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CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE INTERDISCIPLINARY IMAGINATION Jonathan VanAntwerpen

ABSTRACT This article situates Craig Calhoun’s early sociological trajectory within a diverse set of movements that aimed to transform the discipline of sociology in the United States. As a means to historicizing Calhoun’s critical intellectual practice, I position it within the extensively debated, though only partially understood, disciplinary insurgencies of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, emphasizing attempts to transform sociology that drew substantially on interdisciplinary engagements to fuel the fires of a critical sociological imagination. A member of American sociology’s ‘disobedient generation’, Calhoun was a key contributor to a resurgence of historical work that has come to be referred to as the ‘second wave’ of historical sociology. Tracing the ways that this intellectual movement drew inspiration from, worked alongside of, and overlapped with other critical disciplinary formations, I close with a brief consideration of the current state of critical sociology in the United States. KEYWORDS critical theory • disobedience • history of sociology • historical sociology • imagination

By historicizing, sociology denaturalizes, defatalizes. (Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’) It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. (Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’)

Sociologists in the United States are a disputatious lot. Subject to seemingly unending disagreements, they have argued since their discipline’s founding over science and values, theory and methods, politics and professionalism. Characterized by one of its eminent own as a ‘self-destructive Thesis Eleven, Number 84, February 2006: 60–72 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513606060520

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discipline’ (Lipset, 2001: 266), American sociology has been imagined in recent years via narratives of decline, its cleavages and internecine conflicts attributed in no small part to the ‘politicization’ of an earlier era. Yet from other disciplinary quarters comes an increasingly prominent counternarrative, construing the 1960s and 1970s as decades in which critical sociologists rose to confront the dominance of a postwar sociological establishment, challenging intellectual orthodoxies, proffering radical alternatives, and seeking to transform the discipline. Inspired and informed by diverse political projects, intellectual formations, and interdisciplinary exchanges, ‘critical’ movements within American sociology are figured in this narrative as historical precursors to a renewed promotion of ‘public sociologies’, interventions in multiple public spheres whose ‘promise’ is immense, if uncertain (Burawoy, 2005a; Calhoun, 2005b). One critical disciplinary collective that drew substantially on interdisciplinary discourses – and in the process contributed significantly to the expansion of sociology’s interdisciplinary imagination – was the movement associated with the resurgence of historical sociology. ‘Reacting against the dominant ahistoricism of American sociology and to the dramatic political events of the 1960s,’ write Julia Adams, Elizabeth Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff in a recent essay on the ‘three waves’ of historical sociology (2005: 3), ‘a number of sociologists both initiated a renaissance of historical research and reconstructed the discipline’s theoretical canon as the foundation of their enterprise. These efforts, respectively, constituted the second and first waves of historical sociology.’ In an extended essay, which serves as the introduction to a major new collection of writing by historical sociologists of the ‘third wave’, Adams et al. reconsider the work and influence of powerful figures of the second wave – members of a cohort of historical sociologists that Theda Skocpol (1988) has described as the ‘uppity generation’ – and trace out the ‘sites of crystallization and momentum’ in a promising but ‘not yet cresting’ third wave of historical sociology (Adams et al., 2005: 3). The second wave of historical sociology, the authors write, was a ‘theory group’, and ‘a system of signs bound together by continuing engagement with questions inspired by Marxism’. A ‘social movement’ that was ‘nourished both by interdisciplinary activity and by the spread of historical methods to a large number of core sociological topics’, the second wave eventually came to represent an established intellectual formation whose ‘hegemonic analytic framework’ propelled and defined the shape of a retrospectively reconstructed ‘resurgence’ of historical sociology (Adams et al., 2005: 6–7). In contrast to the ‘kaleidoscopic’ condition of contemporary historical sociology, which lacks a ‘dominant paradigm of the sort that commanded the second wave’s allegiance’, second wave scholarship was substantially marked by its self-conscious opposition to ‘the prevailing orthodoxy’ within sociology, as second wave scholars ‘cast themselves as the

