Varieties of Social Imagination

VARIETIES OF SOCIAL IMAGINATION

Varieties of Social Imagination

Barbara Celarent

Edited and with a Preface by Andrew Abbott

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43382-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43396-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43401-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226434018.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Celarent, Barbara, author. | Abbott, Andrew Delano, editor.

Title: Varieties of social imagination / Barbara Celarent ; edited and with a preface by Andrew Abbott.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016021178 | ISBN 9780226433820 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226433967 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226434018 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Sociologists. | Sociology.

Classification: LCC HM478 .C453 2016 | DDC 301—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021178

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Preface

YEAR ONE

I  Michael Young

II  Henry David Thoreau

III  Frances Donovan

IV  Bernard Berelson and Gary A. Steiner

V  Oliver Cromwell Cox

VI  Herbert Marcuse

YEAR TWO

VII  Gilberto Freyre

VIII  Jomo Kenyatta

IX  Qu Tongzu

X  Mariama Bâ

XI  G. S. Ghurye

XII  Frantz Fanon

YEAR THREE

XIII  Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati

XIV  Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

XV  Chen Da

XVI  Ali Shariʾati

XVII  Ziya Gökalp

XVIII  M. N. Srinivas

YEAR FOUR

XIX  Ellen Hellmann

XX  Euclides da Cunha

XXI  Fukutake Tadashi

XXII  Fei Xiaotong

XXIII  Deliar Noer

XXIV  Radhakamal Mukerjee

YEAR FIVE

XXV  Léopold Sédar Senghor

XXVI  Gino Germani

XXVII  Taha Husayn

XXVIII  Fukuzawa Yukichi

XXIX  Heleieth I. B. Saffioti

XXX  Alberto Flores Galindo

YEAR SIX

XXXI  Sol T. Plaatje

XXXII  José Vasconcelos

XXXIII  Edward W. Blyden

XXXIV  José Rizal

XXXV  Joaquín Capelo

XXXVI  Raden Ajeng Kartini

PREFACE

SINCE THE AUTHOR OF THIS WORK HAS RETURNED TO THE FLUX from which she came, it falls to me, as her editor and collaborator, to provide a brief preface. I shall characterize her book briefly, then make some acknowledgments of my own and tell something of my acquaintance with the remarkable Barbara Celarent.

The book provides a broad introduction to social thinking. It aims to stimulate questions and to raise issues. It does not provide answers or summarize arguments, but rather invites us to read the works discussed herein and reflect on them both individually and collectively. It therefore has neither an index nor a summary nor even an introductory chapter. Only by reading and reflecting can we learn.

The text consists of 36 analytic reviews covering one or two works by a given author. Most of these reviews give a short biography to place the author in general context, then loosely describe the book reviewed. Each then focuses on particular issues that seem important to Professor Celarent in her reading.

As for the authors reviewed, they come from the past and the other. No living author is discussed, and 30 of the 36 reviews concern authors born outside Europe and North America. (Even the six metropolitan works are nonmainstream by most standards.) The diversity of the authors is great. Their homelands range from Argentina to Japan, from Turkey to South Africa. Their works range from fiction to scholarship, from general polemic to personal life story. Their attitudes range from radical to conservative, from passionately religious to militantly secular. They are young and old, poets and presidents, social scientists and novelists. They are Catholics and Muslims, Hindus and atheists, men and women, exiles and prime ministers. A very few of them are professional academics, but even those few have lived colorful lives.

The reviews were previously published in the American Journal of Sociology, where they appeared in a more or less continuous sequence from July 2009 to November 2015. Unlike most work in that journal and despite their often quite specific detail, they have no scholarly machinery other than for quotations from related works. However, as I shall explain below, Professor Celarent’s facts and references have been checked as well as I could manage, in original languages where necessary, whether I knew those languages or had to rely on my students’ knowledge of them. I have read all these works myself and have familiarized myself with the historical and social settings involved, typically by reading a half dozen or so auxiliary books and in a few cases by consulting area experts. No doubt some errors remain, to be sure, for which I as the final editor of Professor Celarent’s work must take responsibility.

The reviews have been only minimally edited from their original publication. They have not, for example, been pushed toward a single consistent tone or toward a rigorous argument. Nor have the occasional repetitions of themes or examples been removed. Professor Celarent would have wanted the reader to notice and ponder the evolution of the author of these pieces across the six years that it took her to produce them. I have also left unchanged Professor Celarent’s original dating of the reviews, which lies in the future—from 2048 to 2054. Thus, in the first review, the phrase 90 years ago means 1958, not 1919.

