Sociological insight through the history of social thought: A dialogue about Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought

How to study social theory historically: Questions about interpretation and method

Building on Donald Levine’s (1995) influential Visions of the Sociological Tradition, Modernity and the Jews uses national sociological traditions as its main unit of comparison. While Levine identified several such traditions, my book confines itself more modestly to three of them: French, German, and American.

To choose national sociological traditions as the main unit of comparison presumes, as Donald Levine has argued, that French, German, and American scholars “set forth the theoretical underpinnings of the new science of sociology at the turn of the [nineteenth] century . . . in radically different ways” rooted in different religious and philosophical heritages.

(Goldberg, 2017: 10)

None of the contributors to this symposium really dispute that premise, but some of them do raise concerns about what costs this methodological choice may incur. Peter Kivisto notes that the premise is a matter of debate, “generally pitting splitters who stress the distinctiveness of national sociologies versus the lumpers who see the potential for convergence from the start and the acceleration of it ever since.” Echoing the criticisms that Guenther Roth (1997) made about Levine’s book, Fuyuki Kurasawa worries that a focus on national sociological traditions draws attention away from cross-national connections and similarities among sociologists, as well as the theme of “Jewish exile and cosmopolitan identity,” which informed the work of Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, and the Frankfurt school. For his part, Joseph Gerteis is concerned that the framing of the book obscures sociological thinking about non-national modes of solidarity. Some theorists, he points out, “emphasized mediating ties rather than national identities.” For example, “[Georg] Simmel’s ‘stranger’ and [Robert] Park’s ‘marginal man’ speak directly to the relationships between the individual, the group (particularly the immigrant or marginalized group), and the broader society.”

There is more than one way to study the history of social thought, and they all come with advantages and limitations. Faced with inevitable trade-offs, which the aforementioned remarks help to clarify, the best one can do is to explain the reasons for one’s choices, mitigate their costs and drawbacks as much as possible, and make good use of the advantages they provide. Let me outline how I have tried to do this in Modernity and the Jews while making a broader argument for foregrounding national sociological traditions in work of this kind. To begin with, choosing national sociological traditions as the main unit of comparison can yield a significant pay-off. In this instance, it allowed me to demonstrate, by means of historical comparison, one of the book’s key points:

The social thinkers examined in these chapters worked within different national traditions, emphasized different features of modern society, and disagreed about whether the Jews were synonymous with or antithetical to those features, but they all invoked the Jews to grasp the meaning of the new social order emerging around them.

(Goldberg, 2017: 14)

Loosely inspired by the logic of John Stuart Mill’s method of difference (known in comparative politics as most different systems design), the book’s comparisons serve to demonstrate that a common underlying structure or structures (identified in the book’s concluding chapter) gave rise to similar outcomes in all three cases despite the many differences among the cases that might have seemed causally relevant. In that sense, Modernity and Jews combines splitting and lumping.

The book’s research design is only loosely inspired by Millian methods because, as the symposium contributors rightly point out, national sociological traditions are not independent cases. Accordingly, the book departs from the strictures of Millian comparison when necessary to draw attention to pertinent cross-national influences (what comparative sociologists call inter-case relationships; Lange, 2013: 70–85) such as German influences on the Chicago school (Goldberg, 2017: 79–83, 102). Similarly, despite its focus on national sociological traditions, the book is able to address the theme of Jewish exile and cosmopolitan identity in limited ways. Cosmopolitanism appears as a key aspect of Park’s concept of the marginal man, for instance, and the book’s concluding chapter shows how the opposition between the national and the cosmopolitan – an opposition to which I will return at the end of this response – structures contemporary anti-Zionist discourse. Of course, not all limitations can be mitigated in this way. Modernity and the Jews does not explore the connections between classical sociology and the work of Freud, Arendt, and the Frankfurt school because these later works were written in the 1930s or later as the context of social theorizing was changing profoundly. An exploration of these connections would indeed be fascinating, but to do so adequately would really require another book. Suggestions like this are nevertheless valuable and welcome because they identify potentially fruitful ways that new research in the history of social thought can build upon and extend existing scholarship.

