Abstract
Although it is generally a good practice for book reviewers to acknowledge their biases, I have never done so before. However, in reviewing this book, I feel it is incumbent on me to do so. Philip Selznick is, undoubtedly, one of my academic heroes − an intellectual giant who, as the embodiment and inspiration of the ‘Berkeley School’ of sociological jurisprudence, made signal contributions to the type of scholarship that this journal seeks to promote; that is, to ‘progressive, interdisciplinary and critical approaches to sociolegal studies’ as well as to a number of other fields. Martin Krygier is a colleague and a friend who teaches at the University of New South Wales in Sydney but he has travelled widely and many readers of this journal would undoubtedly have encountered him. He is a legal and social theorist who combines wide-ranging intellectual interests with great sensitivity to the human condition and unusual personal warmth. It follows that, even before I picked up this book, I was predisposed in favour of both the subject of the book and its author.
Having now read and thought about the book, I must admit that I am hugely impressed. Philip Selznick: Ideals in the World is a gem of a book, which is a pleasure to read and a stimulus for further thinking. It is beautifully written, it is respectful without being deferential, and it provides a very interesting account of Selznick’s intellectual journey. It covers the full range of Selznick’s work in the sociology of organisations, leadership studies, law and society, political theory and social philosophy, and draws attention to the most important components of his legacy − in particular, his emphasis on the importance for social researchers of investigating normative concepts like values and ideals empirically and identifying the social conditions in which they either atrophy or thrive.
Krygier has, in my view, got Selznick’s measure and done him proud. Writing the book must have involved an enormous commitment of time and effort on his part − he has been working on it for the last 10 years − but one gets the impression that it was a labour of love. Although Krygier does, on occasion, distance himself from Selznick, he ‘respects his moral-intellectual sensibility’ and ‘admires his ambitions and achievements’ (p. 9). There is a political affinity between author and subject in that both have anti-communist pasts − as a student in New York, Selznick was politically active Trotskyist while Krygier’s father was a politically engaged refugee from communist Poland who became a crusading anti-communist in Australia. There is also an ideological affinity between them in that, unlike many of their peers, neither became a ‘neo-con’ and both are liberals who recognise the importance of the social. Thus, there is a very close ‘fit’ between subject and author. However, Selznick was, first and foremost, a sociologist with a strong interest in philosophy and theory while Krygier is first and foremost a philosopher and theorist with a genuine interest in sociology. In my view, this difference in their backgrounds makes Krygier’s achievement all the greater.
I first encountered Selznick as a postgraduate sociology student in the United States. I developed an interest in the sociology of organisations and was inspired by his masterly study TVA and the Grass Roots, which explored the ways in which the features of an organisation can undermine its mission and which introduced me to the idea of ‘co-optation’. When, as a young lecturer, I started to become interested in sociolegal studies, I read Law, Society and Industrial Justice and Law and Society in Transition and was very much taken with Selznick’s sociological jurisprudence. I became an enthusiastic supporter of two views that he espoused: first, legal sociology should focus on normative concerns, in particular on what he initially called ‘legality’ and later on referred to as ‘the rule of law’; and second, empirical research on law needed to be informed by an understanding of legal norms and legal theory. This led me into reading a good deal of legal philosophy and legal theory and influenced my decision to take a 9 month sabbatical at the Center for the Study of Law and Society in Berkeley, a research centre founded by Philip Selznick. Although, he had already retired, he was very generous with his time and I had two lengthy conversations with him. These focused on the interdisciplinary PhD program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP), which he had also set-up and the prospects for establishing something similar in the United Kingdom. I was very enthusiastic but, as a relatively junior lecturer in the United Kingdom, I was − unfortunately − not in a position to take the idea forward. Many years later, I attended a seminar on The Moral Commonwealth in Edinburgh. Various colleagues presented their take on the book and Selznick responded to their comments. Before the seminar, I managed to read most of the book.
I suspect that, if they choose to read this book, many of my contemporaries will be in a similar situation to me in that they will be familiar with some but not all of Selznick’s publications. In my case, among his major publications, I have not read The Organisational Weapon, Leadership in Administration, The Communitarian Persuasion or his last book A Humanist Science. And I suspect that many younger colleagues will not have read any of Selznick’s work in the original and will, at best, have read second-hand textbook accounts of his major contributions to the field in which he worked. In undertaking a critical appraisal of Selznick’ life work, this must have constituted a major challenge for Martin Krygier. In this respect, though, I am not entirely persuaded that he has risen to the challenge and think that the readers would have found it helpful if the book had contained some discrete summaries of Selznick’s major publications. This would have had the additional advantage of making it easier to distinguish between exegesis and criticism and between Selznick’s views and Krygier’s evaluation of them. Although Martin Krygier does, on occasion, distance himself from Philip Selznick, it is hard to pinpoint the nature of his disagreements.