I should note some other idiosyncrasies. Many of these pieces involve romanizations from nonroman writing systems, and many of these romanizations have themselves changed through the years; a notable example is the shift in Chinese from the Wade-Giles to the Pinyin system. I have left them all as they were in the Celarent originals, thereby following her policy of accepting the terms used by the books she reviewed. Particularly in the case of works touching Islam, this means that there may be multiple romanizations of a single Arabic original or, in some cases, of personal names. More generally, Professor Celarent accepts the vocabularies of the books she reads, even if those vocabularies have later changed. Hence Raden Ajeng Kartini wants to go to Holland, not The Netherlands, and Edward Blyden writes about the Negro race, not blacks or Africans.

As for my own acknowledgements, I should thank first of all those who taught me by word or example that such a project might be intellectually important and indeed necessary: Paul-Yves Colle, John King Fairbank, Gino Germani, Edwin O. Reischauer, Roger Revelle, and Tom Weisskopf. More immediately, even so personal a project has benefited from suggestions, translations, and clarifications, and so I should thank the people who have in one way or another aided me:

Ari Adut

Mito Akiyoshi

Said Arjomand

Ralph Austen

Don Bogue

Dain Borges

Michael Burawoy

Paola Castaño-Rodriguez

John Comaroff

Joost Coté

Saul Dubow

Eleonora Elguezabal

Philip Engblom

Cornell Fleischer

Marco Garrido

Diana Kim

SeungJin Kim

Dave Ludden

Rocco Machiavello

Jeremy Menchik

Sanyu Mojola

Tetsuo Najita

Ralph Nicholas

Peter Perdue

David Schalliol

Alan Sica

George Steinmetz

Susan Stokes

Geng Tian

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo

Liping Wang

Finally, I should most especially thank Susan Allan, managing editor of the American Journal of Sociology, for her work of copyediting and for her forbearance across the years it has taken to publish this series of reviews. They were often late and always complicated, but she handled them with care and aplomb.

What then of the author herself? I first met Barbara Celarent in the spring of 2008. I was in the library of Nuffield College at Oxford University, seeking after-dinner reading. At dinner I had asked some of the students to send me to a randomly chosen bookstack, where I could pick out a book that looked interesting. When I arrived at that spot, Professor Celarent was there. Quietly she directed me to the two volumes of the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz. I knew his name but nothing else. So I charged out the books and took them back to my room. As I read, I was not much impressed by the cardinal himself, but was fascinated by the mere fact of the book—its testimony to the daily life of a particular person, its unconscious revelations of his character, above all the difference between my own world and that of the cardinal. I spent a pleasant two hours reading and decided to choose a new book every night. The Nuffield students and postdocs happily sent me all over the library. I was reading about the East African slave trade one night and mesmerism the next.

I remember little about my actual research work on that visit—I was deep in some interminable revision. But I do remember those nightly visits to Nuffield’s tower-library and an accompanying presence that gradually became both more defined and more intellectually militant. Between them, the students and Professor Celarent sent me to the past, to work less specialized and less academic, to places and people I knew little about. By the time I returned to Chicago, I had learned a particular practice: to read in unfamiliar materials, for short periods of time, with concentrated attention. It was a practice I started at once with my students. We met at four in the afternoon every Friday, spent one hour reading books chosen at random from a specified area of the stacks, and then spent another hour or so drinking wine and discussing the various works we had encountered. Random Reading, I called it. Professor Celarent would sometimes be present.

But Professor Celarent did not think that random reading was enough. I should be more systematic. Each year I should set myself the task of carefully examining a few older and unfamiliar works. I should read a work straight through, then read enough related books to place it in its context of time, place, and social status. Then I should reread the book and, finally, write a short piece about it. By this exercise I could recover the excitement with which I had read as a young man, which had begun to fade after 35 years of classes, conferences, and deadlines.

