Abstract
This article reexamines Alvin W. Gouldner's Enter Plato as a neglected but significant contribution to the sociology of philosophy and argues for its renewed relevance in contemporary theory. Challenging one influential reading of Gouldner's work advanced by Camic and Gross, the article contends that Gouldner's primary aim is not to specify the mechanisms linking social structure to philosophical ideas in a Mertonian sense. Rather, Enter Plato should be understood as an early attempt to conceptualize philosophers as intellectuals who diagnose social problems and propose normative remedies. Drawing on a close reading of Enter Plato in conjunction with The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, the article reconstructs Gouldner's view of social theorists as “diagnosticians” and “therapists” whose ideas are rooted in underlying “operating metaphysics” shaped by social experience. It argues that Gouldner's perspective points toward a sociology of philosophy centered on intellectual agency, problem formulation, and normative intervention rather than on the social determination of ideas. The article further brings Gouldner into dialogue with Jeffrey C. Alexander's theory of “dramatic intellectuals,” highlighting important affinities between the two approaches. Both shift attention from explaining ideas by social conditions to analyzing how intellectuals construct meaning through narratives, symbolic distinctions, and engagement with audiences. While differences remain, particularly concerning how the reception of ideas is conceptualized, this comparison serves to clarify Gouldner's distinctive contribution. By foregrounding the meaning-making and orienting functions of social theory, the article argues for a reorientation of the sociology of philosophy toward the analysis of intellectual practices, narrative construction, and reception. In this light, Enter Plato emerges as an important precursor to a more dynamic and culturally oriented approach to the study of philosophy and social theory.
Keywords
What is the sociology of philosophy?
What might sociologically inspired research into the history of philosophy look like? One way to answer this question is to study in depth the works in which sociologists and philosophers have set out to conduct this kind of research. This research approach is now several decades old and has gone by various names. The American sociologist Randall Collins calls the discipline the sociology of philosophy. Other terms that have been used are sociology of ideas (Charles Camic and Neil Gross) and sociology of philosophical knowledge (Martin Kusch). The older generic term is sociology of knowledge. Sociology of philosophy should thus be understood as a subdivision of the overarching discipline of sociology of knowledge. 1
Although research in the sociology of philosophy has taken diverse forms, it is united by a shared ambition to illuminate philosophical activity by situating it within its social context. 2 This body of scholarship has addressed questions such as: Is there a connection between philosophical and political positions? How do philosophers become influential? How do particular philosophical arguments and positions come to be established as more or less self-evident? How can philosophical creativity be explained sociologically? On what grounds do philosophers adopt certain positions rather than others? A substantial international literature has emerged in response to these questions, examining both intellectual movements—such as neo-Kantianism and pragmatism—and individual thinkers, including Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Richard Rorty.
The most comprehensive work on the sociology of philosophy to date is Randall Collins’ The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998). In this 1,100-page work, Collins sets out to explain intellectual change in all of the world's major intellectual traditions using his so-called ritual interaction theory. Collins does not content himself, as is customary in Western historiography, with recounting the history of Western philosophy from Thales of Miletus to the present day. He also applies his sociological theory to philosophical developments in China, India, and Japan, as well as to Jewish and Arab thought. As the subtitle of the work indicates, it is thus a question of a global theory of intellectual change.
Another important work is Pierre Bourdieu's The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1991). In this book, Bourdieu seeks to demonstrate that there is a social connection between philosophical positions and political views in general, and between Heidegger's philosophy and politics in particular. This intention is already apparent from the title: ontology is political and politics becomes ontology (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 151). According to Bourdieu, Heidegger's magnum opus Sein und Zeit (1927) expresses a philosophically sublimated anti-modernism, elitism, and revolutionary conservatism. Heidegger's supposedly apolitical philosophy is, in fact, according to Bourdieu, full of ideas that mark its affiliation with the revolutionary conservatism of 1920s Germany. Like Collins, Bourdieu approaches the sociology of philosophy through his own theoretical apparatus. In Bourdieu's case, this includes concepts such as field, habitus, nomos, and doxa, whereas Collins relies on notions such as emotional energy, interaction ritual theory, and attention space. What distinguishes both Collins and Bourdieu from many other scholars in the field is that their general theoretical frameworks were developed for broader sociological purposes and only secondarily applied to the sociology of philosophy.
