This semester I’m teaching _Sources of Sociological Theory_ to undergraduate majors, a course I’ve taught several times before. After a crash course on the state of Europe and America prior to 1780 or so (100% guaranteed to make historians come out in at least hives, and possibly trigger fits), we’ve started reading Adam Smith. It’s always a pleasure to teach Smith as a social theorist. For one thing, he’s a clear enough writer (certainly compared to, e.g., Weber) and more importantly his central insight about the possibility of decentralized co-ordination always catches students by surprise. Even though students are all exposed one way or another to the rhetoric of free enterprise, free trade, market capitalism and what have you, in my experience even talented undergraduates have to work a bit to really see the power and elegance of Smith’s vision of a complex, co-ordinated division of labor. I do a few classroom exercises (based on ideas from Mitch Resnick and Tom Schelling, amongst others) to bring out the problem of co-ordination, the many ways it can fail, and the distinctive qualities of markets as a solution. (Though, as Schelling notes, not all cases of distributed co-ordination are markets, just as not all ellipses are circles.)
Although Smith is often presented as the champion of the individual, and opposed to thinkers who emphasize social structure or the state, it’s immediately clear when you read him that Smith was as much a “discoverer of society” — that is, of the idea that the social world is a human product consisting of myriad interlocking relationships dependent on specific institutions and human capacities — as any of the other theorists typically recognized as founders of modern sociology. His treatment of the problem of the division of labor also provides a platform to understand the others. Marx is much easier to understand once you know a bit about Smith, of course, but so are Durkheim’s ideas about social solidarity and the nonrational foundations of contractual exchange. And much of Weber’s work on the origins of capitalism was conceived explicitly with Smith in mind.
{ 13 comments }
tom bach 08.30.05 at 6:31 pm
Hi,
Why not start with the Jansenists, particularly Pierre Nicole? Or with Ferguson on the history of civil society? Both are clear as all get out, fun to read, and Nicole is especially necessary for understanding Smith, no? Why not deal directly with the Doux Commerce thesis, which undergirded so much of Smith’s thought, to say nothing of Hume. And why not Hume, for all of that?
tom
Kieran Healy 08.30.05 at 7:11 pm
Well, you have to draw the line somewhere. Insofar as there’s any substantive justification, I’d say the further back you push the more it starts to look like political philosophy and the less like social theory. But mainly it’s a matter of time (not to mention the relative expertise of the instructor…).
tom bach 08.30.05 at 7:50 pm
Cannot agree about the political versus social theory theory but understand about the time and expertise. Nonetheless, it often strikes me that the tendency to view Smith as a kind of stand alone fellow avoids coming to grips with the roots of social theory. Indeed, his discovery of society is less a discovery than it is a continuation. Just out of general interest who follows?
Kieran Healy 08.30.05 at 8:16 pm
the tendency to view Smith as a kind of stand alone fellow avoids coming to grips with the roots of social theory
I’m painfully aware that the course is pretty truncated in this respect. Two things — again, aside from my own lack of knowledge — prevent me from going any deeper into the material (much as I’d like to). The first is that it isn’t really a history of ideas course. The second is that a lot of these kids have no idea what, e.g., the Reformation or the Industrial Revolution were, and so it’s hard enough to get to the point where discussion of Smith or Marx, etc, even makes sense to them. As a result we follow one big theme — the division of labor — through five or six big names. Smith, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, with occasional extra bits of context or jumps forward to contemporary applications of their big ideas.
djw 08.30.05 at 8:18 pm
Don’t suppose you have a link to Schelling and Resnick’s exercises, or would care to briefly decribe them?
tom bach 08.30.05 at 8:50 pm
How is it that a course on the history of soc theory isn’t a history of ideas? I mean it has a history and it deals with ideas about something. Your post suggests that you teach the various thinkers in a (or if you want an) historical context and as linked some how or another. Isn’t this by definition a (or again an) history of ideas?
Part of the fun, for me at least, is presenting a narrative one that offers, a more — I do not know — accurate? full? personal? truthful?, take on the big conversations between and among the our large brained forefathers. Smith adapts Nicole by delinking, if that is a word, amoure prope, which I hope I am spelling correctly, the advatages it offers for a self-regulating society from the Xtain moral imperative it violates and suddenly all manner of bright lights ignore the moral or religiously based ethic that critized that self-regulating society. So we today discuss Smith comfortably and authoritatively without dealing with his own deeply-held religious views. In so doing, are we actually teaching Smith qua Smith or are we unthinkingly buying into a now exhausted notion of secularization and in so doing are we not then guilty of misinforming the wee ones? I bring this up because I do it too and am often, as in tonight, filled with guilt and a degree of despair.