Professor Celarent offered to choose a few books and show me what to do. Soon there arrived an essay about Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy. It was short, crisp, thoughtful. Moreover, it was in the book review format of the American Journal of Sociology, which I edited. Why not publish it? But to publish the review I would have to vet it for accuracy, and to do that I might as well follow Professor Celarent’s full instructions. So I reread Young’s book, read some related books and articles, reread Young yet again, and then revised and edited her review essay. I told the AJS managing editor, Susan Allan, that we would publish Professor Celarent’s piece, as edited. Moreover, since I had found the whole process a pleasure, we would have one of these essays in every single issue. Ms. Allan was skeptical but supportive. She did the copyediting herself, as she would for the next six years.

We attributed the articles to Professor Celarent, since she was writing the original drafts. But in actuality, I knew little about her. I asked her a few questions about herself, but her smiling responses were the stuff of dreams. After all, even her name was unreal—merely the medieval mnemonic for two of the four valid forms of syllogism in the first figure. But the journal’s policies required that we report a name and affiliation, and so I used the information she gave—Barbara Celarent, Professor of Particularity at the University of Atlantis. (A little research revealed that the position too was a joke: the syllogisms Barbara and Celarent do not involve particular or qualified statements, but only universal ones.) She told me a few other details, which I eventually added to the page I created for her on my website. But like her name and position, those details were all meaningless. Professor Celarent was an amalgam of many selves, which shimmered in her constantly. For use on the website, she sent me a photograph of one of them. It was just another of her jokes—the woman in the picture looked exactly like my grandmother.

In the first year, Professor Celarent sent me six essays, one for each of the AJS’s six issues. I enjoyed following in her footsteps, reading the books and then the biographies and related works, and finally writing a response in which I could strive towards her ideals. But in the essay she sent me for the end of the first year, she declared a change. From now on, we would read old works from outside the privileged center of Western culture. Many of these works would be works I did not know, from writers I did not know, about issues and problems I did not know. And the reviews would be held to a new standard of writing: no references to a canon readers might not know; no indulgences in tired polemics; no hiding from the main task of approaching a new writer with complete seriousness. And I must commit to five more years of work.

She was herself, she told me, profoundly interested in difference and particularity. But one could not expect to arrive at a summary view of such things—indeed, that would be a contradiction in terms. Rather, one experienced particularity, both of oneself and of others. One could not escape difference, but one could learn always to find meaning in new differences, as one lost it in the old ones. Each book would begin as novelty, then become an obsession, then eventually a habit. And then I would be ready for the next book. Over the course of reading many books, I would change in some way that did not consist of adding new things to what I knew, nor of simply drifting from one thing to another, nor yet of creating some new abstractions that would capture the whole variety of this social thinking that I had never before read. Variety that could be captured, she said, was not genuine variety.

To be sure, the guiding morality of Professor Celarent’s reading gradually became clear. One should take the past and the other seriously: on their own terms, not as not-yet-realized or garbled versions of one’s own supposed perfection or even one’s own supposed ideals. After all, we will ourselves be past soon enough, and we are someone else’s other already. Professor Celarent also worried that universal social thought inevitably lost real content and, ultimately, stepped outside the social process altogether, even while triumphant particularity drifted sometimes toward exclusion and violence. In addition, she was clearly concerned with the decline of intellectual commitment among those supposedly most committed to intellectual life. She wished that her practice of careful reading, reflection, and writing would become more general.

She seemed to believe in a perpetual becoming. One was to be always moving. Not radically, to be sure: respect for the past was central to her. But memory must be challenged by anticipation, lest the mind fall asleep. Indeed, she ultimately announced to me, after about three years, that one of the last works in the series would be an enormous untranslated book in Spanish, a language I did not know. By 2015 I must know enough Spanish to check Professor Celarent’s draft review of Joaquín Capelo’s enormous Sociología de Lima. I hoped there would be no further surprises, but over the following two years I dutifully learned enough Spanish to translate 600 of Capelo’s 850 pages, trusting myself to read the rest at sight when the time came to read and edit her review of his book.

Professor Celarent grew more somber as we approached the end of the series. Early on there were attempts to underscore the futureness of the writing (as noted earlier, she insisted on dating the essays about 40 years in the future) as well as the nautical theme of Atlantis. But these things were lost, and she herself became more particular, it seemed to me, as the series wore on. She grew excited about individual themes like liberalism or race or religion. She lost herself in occasional byways. She found herself dragged along paths of new particularities to strange places with unforeseen consequences. It became clear that her investigations would lead to more questions than answers and that this was, in some way I could not understand, the road to a different kind of universalism. And it was to universalism, I now realized, that Professor Celarent wished to return, after her sojourn in the world of particular beings.