Some other important works in this field of research are: Martin Kusch, Psychologism. A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge (1995); Neil Gross, Richard Rorty. The Making of an American Philosopher (2008); Patrick Baert, The Existentialist Moment. The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual (2015), Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí (2022) Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell. A Cultural Sociology and Eliran Bar-El How Slavoj Became Žižek. The Making of a Public Intellectual (2023). Three important articles are: Michèle Lamont “How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida” (1987); Charles Camic and Neil Gross “The New Sociology of Ideas” (2001) and Jeffrey C. Alexander “Dramatic Intellectuals” (2016). 3
One work that has largely been overlooked in research on the sociology of philosophy is Alvin W. Gouldner's Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (1965). Gouldner is today perhaps best known for The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), in which he predicted that Talcott Parsons's structural functionalism, already losing ground by the mid-1960s, would soon be displaced by other theoretical currents (Gouldner, 1970: 377–378). According to Gouldner, the hegemonic position of structural functionalism would give way to a “theoretical polycentrism,” out of which a so-called “reflexive sociology” would eventually emerge (Chriss, 1999). In the preface to The Coming Crisis, Gouldner notes that “the present study is part of a larger work plan, whose first product was Enter Plato, and whose objective is to contribute to an historically informed sociology of social theory” (Gouldner, 1970: vii). While The Coming Crisis has received extensive attention within sociology, the same cannot be said of its predecessor. None of the literature discussed above engages with Enter Plato, despite its clear relevance to the sociology of philosophy. 4 Nor has the book attracted significant attention in the secondary literature on Gouldner himself. In James J. Chriss's Alvin W. Gouldner: Sociologist and Outlaw Marxist (1999), it is discussed in just over one page, and in Confronting Gouldner: Sociology and Political Activism (2015) by the same author, it is mentioned only once. 5
The most comprehensive discussion of Enter Plato to date is provided by Charles Camic and Neil Gross in their article “Alvin Gouldner and the Sociology of Ideas: Lessons from ‘Enter Plato’” (2002). In their assessment, Enter Plato is an exceptionally important work and is even described as a turning point in the history of sociology of knowledge (Camic and Gross, 2002: 104). The central aim of their article is to identify the lessons that contemporary sociologists of knowledge can draw from Enter Plato. This article pursues the same overarching objective. Returning to the initial question, I want to examine what Enter Plato can contribute to sociologically inspired research in the history of philosophy. A work as wide-ranging as Enter Plato can, of course, be read in different ways. In this article, I make no claim to present a definitive or exhaustive interpretation of Enter Plato. Instead, I seek to bring out a theme in Gouldner that is expressed in Enter Plato and The Coming Crisis, but also, to some extent, in The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979). It is a theme that, I argue, should be of considerable interest to the sociology of philosophy.
This article consists of two parts. In the first part, I present an interpretation of Enter Plato and contrast it primarily with Camic and Gross's reading in “Alvin Gouldner and the Sociology of Ideas: Lessons from ‘Enter Plato.’” In order to make Camic and Gross's reading of Enter Plato intelligible to the reader, I also present, in this context, Robert K. Merton's critical discussion of the early sociology of knowledge. Although I take issue with Camic and Gross's interpretation at several points, I concur with their view that Enter Plato should be read against the background of ideas first fully articulated in The Coming Crisis. For Gouldner's program in Enter Plato to be analytically effective, it must therefore be supplemented with arguments developed in The Coming Crisis. In Part II, the scope of the discussion is widened and no longer confined to the interpretation of Enter Plato alone. I examine how Gouldner's notions of diagnosis and therapy in Enter Plato correspond to his concepts of “permitted” and “unpermitted” worlds in The Coming Crisis. I further suggest that Enter Plato can be read as anticipating arguments later articulated by Jeffrey C. Alexander in his article “Dramatic Intellectuals” (2016). Part II also compares Gouldner's program for the study of intellectuals and social theorists with Alexander's corresponding framework in “Dramatic Intellectuals,” bringing the two perspectives into dialogue. This comparison occupies a large part of Part 2.
Robert K. Merton's critique of the classical sociology of knowledge
In his article “Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge” ([1945] 1973), Robert K. Merton examines how earlier work in the sociology of knowledge, most notably that of Karl Marx, Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, Émile Durkheim, and Pitirim Sorokin, had addressed several of the field's central problems. The aim of the article is to provide an analytical framework, or paradigm, by means of which research in the sociology of knowledge can be systematically classified and evaluated. Merton's contribution proved highly influential and is today widely regarded as one of the canonical texts in the sociology of knowledge.
Merton observes that a shared point of departure for virtually all approaches within the sociology of knowledge is the assumption that thought is in some way shaped by extra-theoretical social factors. As he puts it, A central point of agreement in all approaches to the sociology of knowledge is the thesis that thought has an existential basis insofar as it is not immanently determined and insofar as one or another of its aspects can be derived from extra-cognitive factors. (Merton, 1973: 13)
A key dimension of Merton's analytical framework therefore concerns the nature of the relationship posited between determining social factors and different forms of thought: “How are mental productions related to the existential basis?” (Merton, 1973: 12).
Merton identifies several distinct ways in which social structure and patterns of thought may be related. Unless this relationship is specified with sufficient analytical precision, he argues, the entire project of the sociology of knowledge risks becoming vacuous. The sociology of knowledge cannot, therefore, rest content with a vague parallelism between social structure and culture, on the one hand, and the production of knowledge, on the other.
In the article “Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge” ([1949] 1968), Merton criticizes Karl Mannheim for failing to specify with sufficient clarity the nature of the relationship between social structure and patterns of thought. Mannheim introduced the concept of existentially connected knowledge (German: seinsverbundenes Wissen; often translated as existentially connected or existentially determined knowledge) to emphasize that certain modes of thinking are inextricably linked to the social positions and historical perspectives of particular groups. As Mannheim formulates the core claim of the sociology of knowledge: “The principal thesis of the sociology of knowledge is that there are modes of thought which cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscured” (Mannheim, 1936: 2). As examples of existentially connected knowledge, Mannheim points to historical knowledge (that is, how history is interpreted and represented), political thought, knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities, and what he refers to as everyday knowledge (Alltagswissen) (Mannheim, [1928] 2011: 401).
In Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim emphasizes that by the concept of existentially connected knowledge, he does not mean a mechanical cause–effect relationship: “we leave the meaning of ‘determination’ open, and only empirical investigation will show us how strict is the correlation between life-situation and thought-process, or what scope exists for variations in the correlation” (Mannheim, 1936: 267n). According to Merton, who also cites this passage, Mannheim's reluctance to specify the nature of the relationship between social structure and patterns of thought results in a problematic vagueness in his theoretical position. This vagueness is particularly serious, Merton argues, because it lies at the very core of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge (Merton, 1968: 552). As a consequence, Mannheim's approach offers only limited analytical resources for explaining what the social conditioning of knowledge actually consists in.
