Abstract
More than a few elderly professors write their magna opera because they finally find some uncontested free time, as amply demonstrated by Michael E. Brown (b. 1935) of Northeastern University. He began to think about the book that became The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences sometime between 1957 and 1964 during his graduate education at the University of Michigan, while speaking with the philosopher Frithjof Bergmann, author of On Being Free (1977). Later he profited from a remark by the comparative literature professor Marie-Hélène Huet, who observed that “we do not have a language of cooperation” (and who also helped Brown with interpreting Rousseau accurately). The noted Marxist Bertell Ollman also had a hand in inspiring the book, even as the two friends argued for many hours over its content (see pp. 290ff).
Generally speaking, Brown became curious about the utility of “continental philosophy” and “on the internal relationship between the humanities and the social sciences” (p. 439). He took a law degree at Michigan, plus a doctorate there in social psychology, afterwards teaching mainly in sociology departments as a specialist in collective behavior, communist historiography, and the philosophy of social science. According to his 2010 vita, this book was originally titled What is Human About Human Affairs? (now used as the first subhead of the “Introduction”), which reveals more of its actual intent than does the published title. It is a deeply meditative, broad-scale study that will not be mistaken for a work lightly tossed off during a sabbatical year.
One virtue of this long, complex work lies as much in its lineage as in what its author explicitly tries to demonstrate through theoretical dialogue with a number of sources, not many of them strictly sociological. Articles from the “top journals” in sociology are absent, most of his sources being published in the 1950s through the 1980s. As with any work a long time in gestation, Brown’s became a historical document instantly upon publication, showing how thinkers and their major works, in most cases discarded or overlooked by later generations of scholars, can continue to excite a lively imagination when given their analytic due. For example, social theorists today, however broadly and amorphously defined, are not likely to study Sartre’s most difficult texts (e.g., Critique of Dialectical Reason), nor return with undiminished respect to Rousseau’s ideas about subjectivity and “the social contract narrative,” which occupy Brown at length (e.g., pp. 214, 282). The book’s intriguing bibliography reveals that his favored sources include Max Black, Judith Butler, Donald Davidson (more than any other), Derrida, Durkheim, Foucault, Erving Goffman, Habermas, Heidegger, Marx (a pervasive influence on Brown, who was the 2010 chair of the ASA’s Marxist Section), Parsons, John Rawls, Alfred Schütz, and John Searle (another major player). To say the book is as much driven by formally philosophical as sociological or social-psychological concerns does not overstate the case.
Thus, this book’s strength—or weakness, if it is so perceived—resides in Brown’s serious attention to ideas that captivated social theorists and philosophers some time ago, but which, like so many similar notions from bygone days, have predictably slipped into that fuzzy, ever-growing zone of “familiar by name but unfamiliar by content.” Brown’s formative conversations with philosophers about social science’s substance and methodology marked his scholarly consciousness indelibly, so that reading his book today becomes in essence a window onto a landscape of ideas from a distinctly different past. This, of course, is not necessarily unfortunate. If one cares principally about Big Data analysis, or social mediation of adolescent communication, or neuro-sociological explanations of educational achievement, then it is likely his ruminations may seem unnecessarily remote from today’s concerns. But if a return to former greats among the theoretically literate does not seem on its face a waste of scholarly attention, then books like Brown’s remain important, especially as they become rarer in the flood of the more readily digestible, those more tied to immediate, “lighter” concerns.
This is not to say that The Concept of the Social provides its reader with hours of pleasure. Consider, for example, these characteristic summarizing sentences: “the more fundamental presupposition is that criticism is immanent to subjectivity when the latter is understood as intrinsically social in the sense of inter-subjective and, therefore, as denoting a course of activity across bodies rather than an option for an individual actor. This is false unless agency is conceived of without the assumption that the skin is the natural boundary of its instances and unless we accept the idea that objects are agency-dependent and therefore also instances of life” (p. 379; italics original). This begs for parsing. One must know, for instance, that the phrase “course of activity” has special meaning for Brown, occupies a large index entry, and appears dozens of times throughout the book. It shows that “agency-dependent reality” is an indispensable part of “a course of activity.” Thus, one must accept without qualms Brown’s fundamental notion, that the “independent social agent” is a fiction that never has existed and never can exist: “‘agency-dependence’ refers to the aspect of an object that presupposes subjectivity irreducible to individual mentalities.” Moreover, “This is a radical claim if every referent of discourse presupposes such a subjectivity” (p. 323).
Such claims are in part Rousseau’s unvoiced gift to the book, of course. Adapting to Brown’s terminology and his a priori epistemic claims becomes essential to understanding his arguments, whether or not one agrees with them; it is the cost of admission. He has created his own theoretical language and does not make it easy to follow him along his creative trail. As he frankly observes: “I have written this book in a way that may occasionally seem overly redundant, but that is designed . . . to preserve the state of the argument at each moment in which there appears to be an important turn or a new point of departure” (p. 19). If repetition indeed becomes noticeable, even interfering, it is apparently not without the author’s intentional blessing.
Luckily, and thoughtfully, Brown provides dense summaries along the way of what he has tried to achieve, especially in Chapter 17 (“Overview”) and the final chapter (“Summary, Reprise, and Transition”). Shorn of exposition and exemplars, they require close attention to his conceptual maneuverings yet do indeed bring together what his previous chapters with mighty ambitions have strained to demonstrate: for example, “The Sociality of Agency,” “Theorizing,” “Historicism and Its Alternatives,” “Social Action as Action,” “The Self of the Actor,” “Practices, Situations, and Inter-subjectivity,” or “Subjectivity and Objectivity,” to name only a few. There is “a lot going on” in this book, even if many of its most elaborated concerns no longer sound the crisply tolling bell of trendiness. To take only one of so many examples: Brown’s ongoing wish to dethrone Weber’s conceptualization of “social action,” since, according to his way of thinking, it cannot account for real sociality as experienced phenomenologically: “one’s taking account of others minimally involves something like taking account of others taking account of one—in which case the movement among the activities of taking account becomes the object of theory, and must be taken to supersede any individually intentional content” (p. 273; italics original).
Careful study of the “Overview” chapter (pp. 287–301) as well as the concluding “Summary” (pp. 432–437) would give any graduate theory seminar a run for its money. Here he considers “the irreducibility of the social” with bows to Durkheim and Foucault, attention to “the idea of sociality” as a primary theoretical problem, Sartre’s and Ollman’s dialectical techniques, “reading in the mood of writing” (p. 291), contrasting Rousseau and Weber on corporate identity, Hegel’s critique of sense certainty, and much more. A culmination point reads as follows: “If there is a unity of the human sciences, it can be based only on the ideas that humans are essentially social, that human affairs are irreducibly and irrepressibly social, and that sociality, and the ‘attitude of waiting’ that corresponds to it, can be understood, from the perspective of a possible unity, only as a course of activity. It follows that humans are not particulars” (p. 297; italics original). Sometimes the apparently platitudinous reveals, upon sufficient reflection, truths that we blithely miss while racing toward easy, everyday answers. Michael Brown has avoided this common fallacy of the scholar’s life.