Interview with Stephen Turner: Part III
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 and Part II of this interview are already online! Available on our blog section.
Section III: History of Science, Career Strategies, and Weber and Schmitt
ÁML: Could you tell us more about the circumstances under which you came to write those, I think they are two papers (1987, 1990), on the surveys which in a sense they stand alone within the whole list of your publications. Of course, there, well I see a lot of Weber there, but it’s almost hidden.
ST: I also did one on the decision-making process having to do with the water issues in the West (1989). I did the first geology paper for Shils’ National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on the Sociology of Intellectuals. I originally wanted to write something on Veblen, because I had spent my sabbatical reading and taking notes on Veblen, reading the whole corpus, but never got around to doing anything with it. It happened that I had been invited to the Science Studies Center at Virginia Tech for the following fall. I had a peculiar relationship with Science Studies. I had a philosophy of science background and the sociology background and had written on both, but I hadn’t really written on Science Studies itself, except for two papers I had published with Daryl Chubin which were critical of some Mertonian arguments in favor of hierarchy and the stratification system in science, which they were obsessed with justifying (Turner and Chubin 1976, 1979), and I had written a critique of the Strong Programme (1981). But I felt that I really needed to do a substantial piece in Science Studies in order to justify my existence in the Science Studies Center. Shils was doing this summer seminar, so I thought that’s going to be my education in this area. I had never even taken a course in this topic. I did the geology research that summer, and then collected lots of additional material after that as well, including work in the National Archives.
ÁML: And did that paper make a difference for your existence within science studies?
ST: Not really. It was not a topic that interested people at the time. But it gave me something to claim as my own. But it was not at all mainstream. The way it worked then was that you did a lab study or you did some very specialized study of a particular area of science. You mastered that area of science, you sat with the people, you knew everybody. It was very ethnographically oriented. I didn’t want to do that. But I had background in sociology of organizations, I could think organizationally, so I thought I could do something organizational and historical, and wouldn’t have to spend my time running around with scientists. It was really a choice like a lot of other choices that are part of my whole career— to go to some space that wasn’t really occupied and say “I’m going to see what I can make of this phenomenon.” And that’s what I did. What I initially wanted to do was more ambitious: to compare the various stages of the development of the American science funding system. It would have been geology, plus agriculture, which I knew a lot about already but learned a lot more, then the Foundations which I already knew something about, and the National Science Foundation. I never got around to the other ones, except for a bit in the patronage paper, because I got absorbed into the geology story.
ÁML: You just mentioned going to a place or an area where there is nothing or nobody, and work there. Can you mention more instances in your career where you did that?
ST: Certainly, in relation to Weber that was my strategy. This was really born of necessity. I was at a university remote from the centers, and needed time because I had a heavy teaching load. The book on the fact-value distinction (Turner and Factor, 1984) and definitely the stuff on objective possibility and adequate cause (Turner and Factor, 1981; Turner, 1983a), were topics that nobody was doing. There was a reason for that: they had absorbed the false, von Schelting view of Weber’s methodology. Von Schelting ignored von Kries and ignored the problem of probabilistic causality. Parsons then transmitted this interpretation in The Structure of Social Action (1937). Shils, who knew him during his stay at Chicago, was a great admirer of von Schelting and he never addressed these issues either. So, there were footnotes in these famous Weber papers, and nobody had ever bothered to figure out what they’re about. It was a perfect opportunity to go and do so. And the nice thing about doing that is that lots of the time, if you’re not in an immediate competitive environment and concerned with getting the next word in as part of some ongoing discussion, you can go and do it at your own pace in your own way.
ÁML: Unless someone else decides to fill the same gap?
ST: Yes, but then, when the circles with the same interests are small, you can befriend the others who are interested, and you have common interests in establishing the topic, which is what happened with the fact-value topic. This started out with a conversation with Regis Factor when I was a new assistant professor. He was an ultra-Catholic IR scholar who had done a dissertation on Morgenthau. We were at a birthday party and were talking about Habermas and Strauss. He was giving Strauss’ argument against conventional social science and I’m giving Habermas’ argument, and we realize that this is really the same argument. We started looking at the origins of this kind of critique. In both cases, it points back to Weber. But there was also a string of people who had written in the period between Weber and Strauss and Habermas. We just started more or less backwards going through the connections between these different thinkers and finding out more and more about the connections and started filling in the gaps, doing little papers (Turner and Factor,1977, 1979; Factor and Turner, 1982, 1984) on different aspects of it that eventually went into the book—by talking to Heidegger people, for example.
ÁML: Talking to?