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leading protagonists against modernization theory’, and sought to forward issues of class inequality, power, and conflict (Adams et al., 2005: 64, 32, 7, 15). This rendering of one significant strand in the recent history of American sociology – with its distinction between a tightly knit and now canonical ‘second wave’ of historical sociology, followed by a relatively diffuse, diverse and still rising ‘third wave’ – provides a compelling vantage point from which to assess the present trends within, and future possibilities for, historical sociology in the United States. In particular, it allows current students and aspiring practitioners of historical sociology an expansive view of their recent sub-disciplinary past, one that seeks to illuminate the various contributions that historically oriented sociologists are making, and might yet make, to a contemporary conversation that is both characterized by ‘openendedness and fragmentation’ and reconstructed as ‘a congeries of lively debates and oppositions’. In that sense, the essay is itself an excellent example of the sort of ‘historicized sociology’ that the authors champion (Adams et al., 2005: 9, 67–8). Like Adams, Clemens, and Orloff, I want to pursue the project of ‘historicizing sociology’ through an engagement with the recent history of American sociology. In contrast with their sweeping consideration of the multiple figures of the second and third waves of historical sociology, however, my analysis here is focused on situating the critical intellectual practice of a single American sociologist, the historical sociologist and critical social theorist Craig Calhoun. A central figure in the second wave of historical sociology, Calhoun has more recently ‘emerged as a leading voice of the cultural turn’, a series of intellectual shifts that Adams et al. associate with the third wave (2005: 7, 39–45). Thus, although the metaphor of ‘waves’ suggests an historical process of succession, perhaps even of a generational sort, an assumption of complete succession is belied by the careers of those second wave figures who ‘have continued to grapple with the new intellectual currents that challenge contemporary work’ (2005: 6). Like Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol, Calhoun is exemplary in this regard – a mark of his intellectual openness, his sustained engagement with the best of contemporary social theory, and his expansive interdisciplinary reach. Drawing on the work of others who have ranged more widely over the history of historical sociology in the United States – including Calhoun’s own much-discussed critical appraisal of the second wave’s ‘rise and domestication’ (1996) – I am concerned not simply with the resurgence of historical sociology, but with the ways that the second wave drew inspiration from, worked alongside of, and overlapped with other critical disciplinary movements. Seeking to historicize Calhoun’s critical sociological practice, I position it within the extensively debated (though only partially understood) disciplinary insurgencies of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, emphasizing attempts to transform sociology that drew substantially on extra-disciplinary

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engagements to fuel the fires of a critical sociological imagination. The ‘disobedient generation’ (Sica and Turner, 2005) that was in large part responsible for these rebellions pushed to change the shape of sociology in the United States. Craig Calhoun was on the younger side of this generation, but he is nonetheless appropriately placed among the disobedient – ‘a thin, intense, and angry young man’, as one of his advisors from Oxford recalls (Calhoun, 2005a: 92). Now a prominent and established (if not Establishment) figure in contemporary American sociology, Calhoun has long been a proponent and a practitioner of the interdisciplinary. His intellectual trajectory has been international, taking him from Los Angeles and New York, where he worked briefly with Robert Merton and Robert Nisbet, to Manchester and Oxford, and then to Chapel Hill and back to New York, where as President of the Social Science Research Council he currently leads an organization whose earliest efforts produced ‘the first wave of interdisciplinarity’ in the United States (Abbott, 2002: 215). Schooled in anthropology and history, and engaged with both critical theory and philosophy, Calhoun determined relatively early in his career that ‘redefinition as a sociologist’ might be the best way to combine his multiple intellectual interests (Calhoun, 2005a: 91). Surrounded by a decidedly multidisciplinary cluster of graduate students at UNC and NYU in the years that followed, he has since convinced more than a few to seek similar shelter under the notoriously big tent of sociology, and thus to throw in their fate along with him in that ‘irremediably interstitial’ discipline (Abbott, 2001: 6). Yet Calhoun has hardly remained sheltered within sociology. His critical re-reading of Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Calhoun, 1982) was a product of his engagement with the interdisciplinary discourses of Marxism and the ‘new social history’, while his major work of critical social theory (Calhoun, 1995), released more than a decade later amidst a vast outpouring of publications in the mid-1990s, helped introduce a new generation of students across the humanities and the social sciences to an expansive conception of critical theory that drew on the work of Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School, as well as that of Pierre Bourdieu, Dorothy Smith and Charles Taylor. This book, along with edited volumes on Habermas (Calhoun, 1992) and Bourdieu (Calhoun et al., 1993) – not to mention an intellectual range and conversational stamina that must be experienced to be believed – have positioned Calhoun as a leading American importer and interpreter of contemporary continental theory. It is perhaps only slight overstatement to say that if American graduate students in the 1950s read ‘classical’ sociological theory through the work of Parsons (1937) and his followers, today they read the ‘critical’ theory of Habermas and Bourdieu through the eyes of Calhoun and his ilk. Yet the comparison is not a perfect one, and for reasons that Calhoun, with his recurrent concern for historical specificity, would be the first to point out.

