sociologists straddled the boundary between the philosophical interpretation of society and the positive study of social phenomena. Part of their work overlaps with the domain of modem speculative philosophy containing, in particular, detailed reflection on the components and constitution of human knowledge. Another aspect of their work comprises appeals for the application of a naturalscientific method to sociological inquiry and pioneering attempts to devise such applications. For most of the twentieth century, especially in the United States, the second aspect of classical sociology, the natural-scientific tendency, has gained the greatest attention, whereas the speculative phase, except in the work of several figures, most notably Talcott Parsons, has been downgraded, if not ignored. The present discussion is an attempt to recover the speculative dimension of classical sociology through a reflection on its fundamental question. Sociology, conceived as a serious inquiry which is capable of calling forth the complete personality of the investigator, is based on wondering doubt about the possibility of society itself. The question raised by classical sociologists, who inherited the legacy of early-modern social philosophy, is "How do the many individuals constitute a coherent order with one another?" The query of classical sociology, then, is analogous to the Whiteheadian problem of how the many become one. The wonder cultivated by modem social thought is evoked by the more-orless complete order of common life which exists among large collections of individuals, who are, in some radical way, separate from one another. Thus, classical sociology does not take society for granted, but contrasts it with its possible absence or breakdown. The contrast between the presence of society and the lack of society is most apparent in the "social-contract" thinkers of the early-modem period, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, each of whom compared civil society, in which they participated, to a "state of nature" composed of separate individuals. The hallmark of early-modern social thought, then, was a discourse on the founding of society, particularly of its political aspect. The rules of the early-modern discourse did not require that the thinker participating in it demonstrate the literal truth of a particular account of the passage from state of nature to civil society, but demanded a justification for social bonds, especially those guaranteed by governmental coercion. The orders of historical genesis and of moral justification, which have been so sharply separated in contemporary Anglo-American social thought, were fused by the early-modern social thinkers, who believed that observations about what human nature " i s " had relevance to, or even more strongly, had implications for how human beings "ought" to conduct themselves. Although the contrast between the presence and lack of society is most clearly apparent in the work of early-modern social thinkers, it is also of great importance
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for the classical sociologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Classical sociology differs in form from the more speculative thought of the period preceding the French Revolution. This is not because it eliminates a comparison between the social and the nonsocial, but because it locates the nonsocial within society, rather than prior to it. For example, Durkheim's analysis of " a n o m y " shows how society itself carded within its own dynamics the possibility of its breakdown. The possibility of a breakdown for Durkheim highlights the dynamics of the constitution of society, especially the "collective consciousness." (Durkheim, 1964) Similarly, Max Weber's (Gerth & Mills, 1946) discussion of "rationalization" is based upon the projection of an abstract social order in which human relations are fully externalized according to technical imperatives and legal forms. Max Scheler's (Ranly, 1966) "principle of solidarity," the "intrinsic moral religious bond of unity" grounding a community of persons is contrasted to relations of mutual suspicion and detraction springing from the phenomenon of ressentiment. Finally, Georg Simmel (1968), in his "The Conflict in Modem Culture" projects an image of the human situation in which individuals are bottled up in their own lives. This is a condition that might be appropriately called "vital solipsism," and, thus, have lost all meeting grounds with one another. The more ambitious theorizing about society which has occurred in the mid-twentieth century has thrived upon the contrast between social and nonsocial modes of human existence. For example, Talcott Parsons's (1969) "structural-functionalism" carried forward Durkheim's observations about "the cult of the individual" in modem societies, whereas the "critical theorists" of the Frankfurt School have concentrated their attention on the nature and consequences of rationalization. Herbert Marcuse (1964) noted the disappearance of the ideal dimension of social thinking from twentieth-century positivism, but he did not call attention to the equally important muting of the nonsocial aspect of social thinking. Social thought, at its fullest, is three-dimensional, not two-dimensional. It cultivates, from one viewpoint, wonder that there is society at all, that the many have been composed into any unity. It cultivates, from a second standpoint, dissatisfaction with society as it is, in terms of what society ought to be. The appropriate attitude of social thinkers, then, would be one of "wondering rebellion" or rebellious wonder." The present discussion is more concerned with the place of wonder in sociological inquiry than with that of rebellion, not because the second is less important than the first, but because the first has been ignored by most twentieth-century social thinkers. Wonder is eliminated from social thought not only by those who criticize society as it is from the perspective of an ideal of what it should be, but also by those who believe that the starting point for inquiry into society should be the "commonsense" or "everyday" world of ongoing relations. Gerd Brand (1973) has noted that some contemporary sociologists who follow in the line of Alfred Schutz often confuse the "life-world" of Husserlian phenomenology with the "everyday world." Brand argues that "taken as found on one level only," the