Gerteis is undoubtedly right to suggest that classical sociologists thought about solidarity and belonging in a variety of ways, with some placing more emphasis on national identity than others. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for foregrounding national discourses when we study the history of the discipline. As Wimmer and Schiller (2002: 302–303) have noted, “the epistemic structures and programmes of mainstream social sciences have been closely attached to, and shaped by, the experience of modern nation-state formation,” notwithstanding heterodox “currents that contradicted the hegemonic discourse.” ¹ Indeed, national identity remained a prominent reference point even for heterodox thinkers insofar they elucidated their conception of the modern by reference to national differences. This is evident, for example, in the way that Karl Marx, who conceptualized capitalism as a global system, contrasted the political development of the Germans, French, and Americans in “Zur Judenfrage” or the economic development of the Germans and the English in his preface to Das Kapital (“the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”), or in Park’s assumption that “the mixing of races, nationalities, and cultures in America was recapitulating similar processes that had already taken place in Europe” (Goldberg, 2017: 84). None of this means that we should take “national discourses, agendas, loyalties and histories for granted” (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002: 304), nor that we can ignore the heterodox alternatives to them that Gerteis invokes, but neither should we downplay the important role that national discourses have played in classical sociology.

Kurasawa raises additional questions about the history of social theory, turning from the appropriate unit of analysis to concerns about the aims of such work. Modernity and the Jews takes up Pierre Bourdieu’s call for a “reflexive history” of social science that seeks to “emancipate ourselves from a past that is forgotten and yet continues unconsciously to shape contemporary thought and practice” (Goldberg, 2017: 6). Kurasawa is right to see this approach as a hermeneutics of suspicion, as suggested by Bourdieu’s analogies between reflexive history and Freudian psychoanalysis, or my own analogy to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, which strives to reveal the underlying structure or structures that give rise to an apparent surface meaning. However, Kurasawa asks, is emancipation the only aim for “works of historically oriented social theory,” or is there a place for a different kind of hermeneutics that seeks to revive or restore meaning? This is an important question that merits more attention in the history of sociology and social theory. A full answer is beyond the scope of this brief response, but in my view, to emancipate ourselves from inherited categories of thought, concepts, and principles of classification does not mean to dispel them. My own approach is close to that of Julia Adams et al. (2005). They do not assume that the concepts which sociology associates with modernity are “basically fine as they are,” nor do they believe that the concept of modernity should be jettisoned because it is “inalterably flawed by its implicit endorsement of conceptual repressions and exclusions mirroring existing relationships of domination” (Adams et al., 2005: 14). They stake out a third way: to remake modernity. The concept of modernity does “too much useful work” to jettison it, and it “sneaks back into people’s utterances even as they disavow it,” but sociologists can historicize “modernity as an idea, capturing people’s changing ideas of what is or is not modern, and assessing the valences of emotion and moral judgment that these mappings assume in varieties of discourse and institutions” (Adams et al., 2005: 14–15). My comments at the end of this response about the opposition between the national and the cosmopolitan illustrate this approach. Rather than urging social thinkers to jettison these categories, I urge them to use the categories in a more reflective and careful way.

Religion, orientalism, and race: Questions about sociology’s others

Gerteis takes up a question that is central to my book: Why did the Jews, rather than other groups, come to play the central role in classical social theory that the book documents? The book’s last chapter develops an answer to this question at length, drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis of totemism to explain why the Jews are “good to think.” Gerteis, apparently not convinced by this explanation, suggests that the question is “not fully answered in the book.” He then sketches an alternative explanation that rests on an analogy between Jews and Muslims. Like Muslims in the contemporary United States, he suggests, Jews were an insular minority group with transnational identities and commitments. This seemingly paradoxical set of features made them appear simultaneously traditional and modern, in contrast to other groups that are more easily located on one side of the opposition or the other, and therefore threatening to traditionalists and modernists alike. Thus, he concludes, “the way that Jews were understood in social theory (then) can also shed some light on the broader cultural claims about Muslims (today).”