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While contemporary American sociology is frequently characterized as a fractured and fractionalized discipline, full of cacophony and cluttered with competing projects, but without any unifying center or consensual disciplinary self-conception, it is often said that the 1950s were different. It was during these postwar years, Bourdieu once claimed, that a previously diverse field of American sociology gave way to the installation of a ‘new sociological Establishment’, whose leaders – the ‘Capitoline triad’ of Parsons at Harvard, and Merton and Lazarsfeld at Columbia – ‘succeeded in imposing a true intellectual orthodoxy by imposing a common corpus of issues, stakes of discussion, and criteria of evaluation’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 378). Celebrated as the pinnacle of the ‘golden age’ by some, derided for its hegemonic dominance of the ‘establishment’ by others, this period remains an important touchstone in debates about the history of American sociology. It is a period whose common understanding by American sociologists has been deeply inflected by the ‘critical’ disciplinary projects of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s – intellectual movements that rallied around Mills’ broadside on ‘grand theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’, were galvanized by Gouldner’s polemic against Parsonian theory, and made common cause in opposition to the theoretical pretensions and presumed positivism of ‘mainstream’ sociology. References to ‘mainstream’ sociology are still common today, but they first began to circulate widely in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s, when opponents of the ‘sociological establishment’ – a concept popularized by Gouldner and other radical sociologists, and one that resonated with the anti-establishment ethos of the era – gathered forces to engage in various forms of disciplinary revolt and intellectual insurrection. With the birth of the Sociology Liberation Movement (1968), the founding of the Insurgent Sociologist (1969), and the formation of Sociologists for Women in Society (1970), critical voices within the discipline began to find institutional locations from which to wage their war of position against the American sociological establishment (Fuller, 1996; Levine, 2004; Steinmetz, 2005a, 2005b; Ferree et al., 2006). Such locations would proliferate in the years of struggle that followed. Some sought inspiration in the ‘critical theory’ of the Frankfurt School, and under the banner of ‘critical sociology’ opposed themselves to the ‘positivism’ of the ‘mainstream’. Invoking Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (1959) in a review of Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), Randall Collins (1973: 207) wrote that both works represented ‘a rejection of dominant versions of positivist social science in favor of a critical sociology of the European type, a turn away from Cambridge and toward Frankfurt’.1 That same year, Gouldner and Collins announced the formation of Theory and Society, a journal of ‘renewal and critique in social theory’ whose first issue was published in 1974. The new journal would ‘provide an international forum for discourse and critique in social theory’ in which ‘formal disciplinary boundaries’ would be of ‘no relevance’. Contributions