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concept of life-world "becomes flat, as flat for instance as the everyday world with which it is often confused." Brand claims that Husserl does not allow "theoretical constructs" to "thematize the life-world as such." The life-world is an "infinite world which is given to us in finitude," a "pole which we can only continuously approach." Brand, then, critiques, from within the phenomenological tradition, the one-dimensionality of sociologies that are founded on "everydayness." His critique parallels, in a key of transcendental phenomenology, the present, more existential discussion. For example, Brand argues that sociality is constituted by the " a c t " of communication, "the constitution of agreement in personal reciprocal relations and reciprocal comprehension." Communicative agreement "establishes the boundary between my surrounding world and other 'worlds.' " The surrounding or practical everyday world, though it has an "imposing, intrusive, and encompassing aspect," should not stand for the life-world, which is a concrete and meaningful, but "unthematic"whole. The function of wonder in social inquiry is to call attention to the constitution of society as a special reality among others, a reality which is revealed for what it is by reflection on its lack. Insofar as such a comprehensive reflection cannot be undertaken, there is a failure of speculative imagination. The reality of society is then taken for granted, and its being, as a process of achieving unity, is ignored. Therefore, the deeper processes of its constitution, the processes which are omnipresent, are not observed. For example, Durkheim (1964) illuminated the nature of social solidarity, both mechanical and organic, by contrast with " a n o m y . " The "collective consciousness" only appears as what it is, in its independence of private will, when it is abstracted from that private will. Equally, Simmel's (1950) " f o r m s " are defined most fully in contrast with the fluency and solipsism of intraorganic experience. (See also Weingartner, 1959). In contemporary sociology, some of the research of ethnomethodologists has gone far to show how society is an achieved unity. For example, Don Zimmerman (1969) showed how the interpretation of documents by social caseworkers evinces a "continual interplay between the routine and the problematic, the taken-for-granted use of documents and the occasioned accounts which make their use observable as rational procedure." Classical sociology investigates the processes by which society is constituted as a special sort of reality or mode of being. It is able to conduct this inquiry by forming conceptions of the lack of society which are drawn from observation of society's failure to be what it is, a unification of the many, and from imaginative projections of that failure into "ideal types." The root of sociological wonder is the contra-position of "chaos" and "cosmos," which was first expressed in the West by Thomas Hobbes's contrast between "the war of all against all" in the "state of nature," and the civil society formed by the contract of each with all to acknowledge a common sovereign. Of the two great contrapositions of modem metaphysics, "Being" and "nothing," and "cosmos" and "chaos," sociological wonder is grounded on the second because society as an object of study is insufficient to support ontological inquiry.
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The Heideggerian question--Why are there entities rather than nothing?---cannot be posed with specific regard to society. Society is one entity among others and, from the viewpoint of Heidegger's "fundamental ontology," it is no more the foundation of the other entities to which it may be contrasted than are those entities its foundation. Fundamental ontology is concerned with the meaning of Being, not with the relations among entities or among orders of entities, all of which appear or arise within the context of Being, the only limit of which is "nothing." There is a sense, then, in which Heidegger's wonder is more primordial than that of Whitehead, who takes "Being" for granted and, hence, proposes that the prime concern of the speculative philosopher be the analysis of the res vera, the "true thing," the "actual entity," the building block of reality. Within Whitehead's framework of thought, there are variations among entities in accordance with their forms and degrees of organization. "Cosmos" and "chaos" are, for Whitehead, relative terms and, thus, this kind of thinking allows for the evocation of wonder not only about the order of experience itself, but also about the order of distinct kinds of experience, such as that of society. Whitehead's cosmos is formed by a process of integrating diverse experiences into wholes against a tendency to dispersion. Integration takes effort and the higher levels of integration, for example, human society, need, for their maintenance, even greater efforts toward harmonization than the lower physical, chemical, and organic levels. Sociological wonder, then, when it is evoked in the kind of metaphysical context set up by Whitehead, is a specific type or example of wonder about order in the background of possible disorder. Here Talcott Parson's (1949) idea, advanced