I’m a big fan of Christian Smith’s work. Largely, though not solely, for this book. But his new one sounds slightly odd. While it appeals to me on the level of the sociology of sociology, it’s hard not to wonder about it given how utterly scathing some of the reviews are. I’ve ordered a review copy to write one myself and contribute to this, hopefully finding out in the process if the reaction Smith’s book has provoked in some quarters has been deserved. There’s a long review here by an author who acknowledges past antagonism with Smith:
Like a vaccine denier, Smith is more and more convinced of his theory the more all the sociologists around him deny it. In fact, actually, rightly understood, rampant denial is literally evidence that he’s right. By the end of the book he concludes, “Many American sociologists will … find it impossible to see the sacred project that sociology is – precisely because my argument above is correct” (199). This treads uneasily close to the line where common arrogance tips over into a lack of grip on reality.
In the text of the American Sociological Association (ASA) description of the discipline, for example, “none of it admits to advancing a sacred project” (6). Aha! Why not? Two reasons, he figures. First, the sacred project “is so ubiquitous and taken for granted … that it has become invisible to most sociologists themselves” (6-7). Why would we discuss something universal and uncontroversial? Second, admitting its existence “would threaten the scientific authority and scholarly legitimacy of academic sociology,” so it must be “misrecognized, implicit, and unexamined” to maintain “plausible deniability,” and therefore “sociologists carefully exempt their own discipline from their otherwise searching sociological gaze” (7). So, we “carefully” keep secret for strategic reasons that which we cannot even know exists. The devil does work in mysterious ways.
[….]
Given the worldwide magnitude of this project, and its global success over several centuries, in which American sociology has played such a small role, its seems useless to single out today’s idealistic graduate students and young researchers for blame. They are mere cogs in the modernity machine. This is the deep incoherence of the book: he pours his scorn so superfluously on the leftists who annoy him even though the details of contemporary politics seem tangential to his existential concerns.
http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/its-modernity-stupid-book-review/
There’s a shorter review here from Scatterplot that’s also worth a read.
Mark Carrigan 