04 060520 VanAntwerpen (bc-t) 13/1/06 2:40 pm Page 60

CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY AND

THE INTERDISCIPLINARY
IMAGINATION

Jonathan VanAntwerpen

ABSTRACT This article situates Craig Calhoun’s early sociological trajectory

within a diverse set of movements that aimed to transform the discipline of
sociology in the United States. As a means to historicizing Calhoun’s critical
intellectual practice, I position it within the extensively debated, though only
partially understood, disciplinary insurgencies of the 1960s, 1970s and early
1980s, emphasizing attempts to transform sociology that drew substantially on
interdisciplinary engagements to fuel the fires of a critical sociological imagin-
ation. A member of American sociology’s ‘disobedient generation’, Calhoun
was a key contributor to a resurgence of historical work that has come to be
referred to as the ‘second wave’ of historical sociology. Tracing the ways that
this intellectual movement drew inspiration from, worked alongside of, and
overlapped with other critical disciplinary formations, I close with a brief
consideration of the current state of critical sociology in the United States.
KEYWORDS critical theory • disobedience • history of sociology • historical
sociology • imagination

By historicizing, sociology denaturalizes, defatalizes.

(Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’)
It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through
disobedience and through rebellion.
(Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’)

Sociologists in the United States are a disputatious lot. Subject to seem-

ingly unending disagreements, they have argued since their discipline’s
founding over science and values, theory and methods, politics and pro-
fessionalism. Characterized by one of its eminent own as a ‘self-destructive

Thesis Eleven, Number 84, February 2006: 60–72

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
DOI: 10.1177/0725513606060520
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VanAntwerpen: Critical Sociology and the Interdisciplinary Imagination 61

discipline’ (Lipset, 2001: 266), American sociology has been imagined in

recent years via narratives of decline, its cleavages and internecine conflicts
attributed in no small part to the ‘politicization’ of an earlier era. Yet from
other disciplinary quarters comes an increasingly prominent counter-
narrative, construing the 1960s and 1970s as decades in which critical
sociologists rose to confront the dominance of a postwar sociological estab-
lishment, challenging intellectual orthodoxies, proffering radical alternatives,
and seeking to transform the discipline. Inspired and informed by diverse
political projects, intellectual formations, and interdisciplinary exchanges,
‘critical’ movements within American sociology are figured in this narrative
as historical precursors to a renewed promotion of ‘public sociologies’, inter-
ventions in multiple public spheres whose ‘promise’ is immense, if uncertain
(Burawoy, 2005a; Calhoun, 2005b).
One critical disciplinary collective that drew substantially on inter-
disciplinary discourses – and in the process contributed significantly to the
expansion of sociology’s interdisciplinary imagination – was the movement
associated with the resurgence of historical sociology. ‘Reacting against the
dominant ahistoricism of American sociology and to the dramatic political
events of the 1960s,’ write Julia Adams, Elizabeth Clemens, and Ann Shola
Orloff in a recent essay on the ‘three waves’ of historical sociology (2005:
3), ‘a number of sociologists both initiated a renaissance of historical research
and reconstructed the discipline’s theoretical canon as the foundation of
their enterprise. These efforts, respectively, constituted the second and first
waves of historical sociology.’ In an extended essay, which serves as the
introduction to a major new collection of writing by historical sociologists
of the ‘third wave’, Adams et al. reconsider the work and influence of
powerful figures of the second wave – members of a cohort of historical
sociologists that Theda Skocpol (1988) has described as the ‘uppity genera-
tion’ – and trace out the ‘sites of crystallization and momentum’ in a promis-
ing but ‘not yet cresting’ third wave of historical sociology (Adams et al.,
2005: 3).
The second wave of historical sociology, the authors write, was a
‘theory group’, and ‘a system of signs bound together by continuing engage-
ment with questions inspired by Marxism’. A ‘social movement’ that was
‘nourished both by interdisciplinary activity and by the spread of historical
methods to a large number of core sociological topics’, the second wave
eventually came to represent an established intellectual formation whose
‘hegemonic analytic framework’ propelled and defined the shape of a retro-
spectively reconstructed ‘resurgence’ of historical sociology (Adams et al.,
2005: 6–7). In contrast to the ‘kaleidoscopic’ condition of contemporary
historical sociology, which lacks a ‘dominant paradigm of the sort that
commanded the second wave’s allegiance’, second wave scholarship was
substantially marked by its self-conscious opposition to ‘the prevailing ortho-
doxy’ within sociology, as second wave scholars ‘cast themselves as the
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62 Thesis Eleven (Number 84 2006)