Kurasawa also raises comparative questions about Jews and other others, but he invokes a broader range of counterparts. He is ready to add Jewishness “to the pantheon of tropes of the Other that have animated the modern West’s imaginary, along with primitiveness, Orientalism, and blackness.” Moreover, he is convinced that in contrast to these other reference points, Jews were inconsistently represented in modern social thought “as symbols of Eastern traditionalism and Western modernism” (Goldberg, 2017: 125). How then, Kurasawa asks, did the “ambiguous alterity” of Jews and the more clear-cut alterity of non-Westerners and non-Whites enable different interpretations of the modern condition?

Angel Adams Parham also picks up on the relationship between Jewishness and Blackness. Her essay makes two main claims. First, Jews have experienced more successful civil incorporation than people of color in the United States. The reason for this, she argues, is that Jews underwent a historical process of de-racialization. As a result, Jews were redefined as a cultural or ethnic group, and social evaluations of Jews became more positive over time. Second, Parham argues that her comparison between Jews and people of color reveals the limits of civil incorporation in the United States. Despite its relative success, the civil incorporation of Jews remains fragile and incomplete because “elements of their negative racialization were never fully erased.” ² She concludes pessimistically that full incorporation is all the more unlikely for groups that cannot be de-racialized because of their skin color.

Before responding to the specific points that Gerteis, Kurasawa, and Parham raise, let me begin by praising my interlocutors’ commitment to placing discursive representations of Jews in a comparative framework. This is a commitment that I share. “Although references to Jews appeared prominently within and across different national traditions of social thought,” my book notes, “they were not the only point of reference for sociologists seeking to define what it meant to be modern” (Goldberg, 2017: 119). Therefore, while the book’s main unit of comparison is national sociological traditions, it also “examines how sociological portrayals of Jews resembled or differed from depictions of other groups or categories” within each sociological tradition. The other groups or categories to which Jews are compared include “Protestants, women, rival nations, and colonial subjects in the French tradition; Puritans and rival nations in the German tradition; and blacks and other European immigrant groups in the American tradition” (Goldberg, 2017: 10). Of course, many of these categories overlap with Jews: there were Jewish women as well as men, Jews in the colonies as well as the metropole, Jews in America as well as Europe, and so on. Nevertheless, these categories represent ways of dividing the social world that we can distinguish analytically. In this way, it is possible to compare how classical sociologists contrasted men and women, for instance, or Europeans and their colonial subjects, to how they contrasted Jews and gentiles. By examining how social-scientific portrayals of Jews resembled or differed from depictions of other groups or categories, the book is able to engage with a wider literature on race, gender, nationalism, and colonialism. This comparative strategy is what I would recommend to scholars interested in studying the portrayal, symbolism, and meaning of any group within the social sciences.

A good comparison reveals significant differences as well as similarities. If the analogy that Gerteis suggests between Jews and Muslims is correct, then one would expect discursive representations of Jews and Muslims to be similarly contradictory. As my book shows, “Jews have appeared in modern social thought both as personifications of a backward Orient and as agents of Western modernity” (Goldberg, 2017: 131). This finding is consistent with Gerteis’s argument. In contrast, however, “Muslims are rarely represented in contemporary European or American discourse as agents or symbols of modernity” (Goldberg, 2017: 131). On the contrary, European and American discourse consistently codes Muslims as premodern and backward, notwithstanding the modern characteristics that one could adduce to challenge this characterization. This pattern is well documented in the empirical studies I cite in my book. In short, while comparisons between Jews and other groups are possible and indeed necessary, this doesn’t mean that findings about Jews are always applicable to other groups.