According to Camic and Gross, Gouldner's Enter Plato should be read against the backdrop of Merton's critique of the early sociology of knowledge. The book is, they argue, an attempt to provide a detailed account of the relationship between social structure in ancient Greece and Plato's social theory. In this sense, Gouldner is said to have taken seriously Merton's insistence that the sociology of knowledge must specify how intellectual products are related to social structure. This relationship, Camic and Gross maintain, cannot be merely posited at a theoretical level but must be empirically demonstrated. In what follows, I first present my own interpretation of Enter Plato, then outline Camic and Gross's reading, and finally develop my critique of their interpretation.
Enter Plato in two different readings
Enter Plato is divided into two parts. The first, entitled “The Hellenic World,” consists of four chapters that address a set of broad, interrelated themes. Among the most central are the class structure of the Greek city-states, particularly the conflict between citizens and non-citizens, the so-called contest system, the emergence of individualism following the decline of clan-based society from the eighth century BCE onward, and the recurrent warfare among the city-states. Chapter 2, “The Greek Contest System: Patterns of a Culture,” occupies a pivotal position in this first part. In this chapter, Gouldner portrays ancient Greek culture as characterized by a pervasive struggle for success and honor among freemen, manifest in arenas ranging from athletics and poetry to politics. According to Gouldner, this competitive ethos contributed to persistent social tension and division within the polis, since individual and collective interest rarely coincided (Gouldner, 1965: 54). Through constant comparisons of performance, one individual's gain invariably entailed another's loss, transforming competition into a bitter zero-sum game. The contest system thus generated not only intense rivalry but also structural instability within the polis, as it fostered envy and a broadly pessimistic outlook on life. The institution of slavery further darkened social existence in the polis: the possibility of enslavement, for oneself or one's family, remained a pervasive threat that could never be entirely dismissed.
Part 2, which bears the same title as the book, constitutes a critical case study of Plato as an early social theorist (Gouldner, 1965: 166). In this section, Gouldner analyzes the social problems Plato identified and the solutions he proposed. The discussion draws primarily on The Republic and Laws. Gouldner portrays Plato as a social diagnostician and therapist concerned above all with problems of social order, with the Greek city-state as the object of both diagnosis and therapy. Within Part 2, Chapters 6, “Social Diagnosis: Plato's Diagnosis of Social Disunity,” and 8, “Therapeutics: Planned Social Change in Plato's Theory,” are particularly central.
According to Plato, social division constitutes the primary problem of the city-state. In The Republic, this concern is articulated in the following terms: “Well, then, can we think of any greater evil for a city than what tears it apart and turns it into many cities instead of one? Or any greater good than what unites it and makes it one?” (The Republic 462b; partially reproduced in Gouldner, 1965: 206). Plato locates the sources of this division primarily in the absence of a shared consensus on fundamental values, the lack of a unified and coherent ruling class, and an unclear division of labor and role specialization within the polis (Gouldner, 1965: 212–225).
At a more fundamental level, however, all social problems ultimately derive from human nature. Human beings are, according to Plato, creatures driven by desire and largely incapable of governing themselves (Gouldner, 1965: 255). The solution proposed in The Republic therefore takes the form of a kind of social therapy, aimed at enabling individuals to use reason to gain insight into the idea of the good. The method Plato regards as most appropriate for this purpose is dialectics, which is to be practiced both individually and collectively. Such therapy is, in Plato's view, indispensable for the survival of the city-state: if individuals are left to their own devices, society risks rapidly dissolving into chaos and disorder (Gouldner, 1965: 348–349). In Laws, generally regarded as Plato's final dialogue, Gouldner contends that Plato no longer places the same confidence in reason's capacity to govern human passions. Social order must therefore be secured by supplementary means. As Plato formulates it, obedience is most effectively achieved through “fear, law, and true reason” (Laws 783a)—a formulation that signals a shift from the therapeutic rationalism of The Republic toward a more juridical and coercive conception of social order (cf. Gouldner, 1965: 228).
Part 1 provides the general cultural and social background against which Plato intervenes—enter Plato—with his social theory in an attempt to set things right, at least at the level of ideas. In this sense, Plato's social theory becomes, in Gouldner's formulation, “an alternative to politics” (Gouldner, 1965: 165–196).
In their reading of Enter Plato, Camic and Gross bring Parts 1 and 2 of the book closer together than I am prepared to do. They perceive Part 1 as a description of “the existential basis” (Merton) and Part 2 as an account of “the mental productions” that this basis generates. 6 According to their interpretation, it is primarily the contest system and class antagonisms within the Greek city-states that indirectly shape the content of Plato's social theory. As a mediating link between these social factors, the existential basis, and Plato's social theory as a set of mental productions, Gouldner is said, in Camic and Gross's reading, to posit a specific male character type. This character type, in turn, gives rise to a pre-theoretical sentiment shared among the freemen of Athens (Camic and Gross, 2002: 103, 105). Plato's social philosophy is then understood as emerging from this underlying sentiment.