One of the greatest merits of this book is that it embraces the whole corpus of Selznick’s work and traces the evolution of his thinking from his first article, published in Enquiry, a small, breakaway Trotskyist magazine that, together with Irving Kristol, he founded and edited, and which appeared intermittently between 1942 and 1945, to his last book, A Humanist Science, which came out in 2008, two years before his death. Before reading Krygier’s book, I had engaged with each of Selznick’s publications that I had read on its own merits and had not really been aware of the common strands that run through the body of his work or the ways in which his thinking developed in the course of a very long and productive life. Thus, I was fascinated by Krygier’s account of how Selznick’s youthful experience as a Trotskyist made him receptive to the arguments that he found in Robert Michels’ book Political Parties, which he read during the Second World War, in particular with Michels’ account of the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. Selznick’s early political experiences shaped his intellectual agenda for the next 15 years, during which he wrote TVA and the Grass Roots, The Organisational Weapon and Leadership in Administration. I was equally fascinated by the contrast Krygier draws between TVA and the Grass Roots and The Organisational Weapon, both of which demonstrate how ideals can be, and frequently are, undermined by organisation, and Leadership in Administration, which sets out to identify what needs to be done to ensure that ideals prevail over organisation. Selznick found the answer to this question in the process of institutionalisation, that is, in the process of ‘forging and maintaining [the organisation’s] identity and integrity’ (p. 86) and of ‘infusing [the organisation] with value’ (p. 89). I was, in a similar way, fascinated by Krygier’s account of how, after establishing himself as one of the major figures in the sociology of organisations, Selznick’s intellectual interests propelled him towards the sociology of law and how, having made such an important contribution to this field, they subsequently led him to move beyond it into the sociology of morality. However, although the book refers briefly to Selznick’s role in the free speech controversy that pitted the students against the administration at Berkeley in the mid-1960s, references to other economic, social or political events that might have influenced Selznick’s thinking are surprisingly thin on the ground. This is rather strange since one of the defining features of the ‘law and society project’, to which Selznick made such a major contribution, is its concern with the interaction between law and society, that is, with the impact of society on law and of law on society. Krygier neither discussed the ways in which societal developments might have shaped the trajectory of Selznick’s intellectual work nor is he as revealing as he might have been about the intellectual influence of contemporary thinkers on Selznick. Thomas Hobbes (somewhat surprisingly), the philosopher of pragmatism, John Dewey, the philosopher and legal scholar, Morris Cohen, who combined pragmatism with logical positivism, and Robert Michels were clearly of major influences; the management theorist Chester Barnard and the legal philosopher Lon Fuller minor ones, but they were all early influences and one would look in vain for any indication that any of his contemporaries in the ‘law and society’ or ‘communitarian’ movements had had much of an influence on him. Perhaps, they did not have and he really was a self-propelled navigator who, once he had set out, followed his own course and set his own agenda. But, if this was the case, Krygier could have drawn attention to it.
Philip Selznick: Ideals in the World also has little to say about Selznick’s personal life. We first encounter him as a political activist and an ‘eager student’ of sociology and philosophy at the City College of New York and then at Columbia University in the 1930s but we are not told anything about his social origins or about the ways in which he may have been influenced by his parents, his wider family and the community in which he grew up. We learn that, from 1947 to 1952, Selznick taught at University of California, Los Angeles and that, for most of this period, he was also a research associate in the social sciences division at R&D, an influential ‘cold war’ ‘think tank’, and this experience undoubtedly influenced the thinking that led to his book The Organisational Weapon. We also learn that, in 1952, Selznick was invited to join the Sociology Department at University of California, Berkeley and that, a few years after that, he started auditing courses at the Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. We are told about the periods he spent at the University of Chicago Law School and the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford and about some of the colleagues he encountered there. However, these accounts are rather ‘thin’ and, given the importance Selznick came to attach to the ideals like ‘piety’ and ‘civility’, too thin to enable us to understand how he came to adopt them or where they came from. Although, the book is an intellectual biography rather than a personal biography which seeks to assess Selznick’s work rather than his life, it would, in my view, have been enriched if it had contained a fuller account of Selznick’s personal life and lifetime experiences, and speculated about the ways in which they shaped his intellectual output.
Notwithstanding these criticisms, this is a magnificent book, which does justice to a really interesting and important thinker and helps to secure his place among the most interesting social and legal thinkers of the 20th century.