Kurasawa and Parham are quite attuned to the differences among sociology’s others; they are keenly aware that these groups are not interchangeable in the Western imaginary, and that classical sociologists therefore had to engage in what I call a “complex process of triangulation, determining their social coordinates in relation to multiple and different reference points” (Goldberg, 2017: 110). Some tentative answers to the questions that Kurasawa raises about Jews and other others can be inferred from my book. If one refers to its two-by-two table that schematically summarizes the various meanings that social thinkers conferred upon Jews and Judaism, it would appear that three of the four cells provide bases for developing a critical evaluation of modernity. First, groups that were coded as backward in a positive sense (the “noble savage,” for instance) served to highlight virtuous qualities that modern societies had regrettably lost. As my book notes, Jews generally did not play this symbolic role in European and American social thought, but colonial subjects and Blacks sometimes did. Kurasawa’s own research provides an example. The Durkheimian school of sociology, he shows, used “primitive” practices such as the gift economy and the periodic renewal of collective effervescence among Australian aborigines to criticize “many of the central cultural assumptions and institutional arrangements undergirding modern European civilization” (Kurasawa, 2013: 191). Adolph Reed provides another example. According to him, W. E. B. Du Bois “defined blacks as comparatively primitive and undeveloped as a race” in The Souls of Black Folk, but Du Bois gave this seemingly deficient status a positive interpretation insofar as “‘the traits and talents of the Negro’” became a salve for American “fears of overcivilization” (Reed, 1997: 122–123). Second, groups that were coded as harbingers of a threatening and frightening future could complement this kind of backward-looking critique of modernity. These groups did not signify what had been lost in the process of modernization but instead served as a warning to slam the brakes on a process of social change that cultural pessimists desperately wished to avoid. As my book documents in detail, Jews often played this bogeyman role in Western social thought, in contrast to colonial subjects and Blacks who were generally coded as traditional or premodern. Third, groups that were depicted as precursors of a benevolent and desirable form of modernity could serve as a model for Europeans and Americans to emulate. From this perspective, the problem was not that European or American societies were rushing headlong toward a dangerous modernity, but that these societies were not modern enough, or not modern in the right way. Jews sometimes played this role, albeit rarely, as my chapter on the Chicago school shows. Non-Westerners and non-Whites typically did not, again because they were almost always coded as traditional or premodern. The fourth possibility – when European or American societies were contrasted to groups seen as backward and reactionary –provided little basis for a critical interpretation of the modern condition. This contrast tended to exalt European and American societies rather than invite criticism of them. Jews, Blacks, and Orientals alike have played this role in modern social thought. While I believe these conclusions are well supported by the available historical evidence, Kurasawa is surely right that additional research is needed to deepen our understanding of this “complex process of triangulation” in European and American social thought. This is another way that new scholarship can build on and advance existing research in the history of sociology.

Parham makes an important contribution to this discussion, linking cultural representations of these different groups to the relative success of their incorporation into what Jeffrey Alexander (2006) calls the civil sphere. In this way, she draws attention to the way that social theory does not merely describe the social world but also sometimes shapes the reality of that world. However, I would like to suggest that US history provides people of color with more grounds for hope than Parham indicates, and that the civil incorporation of Jews in the United States was more complicated than she presents it.

Although Parham makes claims about people of color in general, her focus is on the experience of African Americans. African Americans serve as a hard case for arguments about the successful incorporation of out-groups into the US civil sphere because the argument appears least applicable to them. If the argument fails this hard test but passes easier ones, it means that the limits of the argument need to be clarified. This is precisely what Parham sets out to do. However, the focus on African Americans obscures variation among people of color. The civil incorporation of Asian Americans, for instance, has arguably been more successful than that of African Americans.

Stigmatized by racism throughout the first half of the twentieth century, barred by law from immigration and from naturalization, confined residentially to ghettos and prevented by some state laws from intermarrying, they are now widely admired as “model minorities” who enjoy higher average incomes than white Americans and not infrequently attain extraordinary academic success, reflected in their visible presence on elite [university] campuses from the Ivy League to Stanford.

