I am teaching the foundations course in our graduate program this year: “Classical Sociological Theory.” It’s a challenge. The last time I taught such a class was thirty years ago. Yet, it’s a challenge worth taking. Aside from the matters of departmental needs and resources, this is something that I believe will be particularly interesting for me, and also for my students. Over those thirty years, I have actively thought about the events of the day, and about my research, using foundational thinkers (though some more than others), “standing on the shoulders of giants.” It is exciting to revisit old friends, including, among others, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and George Herbert Mead, and spend some time, introducing them to students at the beginning of their professional training.
The first theorist was easy, Alexis de Tocqueville. I have taught an undergraduate class on his masterpiece, Democracy in America, frequently. My new book, Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power, is not only informed by Tocqueville’s approach to culture and democracy. It is in a sense in dialogue with Tocqueville. And as the readers of Deliberately Considered know when I look at current events, I often interpret them using the insights of Tocqueville from understanding the nature of the American party system and for contemporary political debate, such as the struggle over workers’ rights in Wisconsin.
Karl Marx, the second theorist we examined in our class, is another matter. Like many intellectuals since his time, I have a history with Marx. As I told the class in an introduction to our discussions last week, when I was young and especially critical, I thought that to be critical required one to read, know and act through Marx. I remember having a course in high school which I found particularly upsetting, “The Problems of Communism.” The author of the class text was J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the F.B. I. Talk about the state ideological apparatus, as . . .
Read more: Teaching the Classics: Reflections of an Ex-Marxist Wannabe