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would come from ‘the vanguard in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, history, political science, economics and human geography, as well as sociology’, and would focus on ‘new directions’, including ‘critical sociology, phenomenology, structuralism, neo-Marxism, linguistically sensitive sociology and historical sociology’ (all quotes from ‘Announcing a New Journal’ (back matter), American Journal of Sociology 79(3)). As these ‘new directions’ gathered steam, some of them having a more significant impact on American sociology than others, articulated opposition to ‘mainstream’ sociology became one means to self-definition as a critical sociologist, with Mills and Gouldner standing in as oft-cited forebears. ‘Vilified by C. Wright Mills, and later given a more nuanced critique by Alvin Gouldner’, wrote Michael Burawoy (1982: S4) as he narrated the ‘resurgence’ of Marxism in American sociology, ‘mainstream sociology’ came under ‘relentless assault’ and was subjected to outright ‘rejection’ in the 1960s. As Calhoun (1996: 306) would write later, ‘The 1960s upset the confident development of mainstream sociology, which was based on the balanced split between grand theory and abstracted empiricism of which C. Wright Mills wrote so critically.’ Not unlike nostalgic remembrances of a lost age of disciplinary unity, however, critical discourses on ‘mainstream’ sociology have tended to overestimate the degree to which an elite ‘establishment’ succeeded in imposing a single organizing structure or professional ideology on the postwar field of American sociology, and thus at times have risked exaggerating the degree of disciplinary rupture wrought by the 1960s and 1970s. Yet their retrospective renderings of the postwar field remain illuminating, both for their insight into a pattern of generational succession and its effects on the constellation of disciplinary forces in elite departments (such as those at Harvard and Columbia), and as contributions to discursive formations worthy of historical scrutiny in own right. In other words, while the concept of ‘mainstream’ sociology has become an analytic tool for reconsidering certain powerful forces within postwar American sociology, it has also been repeatedly employed historically as a ‘classificatory epithet’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 14), a practical category that might name a common enemy and thus unify an otherwise disparate grouping of critical sociologists and anti-establishment disciplinary insurgents (Calhoun and VanAntwerpen, 2006).2 The second wave of historical sociology, and Calhoun’s participation in it, can be seen productively as of a piece with this diverse disciplinary insurgency. Recalling the ‘sort of social movement’ that propelled the resurgence of historical sociology in the 1970s and 1980s, Calhoun reminded his readers of its ‘critical edge and challenge to mainstream sociology’ (Calhoun, 1996: 306). The ‘new and controversial’ movement for historical sociology, he wrote, sought to ‘challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of mainstream sociology’ (Calhoun, 1996: 327), taking critical aim not only at the modernization theory of Parsons and his followers, but also at the scientism and naïve

