The philosopher as diagnostician and therapist: A reading of Alvin W. Gouldner's Enter Plato

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.

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.

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.