(Alba and Nee, 2003: 58)

My point is certainly not to blame African Americans for their less successful civil incorporation, but simply to indicate that the picture for people of color is more mixed than Parham’s essay suggests. This suggests that de-racialization may not always be necessary for successful civil incorporation.

The experience of African Americans has itself been a mixed picture. They have experienced some degree of civil incorporation in the United States, especially as a result of the civil rights movement, though Parham is surely right that they have not experienced full incorporation and that there have been significant backlashes and setbacks. As Alexander (2006: 384–386) has argued, the Black freedom struggle transformed public opinion and social institutions to overthrow a powerful and entrenched racial caste system that was codified in and enforced by law. More favorable discursive representations of Black Americans and effective civil translation of their grievances induced a significant portion of White Americans to feel greater solidarity and identification with them. “In cultural terms, the civil rights movement had inverted the relation between white racism and the binary discourse of civil society. For the first time in American history, it was racialist thinking that occupied the polluted, undemocratic side” (Alexander 2006: 386). This cultural shift was, in turn, a necessary precondition for what Alexander (2006) calls regulatory intervention and civil repair: “Expanding access to the regulatory institutions of civil society required the support of public opinion, a shift that involved communicative institutions” (p. 117). Nevertheless, as Alexander (2006) acknowledged, even after “the success of the black protest movement, the racial distortion of America’s civil sphere remained” (p. 390). Writing before the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the resurgence of overt White nationalism in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, Alexander (2006: 390) had in mind the stark divergence between the Black middle-class and a Black “underclass.” ³ In sum, while the contrast between Jewish and African Americans shows how de-racialization facilitates civil incorporation, significant diachronic and synchronic variation in the experience of Black Americans suggests that there is more to civil incorporation than de-racialization.

As far as the civil incorporation of Jews in the United States, two points are worth underscoring: one about its timing and the other about the reasons for its relative success. The positive depictions of Jewish immigrants produced by Park, William Thomas, Louis Wirth, and Everett Stonequist were not representative of American attitudes toward Jews in the 1910s and 1920s. As historian Tony Michels (2010) has pointed out, a considerable body of scholarship “shows that American antisemitism increased in intensity and popularity from the mid-nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century; it extended beyond the social realm into political and governmental spheres; and it turned violent more frequently than we usually recognize” (p. 212). Only after the Second World War did circumstances improve markedly for Jews in America (Alexander, 2006: 523–543, 2009; Michels, 2010: 220). Parham is therefore right that “negative evaluations of Jews largely withered away,” but it occurred well after the demise of Lamarckianism and the separation of biology and culture in American social thought. As this lag suggests, de-racialization contributed to the successful civil incorporation of Jews, but it was not the only factor. Michels (2010: 220) points to a convergence of several factors in the three decades after the Second World War to explain why the United States became “hospitable to Jews to an unprecedented degree” by the 1960s. The first factor was “the general, if not total, discrediting of antisemitism caused by the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies.” Alexander (2006: 520–523, 2009) similarly emphasizes how the Shoah and its interpretation legitimized postwar anti-antisemitism in the United States. A second factor was the historically unparalleled economic expansion from the early 1940s to the early 1970s. A third factor was enactment of state-level and federal civil rights legislation, including the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts. A fourth factor that contributed to the successful civil incorporation of Jews in the United States was the advent of the Cold War, which resulted in a coincidence, although not a full overlap, of interests between American Jews and the United States in foreign affairs, specifically in matters related to the state of Israel and the cause of Soviet Jewry (Michels, 2010: 220). All of these factors – the discrediting of Nazi racism, the postwar economic boom, civil rights legislation, and the Cold War – furthered the civil incorporation of African Americans as well, even if their incorporation was less successful. None of this detracts from Parham’s point that de-racialization facilitated the civil incorporation of Jews or her larger point about the continuing significance of race for civil incorporation in the United States, but it does suggest that de-racialization is insufficient for civil incorporation, and that de-racialization may not be necessary to advance civil incorporation if other factors are at work.