leading protagonists against modernization theory’, and sought to forward

issues of class inequality, power, and conflict (Adams et al., 2005: 64, 32, 7,
15).
This rendering of one significant strand in the recent history of
American sociology – with its distinction between a tightly knit and now
canonical ‘second wave’ of historical sociology, followed by a relatively
diffuse, diverse and still rising ‘third wave’ – provides a compelling vantage
point from which to assess the present trends within, and future possibili-
ties for, historical sociology in the United States. In particular, it allows current
students and aspiring practitioners of historical sociology an expansive view
of their recent sub-disciplinary past, one that seeks to illuminate the various
contributions that historically oriented sociologists are making, and might yet
make, to a contemporary conversation that is both characterized by ‘open-
endedness and fragmentation’ and reconstructed as ‘a congeries of lively
debates and oppositions’. In that sense, the essay is itself an excellent
example of the sort of ‘historicized sociology’ that the authors champion
(Adams et al., 2005: 9, 67–8).
Like Adams, Clemens, and Orloff, I want to pursue the project of
‘historicizing sociology’ through an engagement with the recent history of
American sociology. In contrast with their sweeping consideration of the
multiple figures of the second and third waves of historical sociology,
however, my analysis here is focused on situating the critical intellectual
practice of a single American sociologist, the historical sociologist and critical
social theorist Craig Calhoun. A central figure in the second wave of histori-
cal sociology, Calhoun has more recently ‘emerged as a leading voice of the
cultural turn’, a series of intellectual shifts that Adams et al. associate with
the third wave (2005: 7, 39–45). Thus, although the metaphor of ‘waves’
suggests an historical process of succession, perhaps even of a generational
sort, an assumption of complete succession is belied by the careers of those
second wave figures who ‘have continued to grapple with the new intellec-
tual currents that challenge contemporary work’ (2005: 6). Like Charles Tilly
and Theda Skocpol, Calhoun is exemplary in this regard – a mark of his
intellectual openness, his sustained engagement with the best of contempor-
ary social theory, and his expansive interdisciplinary reach.
Drawing on the work of others who have ranged more widely over the
history of historical sociology in the United States – including Calhoun’s own
much-discussed critical appraisal of the second wave’s ‘rise and domestica-
tion’ (1996) – I am concerned not simply with the resurgence of historical
sociology, but with the ways that the second wave drew inspiration from,
worked alongside of, and overlapped with other critical disciplinary move-
ments. Seeking to historicize Calhoun’s critical sociological practice, I
position it within the extensively debated (though only partially understood)
disciplinary insurgencies of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, emphasizing
attempts to transform sociology that drew substantially on extra-disciplinary
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VanAntwerpen: Critical Sociology and the Interdisciplinary Imagination 63

