Marx, Weber, and Durkheim offer much in the way of guidance and inspiration and their theories have continuing relevance to the problems we face today, but here I want to stress the way they remind us that a flourishing sociology depends upon all four types of knowledge. With specialization, the different knowledges fly apart, lose touch with one another, and the discipline loses its impetus. As professional and policy knowledge come to dominate and even expel critical and public knowledge, sociology suffers a double amnesia. Individually we lose sight of the original motivation to become sociologists and collectively we lose sight of the values that inspired sociology’s origins. As the policy moment finds the going tough in a hostile environment, all that remains is professional sociology, which itself then fragments into multiple disconnected research projects. The conceptualization of public sociology seeks to restore the contradictory unity of all four sociologies, recognizing that they sit uneasily together in relations of antagonistic interdependence. Only in this way can we return to the utopian and anti-utopian project that lies at the foundation of our discipline. This is especially important today when the original diagnoses of modernity – anomie, rationalization, alienation, domination, inequality – are coming home to roost, and when utopian thinking is losing credibility. Public sociology inspires the renewal of our discipline.
The entry of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) into the sociological canon is especially important not only because he centered race in his analysis, not only because he had a global and historical vision, not only because he embarked from lived experience, not only because he was acutely aware of his own place in the world he studied, but also because he uniquely represented all four types of sociology. He circulated restlessly between academic and public worlds, and though he made great contributions to professional knowledge, he never lost sight of the critical sociology that drove it. His research led him to policy advocacy and an array of public interventions that made him unique among sociologists of the twentieth century. He was the greatest public sociologist of the twentieth century. Of all the sociologists, Du Bois was the most sensitive to the antagonistic interdependence among professional, policy, public, and critical sociologies, themselves suspended between utopian imagination and anti-utopian science. He becomes, therefore, the inspiration for a renewal of sociology that is in danger of losing its bearings in the welter of neoliberalism and the centrifugal forces at work within the division of disciplinary labor.
1 Theory Utopia and Anti-Utopia
As a science sociology is unusual in that it refuses to forget its founders. How is it that we continue to draw inspiration from three European men – Marx, Weber, and Durkheim – from the nineteenth century? From the standpoint of the present they have their inevitable blind spots: a limited focus on questions of race and gender; an often naïve belief in science; and a Eurocentric outlook on the world. They were very much a product of their era and its assumptions.
Indeed, Raewyn Connell (1997) has argued that these so-called classical sociologists had a limited vision of their own times and were arbitrarily chosen after World War II to represent the canon. Upon their shoulders rests the edifice of modern sociology, thereby eclipsing the contributions of a myriad social thinkers from outside Europe. Whereas sister-disciplines like anthropology, economics, and political science have reduced their founders to mere historical interest, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim hang on as obligatory but also inspirational reference points for sociology. Prominent contemporaries, Pierre Bourdieu or Jürgen Habermas, built their social theory on the basis of the same founding figures, implicitly in the case of the first and explicitly in the case of the second. Attempts at building alternative foundations, such as James Coleman’s rational choice theory, never made much headway or gained many adherents.
There is, however, one candidate with irrefutable credentials, around whom it is possible to reconstruct the canon – W. E. B. Du Bois. An African American born ten years after Durkheim and four years after Weber, he is of their generation but outlived them by nearly half a century. Educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois pioneered urban sociology at Atlanta University before launching into a public career as a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), editor of The Crisis magazine, and organizer of Pan-Africanism. In 1934 he returned to Atlanta University to complete his extraordinary history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. As he became ever more hostile to the US state that persecuted him, he moved further leftwards, endorsing the socialist vision represented by the Soviet Union and “Communist” China, and ending his life in newly independent Ghana. As a novelist and poet (Du Bois 1911, 1928) he gave sociological theory a uniquely utopian twist that imagined the transcendence of racial and gender domination as well as class exploitation, an optimism always qualified by an anti-utopian science that tragically spelled out the limits of social transformation.
Changing the canon is not simply a matter of adding him to or replacing Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. A canon is always more than the sum of its parts. It refers to a configuration of relations among its members. Du Bois’s historically rooted, engaged sociology calls for a reconfiguration of the canon, foregrounding its public and critical dimensions, advancing the duality of utopian imagination and anti-utopian science. I start with the continuing significance of the relations among Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, before pointing to a new canon that incorporates Du Bois’s publicly engaged and historically embedded sociology.
The Canon That Was
In whatever ways they may be seen as a product of their times, the founders also rose above their times to speak to the abiding problems of modern society. Marx, Weber, and Durkheim are exemplary not only for their insights into the social world, not only for the methods they used to explore that world, but also for the distinctive way they upheld a science rooted in values. Each managed to establish social constraints – that is, they were anti-utopian, opposing the optimism that anything was possible – but at the same time, they sought to bring the world under human guidance, opposing the pessimistic view that what exists is natural and inevitable. Their sociology was many things, not least a dialogue between its utopian and anti-utopian impulses.
Durkheim’s utopia, first spelled out in his 1893 dissertation, The Division of Labor in Society, was one in which every individual would find their niche in the division of labor. They would feel at one with the world they inhabited through their mutual interdependence and their contribution to the end product, what he called organic solidarity. This would only be possible in a society that offered unimpeded equality of opportunity so that everyone has the chance to assume an occupation best suited to their specific talents and abilities. The realization of such a society – a meritocracy – would, however, require radical change: the elimination of unmerited advantages associated with the “forced” division of labor in which individuals find themselves in positions for which they are ill-suited. Eliminating the forced division of labor required the end of the inheritance of wealth, but we know today that in addition to economic wealth, cultural wealth (family upbringing, primary socialization) is no less important in determining where in society we end up. To replace the forced division of labor with a meritocracy would require transforming our educational system so as to cancel the abiding effects of social inequalities based on race, class, and gender. Affirmative action aims to counteract such inherited inequalities, while such projects as the Harlem Children’s Zone attempt the equalization of opportunities