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empiricism associated with dominant quantitative methodologies. Joining hands with others in the discipline who stood opposed to ‘an old sort of functionalism’ and an ‘ethnocentric positivism’ (Calhoun, 1996: 308) – and thus working alongside ethnomethodologists and symbolic interactionists, feminists and fieldworkers, heterodox Weberians and upstart radicals – members of historical sociology’s ‘uppity generation’ found common cause with a wider, overlapping set of intellectual movements carried forward by American sociology’s ‘disobedient generation’. Drawing on diverse sources of practical and theoretical inspiration, these critics sought to transform sociology from inside the belly of the disciplinary beast, by infusing it with intellectual energies and research agendas that were a product of their engagement with a multiplicity of extra-disciplinary projects. In this sense, their critical sociology was marked, as Burawoy (2005c: 23) has suggested, by various forms of ‘trans-disciplinary infusion’. The amount of unity among this unruly, rebellious and insubordinate bunch – political, intellectual, theoretical or methodological – should not be overstated. Proponents of ethnomethodology stood opposed to symbolic interactionism, and fought attempts to synthesize the two. Advocates of critical theory argued with students of structural Marxism. Feminists became a necessarily critical voice within a range of ostensibly ‘critical’ movements, and were subject to splits and disagreements of their own. And this is barely scratching the surface. Indeed, historical sociologists themselves were a diverse lot, as Andrew Abbott (1991, 2001) has argued, shaped by common historical circumstances but split into two distinct groups, one associated with the Social Science History Association and the other with the American Sociological Association’s Section on Comparative Historical Sociology. While each of these groups stemmed from the ‘disciplinary unease’ and ‘rebellions’ of the 1960s and 1970s, it was the latter cohort – in which Calhoun would figure prominently – that both exercised control over what counted as ‘historical sociology’ within the Association and attached itself closely to outlets of ‘critical sociology’ such as Theory and Society (Calhoun, 1996: 306; Abbott, 2001: 104–5, 112). Despite their many differences, the members of the ‘disobedient generation’ were nevertheless united in important respects – not only by their commitment to variously defined projects of disciplinary critique and interdisciplinary engagement, but also in their disapprobation of the dominant dispositions of the postwar ‘mainstream’, even if consensus regarding the precise shape and substance of those dispositions was sometimes hard to come by. If ‘mainstream sociology’ was (and is) frequently a floating signifier, in its very ambiguity lies some of the explanation of its diffusion throughout the discipline and its enduring practical utility, for both mainstreamers and their opponents alike. Although the effects of these sundry oppositional movements on the structure of American sociology are still a matter of significant debate, it

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is clear that many of them once aimed, at least for a time, at disciplinary transformation and even ‘revolution’. Writing in the mid-1980s, for instance, Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne (1985: 301, 306) referred to a ‘Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology’ and called attention to the various reasons that possibilities for ‘feminist transformations’ had been ‘contained’ within the discipline.3 More recently, Michael Burawoy (2005a: 313) has claimed that the ‘immediate object’ of radical sociology in the 1970s ‘was the transformation of sociology not of society’: There are good reasons why we were so focused on the academic terrain. In those days, we regarded mainstream sociology as a species of bourgeois ideology, lagging behind a world erupting with social movements. Our ‘revolutionary’ task was to either abolish sociology or at least sever its conservative roots. (Burawoy, 2005b: 379)

While Calhoun (1996: 306, 314) lamented historical sociology’s ‘lost theoretical agenda’, and its ‘domestication’ as just another subfield within the discipline, claiming that ‘many of the old aspirations to transform sociology’ had dimmed, nearly a decade later Burawoy’s account of critical sociology’s impact was somewhat brighter. ‘The radical assault on postwar sociology was surprisingly successful’, he wrote, and a subsequent generation, ‘weaned on critical sociology’ had garnered control of the discipline, ‘embraced democratic decentralization, widened the doors to minority groups, deepened participation, and set about creating alternative sociologies’ (Burawoy, 2005a: 316, 317). Whatever one makes of the effects of the radical assault on postwar sociology, it seems equally important to note the remarkable extent to which disciplinary hierarchies have been reproduced (Burris, 2004), as intellectual changes and institutional continuities within sociology have significantly mirrored both ‘structural transformation’ and enduring stratification within the broader field of American higher education (Burawoy, 2005c; Calhoun, 2006). In its very first issue, the Insurgent Sociologist had called on radicals ‘to destroy the power structure of the profession’ and to ‘eliminate the power elite that controls the profession through its undemocratic structure’ (Oppenheimer and Murray, 1988: 4). The ‘power structure’ of sociology has not disappeared, although the intellectual preoccupations of those occupying ‘elite’ positions within the discipline have certainly shifted, as evidenced by Burawoy’s ascendance to the ASA Presidency (Burawoy, 2005c, 2005d) and Calhoun’s leading role in an innovative attempt to reconstruct NYU’s department of sociology (VanAntwerpen and Kirp, 2003), to identify two examples close to hand. As leading critics of ‘mainstream’ sociology have risen to new disciplinary heights, the shape of the ‘sociological establishment’ has changed, with critical sociology clearing a path for the recent promotion of new forms of ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy, 2005a; Burawoy and VanAntwerpen, n.d.).

