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This book consists of 19 autobiographical statements of sociologists, all of whom have some claims to be considered as social theorists. Most were born between 1947 and 1950, and the events of the 1960s—civil rights and Vietnam—fundamentally shaped their growing up (1968 was a pivotal year for most of them). Many of the scholars hold prestigious chairs, and not just at major universities, but at the world's leading institutions of higher learning: Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley, Yale. They are mainly U. S. nationals. Nonetheless, the editors have included some Europeans, most with close connections to the United States, at places like Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. These academics are also heads of their departments of inquiry, presidents of their professional associations, and editors of leading journals in the field.
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The basic idea is that these members of the professoriate had their later scholarship decisively influenced by the radical events of the 1960s, and that this scholarship has been in some way unconventional, "disobedient." For the editors this situation has made the work of the authors more penetrating than it otherwise would have been, or more penetrating than that of other scholars. And so the collection is to illuminate not merely the connection between the personal and the intellectual, but also perhaps to suggest the precondition of incisive academic writing. In any event the editors invite collective appraisals of the scholars, their work, and the role of the 1960s in developing social theory.
What is social theory anyway? This is not an easy question to answer. Maybe even a harder question: is it the same as sociological theory? All of those who have contributed to this volume teach in departments of sociology, but most of the academics have connections to the other social sciences and are often associated with centers for research that have wide-ranging agendas. The scholars themselves have admirably broad interests, from economics and politics to statistics and philosophy. Social theory is a little more elevated than sociology. One way to think about it is to relate the matter in this book to those of the great men most cited as historical predecessors—Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons get regularly mentioned.
Another way of understanding social theory is to enumerate the learned interests of the contemporary followers of the four great men. The Sixties theorists are interested in the role of religion in the social order, the growth of egalitarian democracy and citizenship, racism, and issues of class and capitalism. A chief area of scholarship is to explore how economics shapes the position one has in life. These are big and crucial questions about how society functions, and why. For the 19, the explicit and somewhat conventional way to talk about these concerns is to use the favored phrase "social justice." The achievement of social justice is the end of their efforts, and the work of social theory is, roughly, the knowledge to gain it. That is, social theory combines learning with social engagement to get to the desired state.
This sounds to me something like social work, but social workers are far less exalted than social theorists, and far more part of the bourgeois establishment. For the theorist, practical social choice is far more a hypothetical desideratum than a daily consideration. Many of the thinkers in this volume have notable stories of knocking about in their youth and of finding their paths with some difficulty. Some of them have had working-class employment at some time or another in their lives, or have been organizers of the downtrodden. But only a few have such commitments in their professional careers today, and one announces that he has never held "a nine-to-five job with fixed hours and a boss telling me what to do." For the great majority of theorists in the present, the 1960s have left them with a stance toward academia but not with much of a foot in the real world of work. One writes that he has retained from that era "several nonacademic friendships, … [a] passion for Italian sports cars, … [and] devotion to the restaurants of New Orleans." The social theorists, then, are people who think about the ways to achieve progressive change, or even to give advice about how to think about such change, but don't actually do much themselves. One talks about "visionary pragmatism" and another about "real utopias." They are policymakers without a polity.
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