engagements to fuel the fires of a critical sociological imagination. The

‘disobedient generation’ (Sica and Turner, 2005) that was in large part
responsible for these rebellions pushed to change the shape of sociology in
the United States. Craig Calhoun was on the younger side of this generation,
but he is nonetheless appropriately placed among the disobedient – ‘a thin,
intense, and angry young man’, as one of his advisors from Oxford recalls
(Calhoun, 2005a: 92).
Now a prominent and established (if not Establishment) figure in
contemporary American sociology, Calhoun has long been a proponent and
a practitioner of the interdisciplinary. His intellectual trajectory has been
international, taking him from Los Angeles and New York, where he worked
briefly with Robert Merton and Robert Nisbet, to Manchester and Oxford,
and then to Chapel Hill and back to New York, where as President of the
Social Science Research Council he currently leads an organization whose
earliest efforts produced ‘the first wave of interdisciplinarity’ in the United
States (Abbott, 2002: 215). Schooled in anthropology and history, and
engaged with both critical theory and philosophy, Calhoun determined rela-
tively early in his career that ‘redefinition as a sociologist’ might be the best
way to combine his multiple intellectual interests (Calhoun, 2005a: 91).
Surrounded by a decidedly multidisciplinary cluster of graduate students at
UNC and NYU in the years that followed, he has since convinced more than
a few to seek similar shelter under the notoriously big tent of sociology, and
thus to throw in their fate along with him in that ‘irremediably interstitial’
discipline (Abbott, 2001: 6).
Yet Calhoun has hardly remained sheltered within sociology. His critical
re-reading of Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class
(Calhoun, 1982) was a product of his engagement with the interdisciplinary
discourses of Marxism and the ‘new social history’, while his major work of
critical social theory (Calhoun, 1995), released more than a decade later
amidst a vast outpouring of publications in the mid-1990s, helped introduce
a new generation of students across the humanities and the social sciences
to an expansive conception of critical theory that drew on the work of Jürgen
Habermas and the Frankfurt School, as well as that of Pierre Bourdieu,
Dorothy Smith and Charles Taylor. This book, along with edited volumes on
Habermas (Calhoun, 1992) and Bourdieu (Calhoun et al., 1993) – not to
mention an intellectual range and conversational stamina that must be
experienced to be believed – have positioned Calhoun as a leading American
importer and interpreter of contemporary continental theory. It is perhaps
only slight overstatement to say that if American graduate students in the
1950s read ‘classical’ sociological theory through the work of Parsons (1937)
and his followers, today they read the ‘critical’ theory of Habermas and
Bourdieu through the eyes of Calhoun and his ilk. Yet the comparison is not
a perfect one, and for reasons that Calhoun, with his recurrent concern for
historical specificity, would be the first to point out.
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64 Thesis Eleven (Number 84 2006)

While contemporary American sociology is frequently characterized as

a fractured and fractionalized discipline, full of cacophony and cluttered with
competing projects, but without any unifying center or consensual disciplin-
ary self-conception, it is often said that the 1950s were different. It was during
these postwar years, Bourdieu once claimed, that a previously diverse field
of American sociology gave way to the installation of a ‘new sociological
Establishment’, whose leaders – the ‘Capitoline triad’ of Parsons at Harvard,
and Merton and Lazarsfeld at Columbia – ‘succeeded in imposing a true intel-
lectual orthodoxy by imposing a common corpus of issues, stakes of
discussion, and criteria of evaluation’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 378). Celebrated as
the pinnacle of the ‘golden age’ by some, derided for its hegemonic domi-
nance of the ‘establishment’ by others, this period remains an important
touchstone in debates about the history of American sociology. It is a period
whose common understanding by American sociologists has been deeply
inflected by the ‘critical’ disciplinary projects of the 1960s, 1970s and early
1980s – intellectual movements that rallied around Mills’ broadside on ‘grand
theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’, were galvanized by Gouldner’s polemic
against Parsonian theory, and made common cause in opposition to the
theoretical pretensions and presumed positivism of ‘mainstream’ sociology.
References to ‘mainstream’ sociology are still common today, but they
first began to circulate widely in the United States during the 1960s and early
1970s, when opponents of the ‘sociological establishment’ – a concept popu-
larized by Gouldner and other radical sociologists, and one that resonated
with the anti-establishment ethos of the era – gathered forces to engage in
various forms of disciplinary revolt and intellectual insurrection. With the
birth of the Sociology Liberation Movement (1968), the founding of the Insur-
gent Sociologist (1969), and the formation of Sociologists for Women in
Society (1970), critical voices within the discipline began to find institutional
locations from which to wage their war of position against the American
sociological establishment (Fuller, 1996; Levine, 2004; Steinmetz, 2005a,
2005b; Ferree et al., 2006). Such locations would proliferate in the years of
struggle that followed.
Some sought inspiration in the ‘critical theory’ of the Frankfurt School,
and under the banner of ‘critical sociology’ opposed themselves to the ‘posi-
tivism’ of the ‘mainstream’. Invoking Mills’ The Sociological Imagination
(1959) in a review of Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology
(1970), Randall Collins (1973: 207) wrote that both works represented ‘a
rejection of dominant versions of positivist social science in favor of a critical
sociology of the European type, a turn away from Cambridge and toward
Frankfurt’.1 That same year, Gouldner and Collins announced the formation
of Theory and Society, a journal of ‘renewal and critique in social theory’
whose first issue was published in 1974. The new journal would ‘provide an
international forum for discourse and critique in social theory’ in which
‘formal disciplinary boundaries’ would be of ‘no relevance’. Contributions
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VanAntwerpen: Critical Sociology and the Interdisciplinary Imagination 65