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Even as the discipline of sociology has changed, so have the transdisciplinary formations from which critical sociologists have drawn their intellectual sustenance. Assessing the state of feminist theory in sociology two decades after Stacey and Thorne’s ‘Missing Revolution’, Raka Ray noted the increasing presence of names like Butler, Fraser, Scott and Spivak on syllabi for feminist theory courses in sociology. Such interdisciplinarity, she wrote, has always been the strength of feminist theory, and the best young sociologists that I have had the privilege of teaching and learning from deeply engage with these theorists, sociologizing them even as they expand sociology. (Ray, 2004: 2)

Feminist theory has changed sociology, Ray (2004: 14) argues: ‘The revolution may have been quiet and it has a long way to go, but I would not hesitate to call it a revolution.’4 If transdisciplinary feminist theory continues to infuse sociological discourses with new insights and perspectives, it has also had a significant impact on the interdisciplinary field of Marxism that informed the work of other critical sociologists. One of the challenges to the paradigm that guided second wave historical sociology, write Adams et al. (2005: 29), was the pressure from feminist theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory and critical race studies to ‘pull apart Marxism’. Confronted by new forms of critical theorizing within the university, and by social and political transformations without, Marxism’s role as an ‘anchor’ that might ‘sustain extra-academic or at least extra-disciplinary intellectual publics’ (Calhoun, 2005b: 360) has fallen off considerably. Perhaps as a result, American sociologists whose work was rooted in transdisciplinary intellectual formations that were informed by Marxism have watched these intellectual communities wane. Reflecting on the trajectory of the interdisciplinary ‘No-Bullshit Marxism Group’ in which he honed his ‘analytical Marxism’, for instance, Erik Olin Wright (2005: 345) has noted a ‘drift in its intellectual priorities’ and a ‘decline in its intensity’. While Burawoy and Wright (2001) persevere with a project of ‘sociological Marxism’, what has become of the broader project of Marxist sociology in the United States, and of the interdisciplinary fields in which it once moved? The beginnings of an answer come from George Steinmetz (2005a: 137), who – taking issue with Calhoun (1996) – writes that the idea of ‘domestication’ is ‘too simple and sweeping to describe what happened to earlier critical movements in U.S. sociology’. Marxist sociology, he claims, ‘has rearticulated itself through the lenses of post-structuralism, semiotics, narrative analysis, and Lacanian psychoanalysis and rediscovered the antipositivist traditions of the Frankfurt school’. This is an interesting suggestion, although it may still be too early to assess the relative success of these various ‘rearticulations’ within American sociology. At present, there appears to be little evidence that they have provided an intellectual infusion equal either in scope or in intensity to that