in The Structure of SociaIAction, that the problem of modem sociology is "the problem of order," first broached by Hobbes, is consistent with the more general Whiteheadian suggestion that the basic philosophical problem is the problem of the possibility of cosmos. In both Whitehead's cosmology and in classical sociology, there is a sense in which "order" is not merely a descriptive but also a normative term. In Whitehead's metaphysics, " G o d " performs the function of "envisaging" an absolute order of possibilities in terms of their grades of value. Insofar as things form a cosmos, they approximate to the absolute valuation of possibility. Order, for Whitehead, then, is coincident with goodness. No particular order can be evil in itself, though some particular orders may be more limited than others or may interfere with the realization of more inclusive orders and, therefore, may be relatively evil. For Whitehead, as for thinkers in the tradition of Western rationalism in general, evil is a privation of goodness. Classical sociological thought, for the most part, accepts as regulative and often as an unquestioned and constitutive principle the idea that order is aprimafacie good. In the thought of Karl Marx, for example, it is not order which is critiqued but a specific form of partial order that has the consequence of creating chaos in economic production and distribution. The structured class conflict itself introduces order into the chaotic relations of production and, of course, is supposed to generate a more inclusive and perfected order,
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one which represents human interest and not merely class interest. Similarly, Durkheim held that morality is intrinsic to social order and that breaches of solidarity were breaches of morality. His inquiries were regulated by an idea of "social health," which contained both normative and positive components. The notion that no particular order can be evil itself, but is evil only in relation to a wider good, implies the judgment that orders such as Stalinism and Nazism are not unqualifiedly evil. Some limited good may occur for certain groups within such otherwise predatory and destructive orders, a recognition which only deepens the problem of evil in society and points up sharply how, in the terms of the present discussion, the attitude of "wonder" should be taken in conjunction with that of "rebellion." Behind the acceptance by classical sociologists of the principle that social order is a primafacie good is a commitment to the endurance and the sustenance of society. It is the commitment of the sociologist to be solidary with society, in the sense of calling the attention of people to the ways in which they are dependent on one another which unites the classical sociologists despite their varying doctrines of the forms that interdependence takes and how it arises. In contemporary social thought, for example, Christopher Lasch (1979) remains in the classical tradition by revising the critique of competitive individualism to include a "narcissistic" individualism which, while noncompetitive, avoids acknowledgment of social interdependence. The project of classical sociology, which is anchored as a calling in wonder that many individuals, each one an independent center of judgment, are unified with one another in persisting relations, reaches fulfillment in dedication to the moral perfection of social order, which, in any actual instance, contains moral elements. Yet, the dedication to the perfection of society stands as much at the origins of the project of classical sociology as does wonder. The three dimensions of classical sociology, the vision of the lack of society, the description ofthe dynamics of present and past societies, and the projection of a moral ideal for society, are, for the classical thinkers, closely interrelated. For the classical sociologists, society is a moral phenomenon, not only because societies include among their components systems of morality, but because social order is itself a moral condition which has been more or less perfected. Society, under this interpretation is an intrinsic good. The wonder of the classical sociologist is not the ontological wonder of Heidegger, which is expressly intended to clear inquiry of moral categories, but a moral wonder or, to use of Heidegger's central terms, a "concernful" wonder, a wonder infused by " c a r e . " Only in the light of the preoccupation of many twentieth-century thinkers with the sharp separation of prescriptive from descriptive statements does it become clear that a moral commitment to the project of demonstrating society to be a moral fact is presupposed by classical sociology. The inquiry of classical sociologists, then, is not presuppositionless, but is formed by a calling which is capable of eliciting a person's full mental resources. Classical sociology stands somewhere between medicine, which seeks its norm in the spontaneous functioning of
