Steven Loyal - Classical Sociological Theory

Steven Loyal

I would like to dedicate this book to my former teachers who served as exemplary academic role models, Istvn Mszros and Barry Barnes.

Sinisa Malesevic

I dedicate this book to John A. Hall, a wonderful scholar, my teacher and a lifelong friend.

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This book and its accompanying volume, Contemporary Sociological Theory, took many years to complete. Initially we envisaged writing one shorter volume focusing on both classical and contemporary social thought, but soon realised that we had to cover many more sociological theories and theorists than we originally planned. Since sociological thought is so rich and diverse, including thousands of scholars who have made a significant contribution to the development of sociology, it became apparent that a single volume could not do justice to all forms of sociological thinking. Hence after completing 32 chapters and discussing it with our editors at SAGE, it was agreed to split the original manuscript into two separate books Classical Sociological Theory and Contemporary Sociological Theory. The original manuscript was also substantially shortened in this process, the principal aim of which was to make the two books as accessible as possible to students. Both authors have contributed equally to these two volumes. In Classical Sociological Theory, Loyal was responsible for writing Chapters 1, 4, 5, 11 and 12 and Maleevi wrote 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. In Contemporary Sociological Theory, Loyal was the lead author for Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 while Maleevi was responsible for Chapters 1, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20, with the Introduction and Chapter 3 a product of joint work.

We would especially like to thank Roddy Condon for his invaluable work in producing the boxed pedagogical material and compiling the references. We would also like to thank Chris Rojek for encouraging us to write this book and also for commissioning the project. Thanks also to Tim Mooney for helpful comments on Chapter 1, and Kieran Allen for comments on Chapter 5. We are also very grateful to everyone at SAGE for their goodwill and enormous patience with the numerous new deadlines that we never met. Finally, we would like to thank our families for their support during the very long and sometimes arduous, but mostly enjoyable, writing process.

In 1971 Lewis Coser wrote an unusual, and later highly successful, textbook Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. The book differed from the standard social science textbooks of its time. Instead of summarising the main concepts, ideas and theories of various thinkers, as other textbooks have done, Coser aimed to frame these intellectual developments within the wider social and historical context. While other books would usually provide only a few biographical and historical paragraphs, Cosers work devoted almost as much attention to the history, social environment and biography as it did to the key sociological contributions of respective scholars. He justified this strategy in the following terms:

We have a great number of books that attempt to elucidate what Marx or Weber or Pareto really meant but only few and scattered efforts to use the tools of the sociologist to investigate the role of sociological theorists within the social structure in which they are variously placed. There has been no sustained attempt to show how social origins, social position, social network, or audience found a reflection in the problems that a theorist addressed himself to or in the overall orientation of his lifes work. (Coser, 1971: xiv)

This unusual approach proved popular with the audiences and many students found Cosers textbook enlightening, informative and accessible. Most of all, this approach made it possible for students to contextualise the development of sociological thinking. Instead of de-contextualised abstract concepts and theories created by some distant experts, one encountered real human beings struggling to make a sense of their own world. By focusing on individual biographies and the wider social, political and historical contexts, Coser made the classics of sociology alive and relevant to ones own times. Nevertheless, despite the textbooks success as a teaching tool, Cosers example was not followed by the majority of authors and publishers and they continued to produce social theory textbooks that lacked a historical, social and biographical grounding.