would come from ‘the vanguard in philosophy, linguistics, psychology,

anthropology, history, political science, economics and human geography,
as well as sociology’, and would focus on ‘new directions’, including ‘critical
sociology, phenomenology, structuralism, neo-Marxism, linguistically sensi-
tive sociology and historical sociology’ (all quotes from ‘Announcing a New
Journal’ (back matter), American Journal of Sociology 79(3)).
As these ‘new directions’ gathered steam, some of them having a more
significant impact on American sociology than others, articulated opposition
to ‘mainstream’ sociology became one means to self-definition as a critical
sociologist, with Mills and Gouldner standing in as oft-cited forebears.
‘Vilified by C. Wright Mills, and later given a more nuanced critique by Alvin
Gouldner’, wrote Michael Burawoy (1982: S4) as he narrated the ‘resurgence’
of Marxism in American sociology, ‘mainstream sociology’ came under
‘relentless assault’ and was subjected to outright ‘rejection’ in the 1960s. As
Calhoun (1996: 306) would write later, ‘The 1960s upset the confident
development of mainstream sociology, which was based on the balanced
split between grand theory and abstracted empiricism of which C. Wright
Mills wrote so critically.’
Not unlike nostalgic remembrances of a lost age of disciplinary unity,
however, critical discourses on ‘mainstream’ sociology have tended to over-
estimate the degree to which an elite ‘establishment’ succeeded in imposing
a single organizing structure or professional ideology on the postwar field
of American sociology, and thus at times have risked exaggerating the degree
of disciplinary rupture wrought by the 1960s and 1970s. Yet their retrospec-
tive renderings of the postwar field remain illuminating, both for their insight
into a pattern of generational succession and its effects on the constellation
of disciplinary forces in elite departments (such as those at Harvard and
Columbia), and as contributions to discursive formations worthy of histori-
cal scrutiny in own right. In other words, while the concept of ‘mainstream’
sociology has become an analytic tool for reconsidering certain powerful
forces within postwar American sociology, it has also been repeatedly
employed historically as a ‘classificatory epithet’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 14), a prac-
tical category that might name a common enemy and thus unify an other-
wise disparate grouping of critical sociologists and anti-establishment
disciplinary insurgents (Calhoun and VanAntwerpen, 2006).2
The second wave of historical sociology, and Calhoun’s participation
in it, can be seen productively as of a piece with this diverse disciplinary
insurgency. Recalling the ‘sort of social movement’ that propelled the resur-
gence of historical sociology in the 1970s and 1980s, Calhoun reminded his
readers of its ‘critical edge and challenge to mainstream sociology’ (Calhoun,
1996: 306). The ‘new and controversial’ movement for historical sociology,
he wrote, sought to ‘challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of mainstream soci-
ology’ (Calhoun, 1996: 327), taking critical aim not only at the moderniza-
tion theory of Parsons and his followers, but also at the scientism and naïve
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66 Thesis Eleven (Number 84 2006)