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the organism and its membership in a species, and an ethic of rational freedom grounded in the self-conscious individual's free judgment. Some of the classical sociologists, most notably Durkheim, were more "medical" in their approach, guiding their work by conceptions of "social health," whereas others, such as Simmel, were more "rationalistic," stressing the more voluntaristic aspects of social relations. However, whether stress was placed on spontaneism or voluntarism, there was a commitment to society as an entity which is most fully itself, which achieves its essence when the moral elements which are immanent to it have been brought to their greatest development. It is, indeed, conceivable that an investigator would study the grounds of the constitution of society either without any commitment to its maintenance and perfection, or with the commitment to aid in its destruction. However, such an inquirer would, if the classical sociologists are correct, have to understand society as a moral phenomenon in order to study it justly. There would be no formal contradiction involved in a neutral or a hostile commitment to inquiry into the founda¢ions of society. However, the possibility of such a commitment is abstract. Classical sociological inquiry is ruled effectively by love for its object, society. Love here does not mean Eros in its vital fullness, but what Baruch Spinoza called "intellectual love," a kind of desire which does not aim to possess its object, a form of sublimated Eros. An echo of Spinoza's intellectual love is found in contemporary sociology in Kurt Wolfffs (1976) idea of the epistemological moment of "surrender," which he defines as a "cognitive love" involving suspension of prejudice, openness to novelty, and exposure to risk. Wolff's project is close to that of the present discussion in that it is based on the commitment to study the human being as a "mixed phenomenon" characterized by a polar tension between the generality of species being and the uniqueness of the person. The root of WolfFs wisdom is that if the inquirer is not in a mood of cognitive love, the fullness of knowledge will not become available--the richness of the "catch" is proportional to the depth of the "surrender." The concernful wonder, on which classical sociology as a serious inquiry is based, is the mood which evokes and is sustained by the love for society. There is, in classical sociology, an irreducible element of Auguste Comte's humanitarianism, which in such mature and critical thinkers as Durldaeim, Weber, Simmel, Leonard Hobhouse, George Herbert Mead, J. Ortega y Gasset, and Gaetano Mosca, is transformed from a substitute for traditional religious belief into a critique of social disorganization and an appeal for social responsibility in terms of an ideal of the voluntary commitment of each to care for and make more just and inclusive the system of interdependence in which all participate. The love for society need not guide inquiry into society when the inquirer is a puzzle-solver who takes for granted the being of society as a set of objective data and conducts studies on the basis of the selection of some of those data as entities which merely are what they appear to be, as positive entities or "raw facts". There is no more personal commitment demanded of the behavioral or positivistic inquirer to the
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object of study than there is of any technical fuctionary to the object subjected to manipulation. Love for society is not required of the sociologist who chooses not to question the spontaneity of "everydayness" or "commonsense," or of the social critic who declares present social arrangements to be thoroughly evil and without any redeeming characteristics. Strictly positivistic sociology, whether it be grounded epistemologically in logical empiricism or more broadly in a phenomenology of the commonsense world lacks both wonder and rebellion. A purely utopian criticism, which advocates an entirely new human nature, is superior to positivism because it includes, at least, an element of rebellion, but wonder is absent from it. There is, at present in Western sociology, no approach which is centered in wonder but which lacks a component of rebellion. Pure wonder at society is, perhaps, best exemplified in Hegel's thought, for which hsitory was the "concrete universal." Hegel's thought is at the juncture between speculative philosophy and systematic sociology. His wonder is grounded on the speculative project of "theodicy," but his method of justifying God's ways to human beings is through the analysis of concrete social change. The idea of the "cunning of reason"(Hegel, 1956, 33) which "sets the passions to work for itself" is an attempt to capture the spontaneous process of solidarity and its development, rationalizing that solidarity so that a rebellious attitude is eliminated from historical inquiry. In one way or another, post-Hegelian thought about society has tempered the accepting attitude of wonder with concern and with opposition or rebellion against things as they are. Contemporary efforts to remove a critical element from all ontological moods and, thus, do not endeavor to cultivate any one of them. The foundation of classical sociology in a mood of concernful wonder and an attitude of wondering rebellion points to the dual nature of society, the object of social inquiry. A purely wondering mood elicits the more spontaneous aspects of social relations; human beings do, despite their isolation from one another, their divergent interests, and their resentment against their limitations, unite with one another. Much of the process of unificaion does not appear to result from conscious deliberation and voluntary decision, or even from prudential calculation of consequences. Rather, as Hobhouse emphasized, society appears to an inquirer who attends to the processes of its constitution as a "conational unity," or unity of wills, as a product of individual activities which represents fully none of those activities, but which limits each of them and sometimes even imposes itself on them. For wondering doubt, then, there is a "wisdom" or "reason" inherent in the social process, which is irreducible to individual volition and which grounds society as an entity sui generis. When the acknowledgment of immanent social rationality is absent from thought about society, the individual is sharply separated from society and social thought tends to become either utopian or atomistic. Overemphasis on the immanent rationality of social relations, in contrast, is the basis of Hegelianism, the sociological expression of which is extreme functionalism.