By introducing a mediating link between general social factors and intellectual products in ancient Greece, Gouldner, according to Camic and Gross, avoids the error of directly deriving philosophical ideas from broad social or cultural macro-conditions. Enter Plato thus represents an advance over earlier approaches in the sociology of knowledge, most notably that of Karl Mannheim (Camic and Gross, 2002: 105). Camic and Gross contrast what they regard as Gouldner's successful sociological strategy of explanation with Mannheim's failure in this respect. In Ideology and Utopia, for instance, Mannheim writes: “Was it not this process of social ascent which in the Athenian democracy called forth the first great surge of scepticism in the history of Occidental thought” (Mannheim, 1936: 9; also quoted in Camic and Gross, 2002: 105). Mannheim's problem, on this reading, lies in his attempt to connect processes that appear widely separated without specifying any mediating mechanism—namely, the upward mobility of a lower social stratum in ancient Greek society and the emergence of skeptical modes of thought. Unlike Gouldner, Mannheim thus fails to provide a precise answer to Merton's question: “How are mental productions related to the existential basis?”
As indicated above, I maintain that Part 1 should be read primarily as a general account of the social and cultural conditions prevailing in Greece during Plato's lifetime. Gouldner is not concerned with offering a detailed explanation of how Plato's social theory is conditioned or caused by those conditions. Rather, he presupposes a general connection between social context and intellectual production. Enter Plato should therefore not be interpreted as a direct response to Merton's critique of the sociology of knowledge. In what follows, I outline the reasons for this interpretation.
Merton's critique of the sociology of knowledge is never explicitly addressed in Enter Plato. Although Gouldner dedicated the book to his former teacher Robert K. Merton, Merton is otherwise mentioned only once, and then merely in a footnote (Gouldner, 1965: 132, n.110). Camic and Gross acknowledge that Merton's “Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge” is never discussed in the text, yet they nonetheless regard Merton's influence as evident (Camic and Gross, 2002: 98, 102). This influence, they argue, is particularly visible in Gouldner's introductory formulation of the problem. Since this passage constitutes the only explicit guidance Gouldner offers the reader for orienting themselves within the material presented in Part 1, it is reproduced here in full.
In this and the next three chapters, I attempt to describe as concisely as I can some of the salient features of Athenian social structure and culture and, where it seems helpful, of Hellenic society. The aim is not to reveal new facts about this much-studied civilization; it is rather to apply such perspectives as are common to sociologiststo help to understand how this civilization gave rise to and shaped Plato's social theory. In one part, then, this is a study in the sociology of knowledge—of the Platonic origins of Western social theory, of some of the earliest secular diagnoses of and proposed remedies for the human condition, and of the growth of critical reflection on human relationships as it emerged in ancient Greece (Gouldner, 1965: 4).
It should be emphasized at the outset that Gouldner's formulation of the problem applies only to Part 1; Part 2 pursues a different analytical purpose (Gouldner, 1965: 166–167). In Part 1, Gouldner seeks to describe the social structure of Athens and the wider Greek world by drawing on a range of sociological concepts, including social stratification, reference groups, and social functions and dysfunctions. Since Gouldner is neither a philologist nor a historian, his aim is not to present new empirical data, but rather to explore what a sociological understanding of ancient Greece might look like. In this sense, Part 1 is intended to provide a general background to the emergence of Plato's social theory. Camic and Gross, however, interpret Gouldner's statement that the analysis is meant “to help to understand how this civilization gave rise to and shaped Plato's social theory” as posing a question about an explanatory mechanism or theoretical model linking social factors to Plato's social theory. 7 Camic and Gross argue that this formulation is strongly reminiscent of Merton's guiding question in “Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge”: “How are mental productions related to the existential basis?” However, this interpretation reads too much into Gouldner's wording. No such analysis is, in fact, to be found in either Part 1 or Part 2 of Enter Plato.
According to Camic and Gross, Enter Plato offers precise sociological explanations of Plato's social theory. 8 In my view, however, the social and cultural factors discussed by Gouldner rarely function as more than a contextual backdrop against which Plato's thought can be situated. Although Camic and Gross acknowledge that Gouldner at times reverts to a vague, Mannheimian mode of describing the relationship between social factors and patterns of thought, they nonetheless maintain that his analysis is generally clear on this point. (Camic and Gross, 2002: 105). 9 I disagree. Gouldner remains vague on this point throughout Enter Plato. Camic and Gross's attempt to identify a mediating link in the form of a specific “male character type” strikes me as insufficiently grounded in the text. Although Gouldner does discuss how competition and continual comparisons of performance among freemen generate instability within the polis, this analysis is never explicitly connected to the emergence of Plato's social theory, or his metaphysics, in either Part 1 or Part 2 of the book.
In their article “The New Sociologies of Ideas” (2001), published a year prior to their study of Enter Plato, Camic and Gross in fact characterize Gouldner as a representative of what they term “the old sociology of ideas.” Within this perspective, the ideas of intellectuals are assumed to be explainable in a relatively straightforward manner by reference to macro-level social factors. As they write: “Likewise for Gouldner, ‘Plato's social theory [was] a response to the [economic and political] problems and tensions current in his historical period.’” (Camic and Gross, 2001: 241). A year later, Camic and Gross revise their assessment of Gouldner and now classify him, using the terminology introduced in their 2001 article, as a representative of “the new sociology of ideas.” One defining feature of this approach is its focus on the localized arenas in which intellectual activity unfolds, such as academic institutions, discussion circles, or magazine editorial offices. As I see it, Camic and Gross miss Gouldner's central points in Enter Plato because, in “Alvin Gouldner and the Sociology of Ideas: Lessons from Enter Plato,” they are overly preoccupied with the conceptual apparatus they developed in their 2001 article. In Enter Plato, Gouldner never articulates any ambition to relate Plato's thought to social or cultural factors in a systematic or distinctive explanatory manner. Rather, he presents Plato as the first social theorist in the Western tradition to confront the problem of social order—a problem later taken up by a range of sociologists, including Comte, Saint-Simon, Durkheim, and Parsons.
