Interview with Stephen Turner: Part II
Stephen P. Turner (University of South Florida) is a Weber scholar and social theorist. He is also a member of the so-called “disobedient generation,” which left graduated programs and incorporated to US faculties in the years after the 1968 student movement. Departing from his own personal experience, in this interview Turner shares his views on the intellectual, professional, and job-market conditions under which social theory and Weber studies have evolved since the 1970s. He also explains what he sees as the reasons of the social theory’s current difficulties, but also argues for its continued importance as an academic rather than engaged vocation. Here he also sees a place for Weber’s ideas. Turner’s memoir, Mad Hazard: a Life in Social Theory, was published in September 2022.
This interview was conducted in Berlin on the 10th of July 2019 by Álvaro Morcillo (Free University Berlin). The interview was recorded and subsequently transcribed. It has been edited for clarity; occasionally, the order of a question and the answer thereto has been altered. A list of references is available here.
Part I is already online! Available on our blog section.
Section II: Historical Sociology in the United States
ÁML: This is something which interests me personally. I asked Guenther Roth, the editor of Weber’s Economy and Society, a couple of times about the ASA’s Section “Comparative and Historical Sociology”, maybe I already told you, he said that “the last times I went there, what people were doing didn’t have anything to do with historical sociology.”
ST: That may be, I haven’t been involved with it since the takeover.
ÁML: That’s early 1980s?
ST: Yes.
ÁML: But would something like that be useful to have— a Section really interested in historical social research?
ST: I think what has happened, at least in American sociology, is that what could have been such a field was stripped of theoretical interest. You get research, but the level of ideas has dropped. There are theoretical ideas, but they take the form of non-debatable propositions, such as gender studies, critical race theory, and postcolonial thinking. You either accept the premises or you don’t, so the theory is just an explication of the worldview, and the “history” is just its application. In any case, serious discussions of historical social research moved to the Social Science History Association, which had real historians, and this became more of a historical field than a theoretical one.
ÁML: Just as a last remark on the topic, you probably know Thomas Ertman the author of The Leviathan, he works at NYU, he was at Harvard in the 1980s with Skocpol.
ST: I vaguely know the name, but I don’t know anything about him.
ÁML: Well, he wrote this book about the history of the state, a very Weberian, very Hintzean book, and I think he didn’t get tenure at Harvard and moved to NYU. And two, three years ago we were having a coffee in New York and I asked him about historical sociology and he told me, well that doesn’t really exist because you can’t train people in doing historical sociology. (He was obviously talking about the US). It has become even more complicated because the students don’t bring the linguistic background you need and it takes too many years to train someone to be a historical sociologist. Of course, if you ask Phillip Gorski you will have another answer, but do you think there is some truth in Tom Ertman’s skeptical view?
ST: Yes, but I think that was always true. There were people who devoted years and years to these projects. I knew one of Craig Calhoun’s students, David Bealmear, who never finished, and it is a sadly exemplary story.
ÁML: One of Calhoun’s students?
ST: One of his North Carolina students, who never finished and died in 2003. He had exactly this kind of problem, he wanted to talk about Poland during the crisis. But first, you’ve got the languages, then you’ve got the secondary literature, and then you’ve made this incredible investment in the problem, but it’s taken you years and years to make any progress, and by the time you’ve made any progress, the field has moved on, the issues aren’t as important anymore. It’s not a great career choice in a competitive environment.
ÁML: And an intellectual one?
ST: That is different. I got a lot out of doing historical work, and archival work. Working on the history of geology gave me a good ability to see through these large-scale historical theses. If you’re actually in the papers or in the literature, in the biographical literature and so on, you get a completely different sense of what is going on than in arguing about these Skocpol-like claims about the state. She had a story about the state recognizing itself and gaining autonomy. But geology followed the normal path for institutional change in the US, which is that the states figure out something, create laws and institutional structures, and start copying each other and learning from each other. Then the federal government jumps in and takes it over or relates to it in some administrative way. But intellectually it’s well-developed before it gets to the federal level, so it’s not really a matter of the state recognizing itself and seeking autonomy, but one of individuals with agendas, people with particular views and particular ideas trying things and seeing if they work and so on.