empiricism associated with dominant quantitative methodologies. Joining

hands with others in the discipline who stood opposed to ‘an old sort of
functionalism’ and an ‘ethnocentric positivism’ (Calhoun, 1996: 308) – and
thus working alongside ethnomethodologists and symbolic interactionists,
feminists and fieldworkers, heterodox Weberians and upstart radicals –
members of historical sociology’s ‘uppity generation’ found common cause
with a wider, overlapping set of intellectual movements carried forward by
American sociology’s ‘disobedient generation’. Drawing on diverse sources
of practical and theoretical inspiration, these critics sought to transform
sociology from inside the belly of the disciplinary beast, by infusing it with
intellectual energies and research agendas that were a product of their
engagement with a multiplicity of extra-disciplinary projects. In this sense,
their critical sociology was marked, as Burawoy (2005c: 23) has suggested,
by various forms of ‘trans-disciplinary infusion’.
The amount of unity among this unruly, rebellious and insubordinate
bunch – political, intellectual, theoretical or methodological – should not be
overstated. Proponents of ethnomethodology stood opposed to symbolic
interactionism, and fought attempts to synthesize the two. Advocates of
critical theory argued with students of structural Marxism. Feminists became
a necessarily critical voice within a range of ostensibly ‘critical’ movements,
and were subject to splits and disagreements of their own. And this is barely
scratching the surface. Indeed, historical sociologists themselves were a
diverse lot, as Andrew Abbott (1991, 2001) has argued, shaped by common
historical circumstances but split into two distinct groups, one associated
with the Social Science History Association and the other with the American
Sociological Association’s Section on Comparative Historical Sociology. While
each of these groups stemmed from the ‘disciplinary unease’ and ‘rebellions’
of the 1960s and 1970s, it was the latter cohort – in which Calhoun would
figure prominently – that both exercised control over what counted as
‘historical sociology’ within the Association and attached itself closely to
outlets of ‘critical sociology’ such as Theory and Society (Calhoun, 1996: 306;
Abbott, 2001: 104–5, 112).
Despite their many differences, the members of the ‘disobedient gener-
ation’ were nevertheless united in important respects – not only by their
commitment to variously defined projects of disciplinary critique and inter-
disciplinary engagement, but also in their disapprobation of the dominant
dispositions of the postwar ‘mainstream’, even if consensus regarding the
precise shape and substance of those dispositions was sometimes hard to
come by. If ‘mainstream sociology’ was (and is) frequently a floating signi-
fier, in its very ambiguity lies some of the explanation of its diffusion through-
out the discipline and its enduring practical utility, for both mainstreamers
and their opponents alike.
Although the effects of these sundry oppositional movements on the
structure of American sociology are still a matter of significant debate, it
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VanAntwerpen: Critical Sociology and the Interdisciplinary Imagination 67

is clear that many of them once aimed, at least for a time, at disciplinary
transformation and even ‘revolution’. Writing in the mid-1980s, for instance,
Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne (1985: 301, 306) referred to a ‘Missing
Feminist Revolution in Sociology’ and called attention to the various reasons
that possibilities for ‘feminist transformations’ had been ‘contained’ within
the discipline.3 More recently, Michael Burawoy (2005a: 313) has claimed
that the ‘immediate object’ of radical sociology in the 1970s ‘was the trans-
formation of sociology not of society’:
There are good reasons why we were so focused on the academic terrain. In
those days, we regarded mainstream sociology as a species of bourgeois
ideology, lagging behind a world erupting with social movements. Our ‘revol-
utionary’ task was to either abolish sociology or at least sever its conservative
roots. (Burawoy, 2005b: 379)

While Calhoun (1996: 306, 314) lamented historical sociology’s ‘lost

theoretical agenda’, and its ‘domestication’ as just another subfield within the
discipline, claiming that ‘many of the old aspirations to transform sociology’
had dimmed, nearly a decade later Burawoy’s account of critical sociology’s
impact was somewhat brighter. ‘The radical assault on postwar sociology was
surprisingly successful’, he wrote, and a subsequent generation, ‘weaned on
critical sociology’ had garnered control of the discipline, ‘embraced demo-
cratic decentralization, widened the doors to minority groups, deepened
participation, and set about creating alternative sociologies’ (Burawoy, 2005a:
316, 317).
Whatever one makes of the effects of the radical assault on postwar
sociology, it seems equally important to note the remarkable extent to which
disciplinary hierarchies have been reproduced (Burris, 2004), as intellectual
changes and institutional continuities within sociology have significantly
mirrored both ‘structural transformation’ and enduring stratification within
the broader field of American higher education (Burawoy, 2005c; Calhoun,
2006). In its very first issue, the Insurgent Sociologist had called on radicals
‘to destroy the power structure of the profession’ and to ‘eliminate the power
elite that controls the profession through its undemocratic structure’
(Oppenheimer and Murray, 1988: 4). The ‘power structure’ of sociology has
not disappeared, although the intellectual preoccupations of those occupy-
ing ‘elite’ positions within the discipline have certainly shifted, as evidenced
by Burawoy’s ascendance to the ASA Presidency (Burawoy, 2005c, 2005d)
and Calhoun’s leading role in an innovative attempt to reconstruct NYU’s
department of sociology (VanAntwerpen and Kirp, 2003), to identify two
examples close to hand. As leading critics of ‘mainstream’ sociology have
risen to new disciplinary heights, the shape of the ‘sociological establish-
ment’ has changed, with critical sociology clearing a path for the recent
promotion of new forms of ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy, 2005a; Burawoy
and VanAntwerpen, n.d.).
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68 Thesis Eleven (Number 84 2006)

