Abstract
Charles Lemert’s Americans Thinking America: Elements of American Social Thought traces developments in American social theory, very broadly construed, from the colonial period to the present. After an introductory section, the book includes the following parts: “American Social and Natural Spaces, 1727–1861,” “Civil War and American Pragmatism, 1861–1917 and After,” “American Culture Tries to Explain its Disorder, 1919–1968,” a “Reprise” with another thematic summary, “Identities and Differences in an Unsettled America, 1968 and Beyond,” and, finally, “American Futures, 1542 and 1619 to When?” Each of these sections contains between one and seven chapters with titles like “The Fungible Interaction Order: David Riesman, Erik Erikson, Edwin Lemert, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel” or “Global Structures and Exclusions: Immanuel Wallerstein, Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, Nancy Fraser.”
Americans Thinking America might best be read as an assemblage of biographical and bibliographic snapshots of American activists, public figures, and intellectuals from Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards to political philosopher Nancy Fraser. These summaries can be informative, and some of them—for example, the discussion of Robert King Merton—are excellent. Others may serve to warn the reader away from titles that might be best encountered at second hand. For example, Lemert writes that:
Digging in to any of [Saskia] Sassen’s writings requires a sharp shovel able to dig and lift the dense material she has laid before the reader . . . . [Her titles] seldom reveal the underlying truths of the book at hand which is often a bramble of concepts that turn again and again over each other . . . . This may seem to be a reckless criticism. It is not. I am just telling the reader that Sassen’s books are worth the while and the intellectual effort. (p. 563)
Whether or not the reader heeds this latter judgment, he or she has at least been forewarned.
Americans Thinking America is ultimately disappointing. The elements of American social thought that Lemert proposes do not helpfully organize the thinkers he discusses. His critical judgments are ideologically predictable. Though it is too easy to criticize any tour d’horizon for its inclusions and exclusions, some of Lemert’s choices are especially surprising. He omits Charles Horton Cooley and Alfred Schütz, dismisses Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man as “a bad joke” (p. 565), and ignores John W. Meyer’s world culture theory in favor of Saskia Sassen’s and David Harvey’s musings about globalization. These are peccadillos compared with the flaws of the author’s epistemological framework, however.
These begin with Lemert’s conception of “theory” itself. He writes that “theories—of whichever kind—are stories told to an audience in order to make a claim about the world in which the tellers and listeners live” (p. 7). Later, he adds that “all stories . . . are tendentious to some degree” and that “Non-fiction is a mistakenly named genre of literature” (p. 12). After mentioning Albert Einstein’s formula e=mc2, Lemert asserts that: “[c]rudely put, science of this kind is at best a supremely intelligent guess based on what can be thought based on the debates of the day” (p. 21).
This is not wrong, but it is incomplete. E=mc2 deserves respect not because Albert Einstein was a genius but because it has been subject to relentless criticism, use, and testing by fellow physicists, each of whom would win themselves immortal professional glory if they could find evidence against it while proposing an alternative theory to better explain the data.
Lemert’s equation of theory with mere stories cannot tell us how to decide which simplifications of reality should be preferred to others. For example, if one “story” holds that America’s neighbors are no longer “sending their best” immigrants across U.S. borders, or that tariffs will be paid by foreign exporters rather than American consumers, how shall we decide that this constitutes a better or worse generalization than any other? It will do no good to say that the authors of such assertions are “biased” bigots, since Lemert has already conceded that everyone has their biases. Giving the same question sharper teeth, we might ask what it is that justifies paying some scholars substantial salaries and inviting them to spend hours teaching naïve youngsters whereas other “thinkers” must content themselves with posting on social media afterhours. Academics who intone postmodernist sophistries have no satisfactory response to such simple questions, though they may be able to mount up a wordy and baffling counterattack.
The alternative to doing theory by simply “telling stories” is to propose causal generalizations, that is, causal models. Throwing a lightning bolt into the postmodern mist, Lemert himself occasionally startles the reader with a broad causal assertion, such as “The more social orders grow in size, the more they become hierarchical—and hierarchies, by their structural nature, exclude” (p. 489). This quasi-Jeffersonian observation is at least half true. But it is also true that the American Civil Rights Movement attacked Jim Crow by appealing to an American “social order” that was broader than the South itself, ultimately winning an overall decrease in hierarchy and exclusion. To take another example: are cities, with their denser markets, more ethnically diverse populations, and better-developed public transport systems more or less “hierarchical” and “exclusionary” than small towns? These points could be debated, of course, but both sides in the debate would be doing social theory precisely because they would be contesting broad causal claims about the social world.
Lemert’s attraction to a postmodern skepticism about causality may help explain why so many of his biographical sketches are full of personal moral judgments. Once one has waved away consideration of causality, what else is there to say? Still, the reader may wonder whether a distinguished career in sociology is needed to conclude that, say, Thomas Jefferson was not a good father to his children by slave mistress Sally Hemings or that American slavery as a whole was a moral atrocity.
Lemert leavens his chapters with digressions about specific people and neighborhoods in New Haven, Connecticut, where he lives. These intermissions are frequently elegiac and inform the reader where Lemert’s social sympathies lie: with drifters, the homeless, the destitute, residents of isolated and crime-ridden neighborhoods, and the rare affluent persons willing to befriend or assist them. By contrast, in his stories, institutions like Yale University or global capitalism appear as sinister or callous. Then again, when Lemert or other left-leaning scholars complain about “exclusions,” what exactly are the victims of these exclusions being excluded from? The answer, usually, is from institutions like Yale or global capitalism.
Americans Thinking America would have benefited from more assiduous editing. The text sometimes repeats entire sentences in neighboring paragraphs; hyphenation is idiosyncratic; Fannie Lou Hamer’s last name is misspelled throughout; and the Precambrian eon did not immediately predate the “Anthropocene” (p. 99).
The more serious flaws in Lemert’s book, however, are not idiosyncratic, but symptomatic of American social science’s long-incubating deficiencies, including a left-wing ideological homogeneity that corrodes intellectual rigor and abets an unfortunate displacement of hard thinking with brittle obscurantism and self-congratulatory pseudo-XXX “radicalism.” When the Academy “Thinks America” in such skewed and unrealistic terms, is there any wonder that universities have grown vulnerable to a resentful populist backlash?