Lessons for the sociology of philosophy: From Enter Plato and beyond
Why read Enter Plato today? I contend that the work remains highly valuable. As noted above, Part 2 of Enter Plato constitutes a critical case study of Plato as a social theorist, and it is here that the book's most significant contributions to the sociology of philosophy are to be found. In this part, Gouldner outlines a compelling, albeit underdeveloped, program for the sociological study of philosophers and intellectuals. The program offers a substantive answer to the question of what sociologically informed research in the history of philosophy might entail.
A central argument in The Coming Crisis is that social scientific theories rest on unarticulated premises that originate in the early socialization of theorists into specific cultural and social contexts. This process of social influence typically begins, Gouldner argues, before the theorists in question have reached what he wryly calls “the intellectual age of consent” (Gouldner, 1970: 32; cf. Gouldner, 1965: 349). These premises, whether conscious or unconscious in character, consist of fundamental assumptions about human beings and society, such as whether individuals are rational or irrational, or whether certain social problems are, at root, insoluble without state intervention, and so forth. In The Coming Crisis, Gouldner refers to such assumptions as “domain assumptions” (Gouldner, 1970: 31). These are metaphysical assumptions pertaining to a delimited field, for example, sociological theory. “Domain assumptions” are, in turn, subordinate to more general “world hypotheses,” which are essentially equivalent to metaphysics (Gouldner, 1965: 31). In Enter Plato, Gouldner instead uses the term “operating metaphysics” rather than “domain assumptions” (Gouldner, 1965: 349–350). In both works, however, these terms denote the same kind of underlying structures, even if the line of reasoning is more developed in The Coming Crisis than in Enter Plato.
It is from a theorist's basic operating metaphysics that he or she constructs the more refined philosophical theories later presented to a wider audience. There is thus, Gouldner argues, a significant continuity between a social scientific or philosophical theory and a theorist's operating metaphysics (Gouldner, 1965: 350). In the first part of this article, it has been shown that Plato drew the intellectual resources that informed his operating metaphysics from his own contemporary culture, which he then used to diagnose and propose remedies for the Athenian city-state. Both his diagnosis of social disorder and the therapeutic strategies he proposed were shaped by the conditions of his own historical moment. It is primarily for this reason that historical context plays a crucial role in Gouldner's program.
Plato, Gouldner argues, is only one among several social thinkers who may be examined as social diagnosticians and therapists. In Enter Plato, he expresses the hope of producing additional historically grounded case studies in the future, with the aim of achieving a deeper understanding of the role of the social theorist in Western society (Gouldner, 1965: 171). The purpose of such studies is to contribute to a sociological theory of social theorists themselves. As Gouldner puts it: “Some social scientists are interested in studying industrial workers; some study physicians; and still others, drug addicts and prostitutes. I happen to be curious about social theorists” (Gouldner, 1965: 170–171). Although Enter Plato does not articulate this theory in a fully explicit form, Gouldner suggests that it would contribute to what he terms a “sociology of social science” (Gouldner, 1965: 171). In The Coming Crisis, the same project is referred to as the “sociology of sociology.” A central component of such a research orientation, whatever label one adopts, would be a systematic account of the diagnoses that social theorists or philosophers offer of society and the therapeutic responses they propose to address the pathologies they identify. In Enter Plato, Gouldner formulates this idea as follows: “Our interest in the historical setting of Plato's work derives also from our assumption that social theorists always have some conception—tacit or explicit—of the ills of their society and of possible remedies for them. All social theories, in my view, embody the traces of social diagnosis and social therapy. They are never simply disinterested efforts to describe and explain social reality” (Gouldner, 1965: 171).
The American sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander has, in fact, already outlined such a perspective in his article “Dramatic Intellectuals” (2016), where this theory forms part of his broader cultural sociology. Despite its relatively short length, the article has already left a substantial mark on sociological research on intellectuals (see, for example, the contributions collected in Pérez-Jara and Rudas, 2025a). Rather than reading Enter Plato as a continuation of Merton's “Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge,” I propose to interpret it as a precursor to Alexander's concept of dramatic intellectuals. On this reading, Enter Plato should be understood not as an attempt to practice the sociology of knowledge in Merton's sense, but as an early contribution to a sociology of social theorists and philosophers as diagnosticians and therapists—a line of thought later developed more explicitly by Alexander (2016). In what follows, I seek to deepen the comparison between Alexander's notion of dramatic intellectuals and Gouldner's approach to the sociological study of social theorists, as sketched in Enter Plato and The Coming Crisis (cf. Gouldner, 1965: 170–171; Gouldner, 1970: 483).
My aim is not to present Gouldner as a proto-Alexander, or Alexander as a post-Gouldner. Rather, I argue that the parallels between their approaches are sufficiently significant to warrant closer examination in order to assess their respective contributions to the sociology of philosophy. Accordingly, the comparison will highlight not only points of convergence between the two perspectives, but also important differences. The similarity I primarily want to emphasize is that neither Gouldner nor Alexander is concerned with describing or theorizing the process through which knowledge is determined by social conditions. Instead, they focus on how theorists, drawing on cultural resources, formulate ideas in response to pressing social issues and communicate these to an audience, thereby helping that audience make sense of their social world.