Even as the discipline of sociology has changed, so have the trans-

disciplinary formations from which critical sociologists have drawn their
intellectual sustenance. Assessing the state of feminist theory in sociology
two decades after Stacey and Thorne’s ‘Missing Revolution’, Raka Ray noted
the increasing presence of names like Butler, Fraser, Scott and Spivak on syllabi
for feminist theory courses in sociology. Such interdisciplinarity, she wrote,
has always been the strength of feminist theory, and the best young sociolo-
gists that I have had the privilege of teaching and learning from deeply engage
with these theorists, sociologizing them even as they expand sociology. (Ray,
2004: 2)

Feminist theory has changed sociology, Ray (2004: 14) argues: ‘The
revolution may have been quiet and it has a long way to go, but I would
not hesitate to call it a revolution.’4
If transdisciplinary feminist theory continues to infuse sociological
discourses with new insights and perspectives, it has also had a significant
impact on the interdisciplinary field of Marxism that informed the work of
other critical sociologists. One of the challenges to the paradigm that guided
second wave historical sociology, write Adams et al. (2005: 29), was the
pressure from feminist theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory and critical
race studies to ‘pull apart Marxism’. Confronted by new forms of critical theo-
rizing within the university, and by social and political transformations
without, Marxism’s role as an ‘anchor’ that might ‘sustain extra-academic or
at least extra-disciplinary intellectual publics’ (Calhoun, 2005b: 360) has fallen
off considerably. Perhaps as a result, American sociologists whose work was
rooted in transdisciplinary intellectual formations that were informed by
Marxism have watched these intellectual communities wane. Reflecting on
the trajectory of the interdisciplinary ‘No-Bullshit Marxism Group’ in which
he honed his ‘analytical Marxism’, for instance, Erik Olin Wright (2005: 345)
has noted a ‘drift in its intellectual priorities’ and a ‘decline in its intensity’.
While Burawoy and Wright (2001) persevere with a project of ‘sociological
Marxism’, what has become of the broader project of Marxist sociology in
the United States, and of the interdisciplinary fields in which it once moved?
The beginnings of an answer come from George Steinmetz (2005a:
137), who – taking issue with Calhoun (1996) – writes that the idea of
‘domestication’ is ‘too simple and sweeping to describe what happened to
earlier critical movements in U.S. sociology’. Marxist sociology, he claims,
‘has rearticulated itself through the lenses of post-structuralism, semiotics,
narrative analysis, and Lacanian psychoanalysis and rediscovered the anti-
positivist traditions of the Frankfurt school’.
This is an interesting suggestion, although it may still be too early to
assess the relative success of these various ‘rearticulations’ within American
sociology. At present, there appears to be little evidence that they have
provided an intellectual infusion equal either in scope or in intensity to that
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VanAntwerpen: Critical Sociology and the Interdisciplinary Imagination 69