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supplied by the interdisciplinary Marxism of an earlier period. Thus, although transdisciplinary feminist theory remains a powerful force, and new critical possibilities have emerged within both the ‘cultural’ and the ‘epistemological’ turns (Steinmetz, 2005a: 132–7; Steinmetz, 2005b: 311–13), contemporary critical sociologists, not unlike Adams et al.’s ‘third wave’, arguably lack the sort of ‘hegemonic analytic framework’ that an engagement with Marxism afforded historical sociology’s second wave. One recent bid for hegemony comes from Burawoy, who pushes, in the pages of what was once the Insurgent Sociologist,5 for a ‘critical turn to public sociology’, suggesting that ‘critical sociology is, and should be, ever more concerned with promoting public sociologies’ (Burawoy, 2005a: 314). Critical sociology, he writes, ‘should shift its emphasis from a critique of professional sociology to the infusion of critical perspectives into public sociology’ (Burawoy, 2005b: 381). Another possibility for future work is suggested by Calhoun’s recent efforts to assess the limits and possibilities of a new ‘cosmopolitanism’ (Calhoun 2002, 2003a, 2003b). In a series of interdisciplinary engagements that have made him an interloper among philosophers and political theorists, Calhoun has moved to critique ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’, posing a distinctly sociological invitation to investigate the ‘social bases’ that have ‘shaped cosmopolitan visions’ (2003c: 86, 88). While critical sociologists have long been concerned to transform the inner workings of their own discipline, these new projects point them out toward critical engagements with extra-disciplinary and extra-academic publics, and thus toward the practices of public sociology and the challenges of crossdisciplinary critique, both of which might be sustained by a critical interdisciplinary imagination. Indeed, the notion of an interdisciplinary imagination arguably captures something of what Mills was after in his original formulation of the ‘sociological imagination’, which went well beyond the bounds of an academic discipline called ‘sociology’ (Mills, 1959: 19). This is not to say that ‘interdisciplinary’ projects should or even could reasonably be seen as a replacement for ‘sociology’, at least in the foreseeable future. As Abbott (2002: 215) has argued, although the structure of the disciplines in the American university has long been ‘permeated by a perpetual hazy buzz of interdisciplinarity’, the ‘disciplinary system’ itself has been remarkably durable, notwithstanding regular, non-revolutionary periods of interdisciplinary ferment. The challenge, then, is to cut through the sometimes ‘hazy buzz’ associated with the discourse of interdisciplinarity in order to assess the real problems with, and prospects for, a range of critical projects carried out in its name. It is here that further engagement with the varied trajectories of the members of the ‘disobedient generation’, Craig Calhoun’s among them, would be fruitful. While their exploits may not have yielded the sort of ‘progress’ Oscar Wilde dreamt of, they did in fact contribute to a considerable expansion of sociology’s interdisciplinary imagination, an imagination that critical sociologists

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would do well not to lose sight of, even as they turn their attention to the ambitious project of public sociology.

Jonathan VanAntwerpen is a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is writing a dissertation on the transnational struggles over ‘reconciliation’ in the aftermath of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. [email: [email protected]]

Notes 1. While this turn ‘toward Frankfurt’ was probably helped along by the translation of Habermas’ Theory and Practice in 1973, a work that was greeted by the Americans as exemplary of ‘critical sociology’, it was also undoubtedly rooted at least in part in the migration of the Institut für Sozialforschung to New York in the mid-1930s, and propelled by the presence of Leo Lowenthal in the department of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1950s and 1960s (Jay, 1996; Wiggershaus, 1994). Both New York and Berkeley, Collins (1975: 590) would later claim, were among the ‘beachheads . . . from which much of the radical/critical sociology in America has developed’. 2. The extent to which the notion of a ‘mainstream sociology’ was widely available by the early 1980s was evidenced by the appearance of a feminist variant. Political theorist Mary O’Brien (1981) coined the term ‘male-stream’, and feminist sociologists soon took it up. Opposition to ‘mainstream’ sociology had connected feminists to other critical sociologists; an opposition to ‘malestream’ sociology would set them apart, sharpening a gendered critique of disciplinary hierarchies and inequalities, both inside and outside ‘critical’ circles. 3. A decade later, the authors revisited the issue and substantially revised their position (Stacey and Thorne, 1996). 4. For another recent assessment of ‘the feminist revolution’ in sociology, see Ferree et al. (2006). 5. This journal took the name Critical Sociology in 1988.

References Abbott, A. (1991) ‘History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis’, Social Science History 15(2): 201–38. Abbott, A. (2001) Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Abbott, A. (2002) ‘The Disciplines and the Future’ in S. Brint (ed.) The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University, pp. 205–30. Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press. Adams, J., E. Clemens and A. S. Orloff (2005) ‘Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology’, in J. Adams, E. Clemens and A. S. Orloff (eds) Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology, pp. 1–72. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991) ‘Epilogue: On the Possibility of a Field of World Sociology’, trans. L. Wacquant in P. Bourdieu and J. S. Coleman (eds.) Social Theory for a Changing Society, pp. 373–87. Oxford: Westview Press.

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