By the term dramatic intellectual, Alexander refers to thinkers who not only launch more or less new ideas but also act effectively to ensure that their thinking will have social consequences. In order for ideas to spread in society, Alexander suggests, they must be staged and communicated in such a way that they can assist the public in its attempts to make sense of life. In modern society, intellectuals and philosophers have emerged as a key group in articulating relatively shared interpretations of social reality for a broader public. In this respect, they have assumed functions once performed by priests, prophets, or shamans in earlier forms of society (Alexander, 2016: 343–344). Dramatic intellectuals structure reality through fundamental symbolic distinctions, such as “sacred” and “profane,” “good” and “evil,” and construct narratives that explain how these categories are related and how they have unfolded over historical time. By employing narratives organized around these binary codes, intellectuals diagnose what has gone wrong in society and culture and propose visions of remediation through which the future can once again be imagined as hopeful.
According to sociologists Pérez-Jara and Rudas, dramatic intellectuals offer “diagnoses and treatments for our most serious social and existential illnesses” (Pérez-Jara and Rudas, 2025b: 14). This conception of the intellectual closely mirrors the view of philosophers and social theorists articulated in Enter Plato. As Gouldner himself puts it: “To be a social theorist is to be the oedipal heir to shamans and priests and to the conjurers of philosopher-kings. It is to be a maker and shaker of worlds that are and worlds that might be” (Gouldner, 1965: 197). In this sense, to be an intellectual is to carry forward an ancient vocation: to communicate to one's contemporaries a vision of ultimate meanings—of what is valued, what has gone wrong, and how collective life ought to be reoriented in response (Cf. Alexander, 2017: 8).
Another point of convergence between Gouldner and Alexander lies in their characterization of intellectuals as dramatists. 10 In Enter Plato, Gouldner argues that the role of the secular social theorist, first systematically developed in the Western tradition by Plato, had to be distinguished from that of shamans, prophets, or similar figures. Plato accomplished this, Gouldner suggests, by modeling the role of the social theorist on that of the dramatist. In classical Athens, playwrights functioned as social commentators and moral educators, and it was this cultural role that Plato appropriated and transformed in developing his conception of the philosopher as a social theorist. Plato's use of the dialogue form can thus, according to Gouldner, be understood as a strategy through which he adapted to the role of the playwright and drew upon the cultural authority and symbolic weight associated with that role (Gouldner, 1965: 382–383).
For Alexander, by contrast, the specifically dramatic dimension of intellectual activity lies less in the social role of the intellectual than in the narratives through which intellectuals represent reality. By framing reality in terms of moral binaries such as good and evil, dramatic intellectuals construct social dramas that invite audiences to align themselves with the side of the purported good. Through such performances, intellectuals may themselves come to be perceived as iconic and charismatic figures in the public sphere (Alexander, 2016: 344). Alexander characterizes the rhetorical power of such binary oppositions as follows:
When intellectuals create narratives that juxtapose heroic protagonists with dangerous antagonists, the tension is portrayed not only as social struggle but as storied plot. Sacred and profane binaries thus become dramatic, energized by all-or-nothing battles that decide our shared human fate (Alexander, 2016: 344).
Although Gouldner does not explicitly take binary oppositions as his point of departure in Enter Plato, he nonetheless observes that Plato's reflections on justice and injustice are organized around a series of related “dualisms,” such as order/disorder, temperance/intemperance, and lawfulness/lawlessness (Gouldner, 1965: 221). In The Coming Crisis, drawing on the work of the social psychologist Charles Osgood, Gouldner further develops the idea of the social theorist or philosopher as a creator of symbolic “worlds” structured through binary oppositions. Theory construction, Gouldner argues, is often a means by which a theorist responds to perceived threats to the values he or she holds dear (Gouldner, 1970: 484). There are two kinds of worlds for the social theorist: permitted (or normal) and unpermitted (or abnormal).
Thinking often begins, Gouldner argues, when the theorist experiences an unpermitted world (Gouldner, 1970: 484–485). Such a world may take the form of social fragmentation and anomie—conditions encountered, for example, by both Plato and Durkheim in their respective historical contexts. In response, the theorist seeks, at the level of ideas, to transform this unpermitted world into a permitted one, thereby restoring balance within his or her own cognitive and moral universe. Theorizing thus becomes a way of working through one's social experience at a psychological as well as an intellectual level (Gouldner, 1970: 484).
As already noted, Plato sought in The Republic to remedy the anomie of Athenian society through the practice of dialectics. Durkheim, by contrast, proposed the creation of professional corporations that would encompass large portions of individuals’ lives and thereby foster social integration (Durkheim, 2002: 299). He argued that a mediating structure, a secondary group, was required to bridge the widening gap between the individual and the state and to replace the integrative social forces that were eroding in modern industrial society. Durkheim diagnosed the problem in stark terms: The social forms that used to serve as a framework for individuals and a skeleton for society either no longer exist or are in the process of being erased, and no new forms are taking their place. So that nothing remains but the fluid mass of individuals. (Durkheim, 1992: 106)
The distinction between permitted and unpermitted worlds elaborated in The Coming Crisis corresponds to the same underlying idea found in Enter Plato, albeit expressed there in the language of diagnosis and therapy. In both cases, the task consists in identifying the point at which something regarded as normal and desirable threatens to become abnormal and undesirable—and in intervening, at least at the level of ideas, to prevent this transformation. The theorist's differentiation between permitted and unpermitted worlds thus corresponds, Gouldner argues, to a fundamental moral distinction between good and evil. Another central opposition in this framework is that between the powerful and the weak. A permitted world is one in which power and goodness is closely aligned. When goodness and power are positively correlated, Gouldner argues, the social theorist attains, at a psychological level, a state of equilibrium in his or her perception of social reality (Gouldner, 1970: 85, 486; Gouldner, 1979: 103, n9). Theorists such as Plato, Durkheim, and Parsons exemplify this orientation by emphasizing value consensus as both a powerful integrative force and a morally desirable condition. From this standpoint, a social world in which morally desirable phenomena lack power appears deeply troubling.