supplied by the interdisciplinary Marxism of an earlier period. Thus, although

transdisciplinary feminist theory remains a powerful force, and new critical
possibilities have emerged within both the ‘cultural’ and the ‘epistemologi-
cal’ turns (Steinmetz, 2005a: 132–7; Steinmetz, 2005b: 311–13), contempor-
ary critical sociologists, not unlike Adams et al.’s ‘third wave’, arguably lack
the sort of ‘hegemonic analytic framework’ that an engagement with Marxism
afforded historical sociology’s second wave.
One recent bid for hegemony comes from Burawoy, who pushes, in
the pages of what was once the Insurgent Sociologist,5 for a ‘critical turn to
public sociology’, suggesting that ‘critical sociology is, and should be, ever
more concerned with promoting public sociologies’ (Burawoy, 2005a: 314).
Critical sociology, he writes, ‘should shift its emphasis from a critique of
professional sociology to the infusion of critical perspectives into public soci-
ology’ (Burawoy, 2005b: 381). Another possibility for future work is
suggested by Calhoun’s recent efforts to assess the limits and possibilities of
a new ‘cosmopolitanism’ (Calhoun 2002, 2003a, 2003b). In a series of inter-
disciplinary engagements that have made him an interloper among philoso-
phers and political theorists, Calhoun has moved to critique ‘actually existing
cosmopolitanism’, posing a distinctly sociological invitation to investigate the
‘social bases’ that have ‘shaped cosmopolitan visions’ (2003c: 86, 88). While
critical sociologists have long been concerned to transform the inner
workings of their own discipline, these new projects point them out toward
critical engagements with extra-disciplinary and extra-academic publics, and
thus toward the practices of public sociology and the challenges of cross-
disciplinary critique, both of which might be sustained by a critical interdis-
ciplinary imagination.
Indeed, the notion of an interdisciplinary imagination arguably captures
something of what Mills was after in his original formulation of the ‘socio-
logical imagination’, which went well beyond the bounds of an academic
discipline called ‘sociology’ (Mills, 1959: 19). This is not to say that ‘interdis-
ciplinary’ projects should or even could reasonably be seen as a replacement
for ‘sociology’, at least in the foreseeable future. As Abbott (2002: 215) has
argued, although the structure of the disciplines in the American university
has long been ‘permeated by a perpetual hazy buzz of interdisciplinarity’,
the ‘disciplinary system’ itself has been remarkably durable, notwithstanding
regular, non-revolutionary periods of interdisciplinary ferment. The chal-
lenge, then, is to cut through the sometimes ‘hazy buzz’ associated with the
discourse of interdisciplinarity in order to assess the real problems with, and
prospects for, a range of critical projects carried out in its name. It is here
that further engagement with the varied trajectories of the members of the
‘disobedient generation’, Craig Calhoun’s among them, would be fruitful.
While their exploits may not have yielded the sort of ‘progress’ Oscar Wilde
dreamt of, they did in fact contribute to a considerable expansion of sociol-
ogy’s interdisciplinary imagination, an imagination that critical sociologists
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70 Thesis Eleven (Number 84 2006)

would do well not to lose sight of, even as they turn their attention to the
ambitious project of public sociology.

Jonathan VanAntwerpen is a PhD candidate in the department of sociology

at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is writing a dissertation on the
transnational struggles over ‘reconciliation’ in the aftermath of South Africa’s Truth
and Reconciliation Commission. [email: jdva@berkeley.edu]

Notes
1. While this turn ‘toward Frankfurt’ was probably helped along by the translation
of Habermas’ Theory and Practice in 1973, a work that was greeted by the
Americans as exemplary of ‘critical sociology’, it was also undoubtedly rooted
at least in part in the migration of the Institut für Sozialforschung to New York
in the mid-1930s, and propelled by the presence of Leo Lowenthal in the
department of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late
1950s and 1960s (Jay, 1996; Wiggershaus, 1994). Both New York and Berkeley,
Collins (1975: 590) would later claim, were among the ‘beachheads . . . from
which much of the radical/critical sociology in America has developed’.
2. The extent to which the notion of a ‘mainstream sociology’ was widely
available by the early 1980s was evidenced by the appearance of a feminist
variant. Political theorist Mary O’Brien (1981) coined the term ‘male-stream’,
and feminist sociologists soon took it up. Opposition to ‘mainstream’ sociology
had connected feminists to other critical sociologists; an opposition to ‘male-
stream’ sociology would set them apart, sharpening a gendered critique of
disciplinary hierarchies and inequalities, both inside and outside ‘critical’
circles.
3. A decade later, the authors revisited the issue and substantially revised their
position (Stacey and Thorne, 1996).
4. For another recent assessment of ‘the feminist revolution’ in sociology, see
Ferree et al. (2006).
5. This journal took the name Critical Sociology in 1988.

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