ST: Heidegger people, such as Karl Moehling. We had a conversation, probably around 1980 with him, about whether Heidegger was a nihilist? This is probably not the right question but, it was definitely the Straussian question. And so, we worked through these issues, but there were very few papers at the time. Nobody was doing work on Heidegger as a Nazi at that time, nobody. Moehling was trying to get a grip on it, but to defend Heidegger. The same was true with Weber–there were people who had written on these issues, like Hans Henrik Bruun (1972), but had made almost no impression in the US. When we wrote the first big paper on fact-value and Weber’s value theory, we sent it to Theory and Society, naively thinking that it was the open forum it presented itself as. Gouldner just wrote back and said I’ve never heard of any of these people, I don’t know what you’re talking about. He wouldn’t even review it.
ÁML: Which was the paper?
ST: It was a paper that eventually was published in Human Studies as “The Limits of Reason and Some Limitations of Weber’s Morality” (1979). It was really a review of people like Dieter Henrich and all of this other continental writing that never got translated into English but was part of the standard European discussion of Weber. Of course Leo Strauss is a big part of this story in the US. Weber and Heidegger are the subject of Natural Right and History (1953). But Strauss was always either dismissed or ignored, even in political science and never mentioned in Sociology. When I was in graduate school in the Political Science department, you never heard “Straussian” without “crazy” being attached to it: “Those crazy Straussians.” They just ignored them. And political theory was taught as though these issues didn’t exist. I knew a lot of people in the political science department, and I talked to the theory professor and said, “I’m doing sociological theory, and I’d like to take some political theory courses.” He says, “oh you wouldn’t like it.” And it was probably true because they were just obsessed with Locke, it was the same stuff over and over again. It wasn’t a broad view of history of political thought: everything was a prelude to Locke and then it ended. So, I didn’t learn about any of these things in graduate school. What education I got came afterwards. But importing these topics into sociology, especially American sociology didn’t really work. And it didn’t work partly because of Roth and Bendix. So, we had tremendous trouble publishing that book. But we immediately connected with Larry Scaff, Robert Eden, and Bill Shapiro, who was a Strauss student, and had done a dissertation on Weber, and then became a great teacher but never produced much. We started setting up sessions at meetings, in order to get together. We started out at the Southern Sociological Society, we all met there in Knoxville and had dinner together and we bonded. Then we went to the APSA and other political science meetings. Political science was much more open to these topics. Then we connected up with the Schmitt people, Ellen Kennedy and Joseph Bendersky, who were just starting on Schmitt at that time. So, it was an empty space that was on the edge of becoming popular. But there were very few people who were talking about Schmitt in the US at that time: you could put them in a phone booth.
ÁML: This is before the Telos special issue (Summer 1987)?
ST: Oh absolutely, this is about 1980. There was nothing. And there was an active suppression of Schmitt. There was a famous story about Kirchheimer, who had this student, George Schwab, who did the first book in English on Schmitt, and it turns it in as his dissertation. Kirchheimer refuses to accept it, so he has to write another dissertation on a different topic. Why? Because Schwab had ferreted out Kirchheimer’s early writings and shown how Schmittian they were, and Kirchheimer wanted that suppressed. There was really almost a conspiracy to hide this whole period, and this was also something I learned from these émigrés: they all knew that there was dirt on them (see Turner 2011).
ÁML: There was dirt?
ST: There was some issue with their past, and they didn’t want to air that dirty linen in front of others. There was a conspiracy of silence among them not to talk about what they did during this period. So, they would turn it into very abstract discussions, but they would never get down to the nitty gritty. Schmitt was part of this story, and it was one of the things that they didn’t want to talk about. Frankfurt School figures, especially but not only Neumann and Kirchheimer, also Marcuse, took a lot of their thinking from Schmitt, but they were very careful to insist that they didn’t.
ÁML: For obvious reasons.
ST: For obvious reasons, especially in that early period, in the 1940s and 50s. I had a really interesting letter from Wilhelm Hennis after I had published a paper on Shils (1999) and said obviously he read Schmitt, but that I don’t know when he did this. Wilhelm Hennis wrote and said I know when he did it. When Hennis was a student, he went to Chicago around 1950 on one of these famous post-war fellowships for young Germans. He said he shuttled back and forth between Shils and Strauss telling them news about Schmitt. They were both absolutely fascinated but they didn’t discuss it. And Shils always insisted that whenever you mention Schmitt you have to say how terrible he was. But he still definitely had an effect on them.
ÁML: And you can perfectly imagine how someone like Shils could be fascinated by someone with the learning of Schmitt.
ST: Especially with the theological aspect to Schmitt.