Understanding social solidarity: Questions about modes of belonging

This discussion about cultural representations and civil incorporation of out-groups leads to a broader set of questions about modes of belonging and the social forces that work to limit and restrict solidarity. Gerteis draws attention to these questions perhaps more than any other contributor to this symposium. He asks how the theoretical framework of Modernity and the Jews might be further developed and enriched by making the question of solidarity and belonging (rather than the question of modernity) more central. He suggests that classical sociologists theorized Jews not only in temporal and evaluative terms but also “in relation to their claims about belonging.” He then goes on to distinguish three different positions that sociologists took in regard to this dimension. For some classical sociologists, Jews signified individualism or the stranger within the national community; for others, Jews represented rootless cosmopolitanism; and for still others, Jews denoted a kind of group solidarity within or at odds with the nation. All three positions placed Jews at odds with the logic of what Gerteis calls national identification because Jews represented either the atomization of the nation or alternative modes of belonging that are sub- or transnational.

Different contributors to this symposium take up one or another of the three modes of belonging that Gerteis distinguishes. Kivisto emphasizes the theme of individualism in the work of Émile Durkheim, Simmel, and Park, which serves in his essay as a counterpoint to antisemitism. As Kivisto notes, social thinkers have produced “abstract discourses on the role and place of Jews” in “social environments that are simultaneously permeated with groups consumed by visceral antipathy toward Jews.” However, he points out, few classical sociologists seriously attempted to “factor the social reality of antisemitism into their work.” Kivisto points to Durkheim and Park as notable exceptions. Although Kivisto does not elaborate on the relationship between their analysis of antisemitism and their commitment to modern individualism, he clearly associates individualism with social thinkers who avoided wholly negative views of Jews and who promoted a more liberal and pluralistic social order. For his part, Kurasawa sees in Simmel’s writings an expression of Jewish cosmopolitanism that influenced the Chicago school. He contrasts Simmel’s cosmopolitanism to Durkheim’s outlook, which he argues was less pluralistic and more committed than I think to a homogenizing “republicanism that remains at the core of France’s national identity today.” Finally, Gerteis and Parham highlight subnational modes of belonging with references to minority groups that mediate between the individual and the nation. All four contributors highlight the dangers of antisemitism, which they associate with racism, nationalism, and what Gerteis calls a “unitary sense of ‘the people,’” and while they disagree about how best to interpret Durkheim, they mostly converge in their appreciation of Simmel and Park for pointing to looser but less dangerous modes of belonging and solidarity in the modern world.

The contributors to this symposium are right to emphasize questions of solidarity and belonging, which are central to the sociological enterprise, and to suggest that the history of social thought can enrich and deepen our thinking about such questions in the present. I would like to conclude my remarks by elaborating and amplifying this point. As we have seen, Modernity and the Jews describes the history of social thought as having an emancipatory intent. I believe this to be true in two ways. On one hand, the history of social thought “exposes us to voices that do more than duplicate our own” and thereby “enlarges the horizon of theoretical alternatives beyond the finite bounds of current possibilities” (Camic, 1997: 6). A case in point is my attempt to recover an earlier sociological discussion about the formation of a democratic public as one distinctive mode of social belonging that is irreducible to interpersonal relationships or large-scale categories of identity (Goldberg, 2017: 93–100). ⁴ I believe this neglected contribution of the Chicago school merits greater theoretical attention, and I was disappointed that none of the contributors to this symposium take it up amid an otherwise wide-ranging discussion of different modes of belonging. On the other hand, the history of social thought also allows social inquiry to become more reflexive, which is to say, more attentive to how categories of thought, concepts, and principles of classification inherited from the past continue unconsciously to shape contemporary thought and practice. Armed with this kind of reflexivity, the contemporary social scientist is less likely to blindly reproduce old and problematic habits of thought.