Gouldner illustrates these contrasting configurations of alignment and misalignment between goodness and power with a brief comparison. In The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979), published only a year before Gouldner's death, he remarks in passing that Noam Chomsky regards “the new class” as morally corrupt, that is, as evil, but also as weak. John Galbraith, by contrast, views the technical intelligentsia, which constitutes a class fraction within “the new class,” as good and powerful. Gouldner sees Chomsky's and Galbraith's views on the new class as an example of intellectuals’ tendency to normalize social worlds, that is, to bring the good and the powerful into alignment with one another, and to treat the evil as weak (Gouldner, 1979: 6; cf. Gouldner, 1979: 103, n9).
An unpermitted world is thus one in which moral goodness is weak while moral badness is strong (Gouldner, 1970: 485–486). For a Marxist, for example, a social order in which the working class is weak and capitalists are powerful represents a threatening and evil world—one that calls for transformation through a shift in the balance of power. For Durkheim, by contrast, modern anomic society, characterized by a “fluid mass of individuals,” constituted a veritable nightmare, leading to social disintegration, suicide, and class antagonism (Durkheim, 1992: 106).
In this respect, both Gouldner and Alexander assume that social meaning is structured through relatively universal binary distinctions, such as sacred/profane, good/evil, powerful/weak, or pure/polluted, by means of which social theorists interpret contemporary problems and articulate possible remedies. From this perspective, theorizing is therefore not only about exploring social reality but also about constituting it, on a theoretical level, as a social world (Gouldner, 1970: 84). A key difference between the two perspectives, however, lies in Gouldner's incorporation of a psychological dimension. For Gouldner, the social theorist seeks to make sense of his or her own social experience in order to achieve a state of psychic equilibrium. Alexander, by contrast, does not develop a comparable psychological theory of motivation. In his account, the activity of intellectuals is oriented primarily toward the production of meaning-making narratives for social actors, such as social movements. This distinction between the two perspectives will be examined in greater detail below.
The philosopher and the audience
A central concern in the sociological study of philosophers and social theorists is why certain philosophical ideas and proposed solutions to social problems gain traction with broader publics while others do not. Gouldner understood Enter Plato and The Coming Crisis as parts of a broader intellectual project aimed ultimately at developing a theory of how social science theory is both generated and received (Gouldner, 1970: 483). Both works gesture toward what such a theory of reception, applicable to social scientific and philosophical ideas alike, might entail, even though this dimension is never fully elaborated in either text.
In Enter Plato, Gouldner offers a detailed analysis of Plato's reference group (Gouldner, 1965: 319–323). Whereas Plato's philosophical rivals, such as Antisthenes and Diogenes, addressed a broad popular audience, Plato oriented himself primarily toward the aristocratic youth of Athens. Within this milieu, he likely found a particularly receptive audience for his arguments concerning the necessity of a strict and clearly defined social hierarchy. Gouldner stresses that Plato did not simply adapt his political message to aristocratic interests; rather, there existed a deeper affinity between Plato and this audience in terms of their shared social experiences and political outlook. As Gouldner observes, Plato “expresses in pointed ways congenial views of society which they have only vaguely formulated and felt” (Gouldner, 1965: 322–323). 11 Plato's social theory can therefore be understood as giving explicit conceptual form to experiences and perceptions that members of the aristocracy had already undergone but were unable to articulate on their own. Both Plato and his audience sought to make sense of social reality at a psychological level, and because they belonged to the same social group, they shared a common mode of perceiving society. What distinguished Plato from the aristocratic youth, however, was his intellectual capacity to elevate these diffuse experiences to a reflexive and systematically articulated theoretical level. This, ultimately, is the task of the intellectual. 12
A central idea in The Coming Crisis is that an affinity exists between the social theorist or philosopher and his or her audience with respect to social and political orientations. According to Gouldner, the perceived validity of a social science theory depends to a significant extent on shared experiences and sensibilities between those who formulate the theory and those who receive it (Gouldner, 1970: 8). Theory evaluation is therefore not conducted solely on cognitive or intra-scientific grounds. Rather, an audience's assessment of a theory's plausibility and relevance is decisively shaped by a shared experiential basis. Both the social theorist and the audience evaluate what appears valid and real in their own social experience. What distinguishes the theorist, however, is the capacity to translate these experiences into articulated intellectual constructions—most notably into visions of permitted and unpermitted worlds. The general public is subsequently drawn to those theories and arguments that most convincingly resonate with and give conceptual form to their lived social experience.
There is an important distinction between Gouldner's and Alexander's respective views on the relationship between intellectuals and their audiences. For Alexander, the persuasive force of a perception or theory derives less from shared cognitive frameworks (such as domain assumptions) than from the rhetorical and dramatic power of the narrative through which it is articulated. Meaning-making, in this perspective, emerges through the sharp contrasts of binary oppositions, such as sacred/profane, good/evil, and pure/polluted, that structure cultural understanding and moral evaluation. Alexander's dramatic intellectuals therefore do not assume a pre-existing frame of reference shared with their audience. Instead, audiences are portrayed as inhabiting a condition of uncertainty, marked by anxiety, stress, or skepticism, and therefore actively seeking orientation or civil repair (Alexander, 2009, 23; Alexander, 2016: 344). It is only insofar as the intellectual succeeds in constructing a compelling narrative that his or her message can reach a broader public (cf. Alexander, 2004: 12). In Gouldner's perspective, the relationship with the audience, at least with parts of it, is, as it were, already established, prior to and independently of any speech act.