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In contrast to the wondering mood, the attitude of concern discloses those aspects of society which do not take care of themselves, and which require the voluntary cooperation and conscious planning of individuals for their maintenance and the movement toward their perfection. There is a sense in which society can be said to depend entirely on the conscious commitment of individuals to its prolongation in time. Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly in his trilogy, The Paths of Freedom, highlighted the voluntaristic phase of society by continually placing his protagonist, Mathieu, in situations in which he had to choose whether to commit himself to bonds of solidarity with others or to deny his social responsibility. For Sartre, it is a possibility for human beings, when they reach the "age of reason," to distance themselves from their circumstances and to choose how they shall bind themselves to those circumstances. Society, then, from the viewpoint of the Sartrian existentialist, can be lost if individuals fail to commit themselves to it. Sartre's sharply-etched presentation of the voluntaristic and concernful attitude toward society is echoed, though less decisively, by such classical sociologists as Georg Simmel and, particularly, Max Weber (Gerth & Mills, t946), who in his "Politics as a Vocation" discloses the antionomies within a moral viewpoint (the tension between the "ethic of ultimate ends" and the "ethic of responsibility") which opens a realm of indeterminacy and, therefore, of higher responsibility for social commitment. The voluntaristic and concernful attitude in classical sociology is related to the neo-Kantian movement in philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century which influenced Simmel in particular, but also finds resonance in Durkheim, Weber, and Hobhouse. Morris Ginsberg (1954), who carried on the classical tradition in England through the mid-twentieth century, highlights the neo-Kantian conceptual structure. The dualism of form-process and content in neo-Kantianism kept sociologists who were influenced by this tendency from adopting a complete voluntarism. A similar modification of voluntarism is made by John O'Neill (1978) who, following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argues that " w e never have anything like Sartre's absolute power of decision to join or withdraw from collective life." Human beings have, according to O'Neill, "an ability to shift institutions off center, polarizing tradition in the same plane as creativity and imitation." A purely voluntaristic interpretation of society leads beyond sociology to a position of individualistic anarchism, such as Max Stirner's, in which solidarity among human beings is strictly a"union of egoists," a purely voluntary association which is sustained so long as its free participants, who value their freedom of commitment above all else, will to continue it. Between extreme functionalism and extreme individualism lies the universe of discourse which is formative of classical sociology. Each classical sociology is explicitly shaped by the polar tension between spontaneity and voluntarism. The polarity which is constitutive of society is disclosed most vividly by the specific doubt which makes classical sociology a serious endeavor. That doubt includes both wonder and concern, acceptance and rebellion, in an experienced unity
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which cannot be interpreted fully with the aid of abstract and conceptual categories, but is experienced as a love of society which allows its contradictions to be embraced vitally and studied systematically. The tradition of classical sociology can be kept alive by recurrence to its founding mood and its essential project of awakening the recognition of human interdependence and its moral fulfillment. Classical sociology is like the society which is its object; it must be affirmed as a moral endeavor in order to exist at all. REFERENCES Brand, G. "The Structure of the Life-World According to Husserl." Man and World, 6 1973, (May, pp. 143-162). Durkheim, E. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press, t964. Gerth, H. & Mills, C. W. From Max Weber. New York: Oxford, 1946. Giddens, A. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: University Press, 1971. Ginsberg, M. The Psychology of Society. London: Methuen, 1954. Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956. Heidegger, M. Being and Time. New York: Harper, 1962. Kuhn, T. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Lasch, C. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton, 1979. Marcuse, H. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964. O'Neill, J. "Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Marxist Scientism." Canadian Journal of Political and Society Theory 2 (Winter, pp. 33-62), 1978 Parsons, T. Politics and Social Structure. New York: Free Press, 1969. Parsons, T. The Structure of Sociat Action. Glencoe: Free Press, 1949. Ranly, E. Scheler's Phenomenology of Community. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Simmel, G. The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays. New York: Teachers College Press, 1968. Simmel, G. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. K. Wolff, ed., Glencoe: Free Press, 1950. Weingartner, R. "Form and Content in Simmel's Philosophy of Life." George Simmel, 1958-1918. K. Wolff, ed., pp. 33-60. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959. Whitehead, A. Process and Reality. New York: Humanities Press, 1955. Wolff, K. Surrender and Catch: Experience and Inquiry Today. Boston: D. Reidel, 1976. Zimmerman, D. "Fact as a Practical Accomplishment." Ethnomethodology. R. Turner, ed., pp. 128-143. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.