Old habits of thought often crop up in discussions of solidarity and belonging, so we need to be especially vigilant there. Consider, for example, how sociologists think about – or neglect to think about – antisemitism as a source of social antagonism and exclusion. If most classical sociologists failed to factor the social reality of antisemitism into their work, as Kivisto argues, then the dearth of papers that address antisemitism at annual meetings of the American Sociological Association suggests that it is again a problem today. (The European Sociological Association, which has a research network devoted to the study of ethnic relations, racism, and antisemitism, is doing better in this respect.) The history of social thought draws our attention not only to this lacuna but also to the peculiarities of antisemitism that must be considered in order to arrive at an adequate understanding of it. For one thing, antisemitism is probably better understood as a form of proteophobia (fear of what does not fit established categories) than heterophobia (resentment of what is different) (Bauman, 1995). The contributors to this symposium acknowledge that point in a variety of ways: Gerteis emphasizes how Jews (and, he argues, Muslims) confound the categories of national identification, Kurasawa asks how “theorists’ ambivalence towards the place and worth of Jews in the modern West” may have contributed to the Shoah, and Parham highlights the ways that Jews are “both raced and un(raced) at the same time” in the contemporary United States. However, antisemitism also has multiple roots – religious, racial, economic, and political (Brustein, 2003) – which renders any attempt to analyze it exclusively in terms of nationalism or racialization insufficient.

Old and problematic habits of thought crop up even when social thinkers adopt seemingly universalistic and progressive positions. Here too the history of social thought can serve a valuable role in making us more aware of these habits. As my book shows, European and American social thinkers have mapped different modes of belonging onto the opposition between the particular and the universal, which is itself mapped onto the opposition between the traditional and the modern. Consider, for example, how the opposition between nationalism, on one hand, and individualism or cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, evokes the opposition between closed and open societies, which in turn is identified with the opposition between the backward and the progressive. The problem with this formulation is not that it highlights the all too real dangers of nationalism; the problem is that it is blind to another, hidden danger in cosmopolitanism itself. As sociologist Robert Fine (2016: 770) has argued, cosmopolitanism has not one but two faces: an emancipatory face expressed in movements for “radical inclusion on the basis of common humanity,” and a prejudicial face that “pathologize[s] one or other category of people as the enemy of humanity.” Jews have experienced both faces. In its emancipatory aspect, cosmopolitanism has promoted their social inclusion on equal terms. However, when universalistic movements and ideologies define themselves in opposition to Jewish particularism, they treat Jews as the other of the universal, which is to say, as creatures “incapable of acting as universal human beings – at least as long as they remained Jews” (Fine, 2016: 770). In these instances, Jews are vilified not for being rootless cosmopolitans but for a “failure to be cosmopolitan at all,” and cosmopolitanism is turned “into a weapon against Jews” (Fine, 2016: 770). This prejudicial aspect of cosmopolitanism is evident in social thinkers from Bruno Bauer to Alain Badiou, who reproduce in secularized form the centuries-old theological opposition between Christian universalism and Jewish particularism (Fine, 2016; Goldberg, 2017: 48–51, 133–135). In short, the “Janus-faced capacity of cosmopolitanism” generates a “dialectic of emancipation and prejudice” that cannot be safely relegated to the past (Fine, 2016: 770). Cosmopolitanism must therefore become “reflective about its own capacity for reversal” to avoid “reproducing old racial and antisemitic typifications” (Fine, 2016: 770, 780). This is in my view another valuable and urgently necessary contribution that the history of social thought can make to the production of social science in the present.

In conclusion, it is a welcome opportunity when distinguished colleagues whose scholarship you know and admire take the time to engage with you about your own work. I am therefore thankful to Angel Adams Parham, Joseph Gerteis, Peter Kivisto, and Fuyuki Kurasawa for participating in such a thoughtful and constructive dialogue about shared concerns that my book addresses. I am also thankful for institutions like the Journal of Classical Sociology that support and provide an intellectual home for the historical sociology of social thought. My hope is that Modernity and the Jews and this symposium devoted to it will encourage more scholars to see the value of this kind of social inquiry and to take it up themselves.