Which theory of education focuses on education as a means of widening the gap?

Although in the space allotted here it is impossible to offer even a succinct history of social science reference books, some sense of how they evolved over the last century or so might be conveyed simply by means of mentioning some titles which seemed to define a given discipline at a particular moment in its development. I will begin with my own field whose history is more familiar to me than the other disciplines.

Despite its senior status as a university discipline of independent identity relative to most of the other social sciences, reference works have not been as numerous for sociology as one might therefore expect. Thomas Nixon Carver's Sociology and Social Progress: A Handbook for Students of Sociology (Sumner, 1907: 810 pp.) was remarkable for its earliness. Yet the first real encyclopedic effort in English came only in 1992 under Edward Borgatta's editorship (Macmillan: 4 volumes), a full century after academic departments bearing the discipline's name appeared in several midwestern universities. (Two previous efforts, one edited by the noted scholar Michael Mann, did not live up to their titles as ‘encyclopedias’ proper.) Other useful compendia include Smelser and Swedberg's The Handbook of Economic Sociology (1994) and Frank Magill's International Encyclopedia of Sociology (1995: 2 volumes).

The first handbook expressly designed for sociology was Alfred Vierkandt's Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (1931), a mere 690 pages long, followed in 1956 by Werner Ziegenfuss' Handbuch der Soziologie, at double the length. And in 1962 Rene König edited the famous Handbuch der Empirischen Sozialforschung in 2 volumes of 2000 pages. In the United States one could begin with An Introduction to Sociology edited by Jerome Davis and H.E. Barnes (1927, 1931), a 900-page collabora by seven authors. Trends in American Sociology followed in 1929, edited by George Lundberg, Read Bain, and Nels Anderson, with substantial chapters on the history of sociology, theory, social psychology, culture, rural sociology, urban sociology, educational sociology, social work, applied sociology, and methods. In 1937 Prentice-Hall sold Man and Society for $3.75, a 787-page work edited by Emerson Schmidt that tried to introduce students to all the social sciences simultaneously, covering everything from human values to income distribution to social psychology (Herbert Blumer's memorable chapter). The Gurvitch-Moore volume, Twentieth Century Sociology, published just following the war (1945), seemed to have widespread influence, despite its execrable typos and layout. Its most distinctive feature, in addition to chapters on all the subfields of sociology at the time, was a second section of 250 pages that dealt with sociology in France, the United States, Britain, Germany, Latin America, Italy, Spain, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. This should have inspired later handbooks, and may account for the volume's popularity, since a distinctly ecumenical flavor swept the academy worldwide following World War II. Its authors – Burgess, Parsons, H.P. Becker, Sorokin, Maclver, Znaniecki, Gurvitch, Roscoe Pound, Merton, Wach, Levi-Strauss, Faris, Albert Salomon, Bastide, and so on – comprise a list of distinguished scholars that has not been matched since in a collaborative volume. The first recognizably ‘modern’ compendium was Joseph Gittler's Review of Sociology (1957), with chapters by recognized authors on the topics that soon became the staples of introductory textbooks. (Georges Gurvitch edited Traité de sociologie in 1960, 2 volumes and 1000 pages, which seemed to have little impact in the United States.) And finally, Parsons himself had a go with his American Sociology (1968), with chapters by many scholars now in the twilight of their careers but who then were the bedrock of the mainstream, as it were.

One could say many things along these lines about the Smelser Handbook, which, given its size and unique position within sociology at present, deserves more than passing attention. This is especially so regarding the ‘theories’ that are put forth in the opening chapters as constituting ‘the’ new streams. For instance, neither Walter Wallace nor Jeffrey Alexander, the chapters' authors, wishes to consider postmodernism as a fact of existential and scholarly life, and therefore each throws himself or herself into a strange time warp. Peterson had characterized Faris' introduction to his earlier compendium as ‘blindly benign’ (Peterson, 1965: p. 254), which seems perfectly correct, even when rereading Faris today. One could say something similar about the theoretical terrain that is gingerly walked over in opening chapters of the Smelser Handbook. A range of old beliefs, now diminished by criticism from philosophers and literary critics – some of whom, incidentally, number among our most influential ‘social’ theorists – are trotted out as if nothing substantial had occurred to Western culture since 1964. It is as if the ‘self’ about which Parsons wrote with such conviction is still out there doing what selves have ‘always’ done. The same could be said about the precritical notion of ‘science’ and ‘rationality’ that figures in both chapters, but especially in Alexander's, as if definitions of rational action and societal rationality are not now in themselves enormously contentious topics. Such limitations begin to indicate the intellectual boundaries of compendia of this sort, even those written by top scholars, for the adventurousness that might pervade a monograph composed by the same authors is diminished when they turn their hands to ‘general’ statements. Since reference sources, by common consent, are supposed to offer a summary of ‘established knowledge’ in a specific field or subfield, their authors typically draw back from the perimeters of discovery and innovation. Therefore, such works almost always lag behind the leading edges of thinking and offer their users a snapshot of what was confidently held to be true a dozen or more years before they are published. And with the ever-increasing rate of change in global intellectual culture, this poses a problem, particularly for printed reference sources, which may be met only via constantly updated electronic versions.

Comparison of Smelser's Handbook, the most recent entry into the genre, with earlier versions must remain fairly rough. Its predecessors employed other sorts of authors, aimed at different audiences (those not yet effectively lobotomized by videocretinization), and seem to have been composed in an atmosphere of genuine wonder and hopeful discovery regarding what social scientific study might yield for intellectuals and for the social order that supported them. This kind of childlike hope decomposed after the Gurvitch–Moore volume in 1945 and was replaced by a somewhat defensive, stuffy scientism in later compendia that reflected sociology's struggle to survive McCarthyism on one hand, literary criticism on the other. But such books, while high on scientific rhetoric, seemed correspondingly low on political self-examination and savvy, while also revealing a foreshortened understanding of the philosophical problems necessarily part of sociological study. Still, it is uplifting to read these older books because their authors were usually straightforward and unpretentious. They tended to avoid enormous claims for the discipline, and offered up its fruits with a direct and unembattled character that nowadays is harder to find. It is probably no accident that after years of sociology bashing at the highest levels of government, both here and in Europe, the field should have put out a summary package for broad consumption in hopes of regaining lost ground, both within the cloister and beyond its high walls. We shall see if it succeeds as part of the long process of recertifying the discipline for a public which has been told repeatedly that nothing good can come of thinking about social reality in the way ‘we’ do.

Dictionaries for sociology began with Constantine Panunzio's pamphlet, A Student's Dictionary of Sociological Terms (California, 1937), continuing with Henry Fairchild's Dictionary of Sociology (1944). Only in the late 1960s were a number of competing volumes added to this small shelf of sociological reference books, including those of Geoffrey Mitchell (1968, 1979), George and Achilles Theodorson (1969), and Thomas Hoult (1969). With Raymond Boudon and François Bourricaud's Critical Dictionary of Sociology (1989), celebrated scholars from Europe entered the field for the first time, followed in the 1990s with new dictionaries by David Jary (1991), Nicholas Abercrombie (1994), Gordon Marshall (1994, 1998), and Allan Johnson (1995), the former three being well-known British scholars. American sociologists have not of late contributed substantially to this genre.

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