So then, I agree that kids today (and most likely kids of yesteryear) do not know what the Reformation and such like were but then again, they do not know because we don’t teach them, no? A fact that makes or has made me go home and shower after truncating or at best half explaining something or another, say the 30 Years’ War. But surely, we need a better justification than its is their ignorance that forces us to truncate and misrepresent.
Kieran Healy 08.30.05 at 9:03 pm
How is it that a course on the history of soc theory isn’t a history of ideas?
What I mean is, the goal of the course is to introduce students to a few thinkers who have played a very large role in shaping the agenda of contemporary sociology, rather than to provide a comprehensive or very nuanced account of the evolution of social thought since, say, the enlightenment. I’m not saying that the line between these goals isn’t blurry (e.g., to fully understand the big guys, don’t you need to know something of the latter), but it’s a question of emphasis.
So then, I agree that kids today (and most likely kids of yesteryear) do not know what the Reformation and such like were but then again, they do not know because we don’t teach them, no?
Collectively, yes. But individually, no. I mean, I am not responsible for college juniors and seniors literally not knowing what the Reformation was. I wish they came into class with at least a basic grasp of that kind of thing. They don’t (or many don’t), so I devote a good chunk of time to explaining it as needed. But of course this takes time away from our chance to read some of Smith’s precursors, or a couple of essays by Albert Hirschman on the evolution of ideas of self-interest, or the nature of capitalism, or what have you. I wish they’d learned it when they should have, in high school. But what can I do?
tom bach 08.30.05 at 9:35 pm
Hirschman is fine but Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy is better and again so is Nicole, who is relatively short and very clear.
“Collectively, yes. But individually, no.”
Sorry but this leaves me cold. It seems to me that responsibility wisely speaking collectively yes and individually yes. I mean, it would be nice if somehow or another all the stuff the kiddies ought to learn occured without individual action and effort, but of course it does not and the fact that it does not does not excuse my failure to either fill the gaps or demand that the gaps be filled. Surely, we have a responsibility to teach what is necessary before teaching what is, you know, fun.
mcm 08.30.05 at 9:50 pm
“Part of the fun, for me at least, is presenting a narrative one that offers, a more—I do not know—accurate? full? personal? truthful?, take on the big conversations between and among the our large brained forefathers.”
Well, yes. But. There are only so many weeks in a semester, and only so many pages per week that students can reasonably be expected to read. If the course were all about Smith, or even all about 17th- and 18th-century social theory, then of course there would be any number of early modern must-reads on the list (not only Ferguson and Hume, but also Mandeville, Kames, Millar, etc.). But if, for the purposes of this course, Smith must stand alone, then it seems to me that an emphasis on the discovery/invention of society is as good a place as any on which to present a Smithian stand.
david 08.30.05 at 10:14 pm
It only takes a few pages of Millar to get all four stages burned into their brains — highly recommended. The down side, of course, is that they’ll then go on to explain everything that’s happened outside of their hometown via the four stages theory, when you were hoping they’d embrace the past as a foreign country.
I had a course where I lept from Boethius to Hobbes, with a fifteen minute interlude covering the renaissance, reformation, scientific revolution, and encounter/conquest. I loved that interlude.
nick 08.30.05 at 10:21 pm
The Theory of Moral Sentiments is oh-so underread. And it’s a necessary read if you’re teaching the Other Book. (I’d throw in Shaftesbury on social theory, too.)
Elyas Bakhtiari 08.31.05 at 8:51 am
My professors always grouped Durkheim, Weber, and Marx as the big three founders of sociological theory. Smith was only mentioned in passing, which may have been because he had an entire Economics department dedicated to his theories. The only place you would come across Hume or Rousseau would be in a Political Science theory course.
What I find interesting is how different departments claim certain theorists as their own and how the teaching varies across departments. Marx is read in each department (Poli Sci, Sociology, Economics), but at different levels.
Tim 08.31.05 at 10:48 am
Smith was only mentioned in passing, which may have been because he had an entire Economics department dedicated to his theories.
I’d say this caricatures both Smith and economics. One can train to be an economist through to a PhD and never take a course in the history of economic thought. I’d argue that many (most?) mainstream economists view the history of ideas as a rather antiquarian sort of thing.
And it’s almost banal to point out that there’s a huge difference between Smith’s political economy (and the tradition of classical political economy more broadly) and present-day economics in terms of scope and methods.
Incidentally, I took a history of economic thought course as an undergrad that covered Hume (his price-specie flow mechanism); so he’s a monetary theorist too.
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