History of the Book, theory-building in sociology


Filipe Carreira da Silva’s project The Books that Made Sociology: A Cultural Approach to the Sociological Classics is in the intersection between cultural sociology and the history of sociology. In particular, it explores the canon-formation processes in sociology from the angle of the history of sociological classical books.

The first chapter, “Books and Canon-building in Sociology: The Case of Mind, Self, and Society”, will be published in the fall issue of the Journal of Classical Sociology. There are two main goals behind this exercise in historical reconstruction. First, the study of how Mind, Self, and Society came into existence and acquired classical standing offers an insightful view of the contingency and the complexity of canon formation. It is on this continuous process of reception, through which certain texts and authors acquire classical value, which the second part of the article focuses. It discusses the extent to which the history of the reception of Mead’s ideas would have been very different, and the impact of his ideas for theory building substantially larger, if it had been based, not on a posthumously published transcript, but on his own work. Preliminary accounts of this approach were published in 2006 as “G. H. Mead in the History of Sociological Ideas” (Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 42) and 2007 as “G. H. Mead: A System in a State of Flux (History of the Human Sciences, 20). The other five chapters will be on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, Durkheim’s Suicide, Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, and Weber’s Protestant Ethic.

Although substantially different from Carreira da Silva’s latest book, Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Polity, 2010; with Patrick Baert) – its culturalist orientation is much more pronounced – The Books that Made Sociology will likewise be a comparative re-examination of central works of the sociological tradition.

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References

  • 2011. Books and Canon-Formation in Sociology. The Case of Mind, Self, and Society. Journal of Classical Sociology 11(3): 356-377. With Mónica Brito Vieira. [online]