Because the reception of a message depends on its dramatic presentation, Alexander argues that performances can both succeed and fail. An intellectual performance, for example, the writing of a popular article, may fail to engage its audience, as readers may perceive the text as contrived, inauthentic, or irrelevant to their purposes. Alexander conceptualizes successful reception in terms of a performance's capacity to “re-fuse” different elements, such as actors, audiences, and symbolic structures. In earlier societies, these elements were fused into a unity, whereas in modern differentiated societies they have, according to Alexander, become separated (Alexander, 2004: 529; Alexander, 2016: 343–344). In a fused performance, the audience identifies both with the actor and with the collective representations that are seamlessly articulated in the performance.
When Gouldner addresses the success or failure of communication, he instead tends to do so in terms of whether a message “resonates” (or fails to resonate) with an audience. In Enter Plato, for example, he describes how the perceptions of the young aristocrats “would be congenially resonated by the repeated emphases on hierarchy and authority in Plato's projected cities” (Gouldner, 1965: 321). In The Coming Crisis, he similarly notes that the experiences of the younger generation are not “resonated by the different kinds of sentiments that have been historically deposited in older [sociological] theories” (Gouldner, 1970: 7). As Rudas has pointed out, this terminology is explicitly rejected by Alexander (Rudas, 2026: 12), who characterizes the concept of resonance as “a bit like a giant black box for post hoc explanation” (Alexander and Smith, 2010: 21; also cited in Rudas, 2026: 12).
One advantage of Alexander's concept of “fusion” is that it is more multidimensional than the notion of “resonance” (Rudas, 2025: 12). It enables a more fine-grained account of how a text may be received more or less favorably by an audience and foregrounds the role of performance in shaping that reception. Reception is thus understood as dependent on the intellectual actor's dramatic articulation of the message. By contrast, the concept of “resonance” appears largely dichotomous: a text either resonates with an audience, or it does not. Moreover, it tends to treat reception as largely independent of the intellectual actor's performative articulation of the text.
Although the idea that social scientific theories can serve a meaning-making and orienting function has come to be most closely associated with Alexander, it is also clearly present in Gouldner's work. For Gouldner, theoretical narratives, such as Grand Theory, likewise perform an orienting role by providing coherent interpretations of social reality. In this sense, theory does not merely describe the social world but actively contributes to organizing it symbolically for its audience. In Gouldner's own words, the social function of theory “is not simply or primarily to provide ‘facts’ about the social world, but to provide an anxiety-reducing reorientation to it, to provide a new, comprehensive mapping which says what things are and where they belong in relation to one another” (Gouldner, 1970: 86). Unlike Alexander, Gouldner maintains that such narratives also perform a meaning-making function for the theorist himself. Social theory is always grounded in the theorist's own social experiences; Gouldner argues (Gouldner, 1970: 8). This dimension remains underdeveloped in Alexander's theory of dramatic intellectuals, which is primarily concerned with the effects of intellectual narratives on their audiences rather than with their psychological significance for those who produce them.
Conclusions
Gouldner's ideas of the philosopher as diagnostician and therapist, and as a creator of permitted and unpermitted worlds, a maker and shaker of worlds that are and worlds that might be, constitute a significant contribution to both the sociology of philosophy and the sociology of knowledge. These conceptual tools make it possible to subject the ideas of philosophers and social theorists to comparative historical–sociological analysis, as well as to examine their theoretical development over time. As shown above, for example, Plato had, by the time he wrote Laws, lost confidence in the capacity of human reason to regulate social life. Reason now appeared to him as weak rather than powerful, which led to a therapeutic strategy markedly different from that proposed in The Republic. Gouldner also emphasizes that social theory can function as a meaning-making narrative not only for its audience but for the theorist as well, and that it can therefore be analyzed in these terms. I further suggest that Gouldner identifies an important dynamic when he argues that social experiences both inform the formation of social theory and condition its reception. The social theorist's “personal reality,” which Gouldner often refers to (cf. Gouldner, 1970: 482), could, I argue, be incorporated into Alexander's cultural sociology without requiring significant modification to Alexander's framework.
I have pointed out that both Gouldner and Alexander are interested in social theorists as creators of meaningful narratives that can assist different audiences in their processes of meaning-making. In contrast to the direction Merton sought to give the sociology of knowledge, they are not concerned with identifying the kinds of social processes or mechanisms that give rise to different kinds of ideas. Instead, the focus is on the individual intellectual and the ideas he or she creates and communicates to an audience. The longstanding and largely unproductive debate over how social conditions influence thought can, in my view, is set aside; despite Merton's important clarifications, it has yielded few concrete analytical results in practice. If the sociology of knowledge is to contribute to the future theoretical development of sociology, a shift in focus is required. Instead of concentrating on the social conditioning of thought, sociologists should examine what philosophers and intellectuals actually do—for example, how they construct permitted and unpermitted worlds, how they formulate meaning-making narratives, and how different audiences receive these narratives. In this article, I have argued that Gouldner's Enter Plato represents an important early step in this direction. When contemporary sociologists of knowledge return to Enter Plato, this, I suggest, is the central lesson to be drawn from it.
The themes introduced in Enter Plato have since been developed independently of Gouldner, most notably by Jeffrey C. Alexander, but also by other sociologists such as Patrick Baert (2015). This reorientation does not deny that thinkers are shaped by social and cultural conditions. It does, however, carry an important methodological implication: the question of how social being determines thought recedes into the background, making room for a more dynamic analysis of intellectual agency, meaning-making, and reception.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