In May 2015, on my annual trip to Nuffield, I received the draft of the thirty-sixth review. The youth and hopes of Raden Ajeng Kartini’s letters represented for Professor Celarent one ideal of intellectual and reflective living—the ideal of continuous learning, of personal growth in complexity and depth, of embracing another without losing oneself. It is always time, she seemed to be saying, to begin anew. As so often before, she had reimagined herself, this time in a radiant young woman.

But death had taken Kartini at the threshold of life, leaving only her radiance behind. And I had no need to read the final paragraphs to know that I would not see Barbara Celarent again. As she said there, the duty and pleasure of continuing the inquiry now fall to the reader.

Andrew Abbott

YEAR ONE

I

Michael Young

The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033. By Michael Young. London: Thames & Hudson, 1958. Pp. 160.

IN THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY, A SOCIOLOGIST IN 2034 LOOKS back on the preceding 160 years of education in Great Britain. The book’s fictitious future (from its publication in 1958 onward) imagines the gradual triumph of the IQ-driven education system that had emerged in Great Britain during the war years. In this future, IQ testing continues throughout the life course, and work is allocated by strictly meritocratic standards—in fact, by current IQ. The history of this dystopic system is chronicled down to its fall, whose sources the bewildered author is trying to discover. A final footnote informs us of his death at the hands of rebels.

Published 90 years ago, this book raised all the issues of stratification by means of its unforgettable fantasy. Yet history betrayed Young. Scholars ignored the book, but his new word entered the language overnight. In the process, Young’s sarcastic neologism was euphemized into a positive term for a society that gives rewards to a putative merit of individuals. The optimistic sociology of the later 20th century believed this meritocracy to be not only possible, but also compatible with rigorous egalitarianism. Equal opportunity would lead to true meritocracy, which would be true egalitarianism, for—this was the hidden assumption—every person was in effect taken to have a merit proper only to herself.

Such a belief in the equal personal dignity of every human had long been a staple of universal religions. And it was distantly related to Young’s—and our own—notion that there are many different dimensions of merit, each with its own importance and its own difficulty of achievement. But in the late 20th and early 21st centuries scholars and policy makers alike avoided the challenge of interrelating and reconciling these conflicting ideals, instead employing simplistic assumptions and deliberate silences.

Both that thoughtless optimism and our own more recent anguished multidimensionality lay in the future when Michael Young stepped back from his studies of East London’s working class and envisioned a society in which merit would be measured by intelligence tests administered continuously over the life course. By 50 years after Young’s book, that society had become, if not a reality, then at least a simulacrum. From IQ test to SAT to LCAT, from bachot to agrégation, tests called the tune. To be sure, Young’s prediction of lifelong testing—with consequent demotion when scores started to fall—did not become an explicit reality. But practice came close; the engineer’s trajectory from school to practical engineering into administration was one example. The academic trudge from assistant professor to midcareer grandee to occasional commentator was another.

Culturally, meritocracy became so dominant an ideal that even those who opposed its interim results attacked only the cultural bias of the tests. They did not attack the ahistoricality of the meritocracy concept nor its ignoring of personal development. Nor did they, like Young’s rebels, reject the whole enterprise in the name of multidimensional merit. Nor, last of all, did they—like Young himself—spend their careers envisioning structures that would enable excluded people to find inclusion as well as to have happier, richer, more rewarding lives.

Young’s book is important not only for its ideas and its impact, but also for its unwitting illustration of meritocracy in academia. The book had difficulty finding a publisher. No scholarly journal reviewed it. Indeed, by 2010 it had been cited only about 300 times. Yet in its time, Meritocracy was part of an intense polemic about British education. The 1944 Education Act had brought the eleven-plus exam, whose results dictated a tripartite division of students into academic, technical, and vocational tracks. Chief among Young’s targets was a great apostle of that system—Eric James, headmaster of the then-famous Manchester Grammar School, which restricted nearly all its places to those who obtained high scores on the eleven-plus. James’s book Education and Leadership (Harrap, 1951) had argued that such an elitist approach opened the upper classes to any talented child. In Meritocracy James appears at every corner, sometimes damningly quoted, sometimes covertly mocked (the purported author of Meritocracy is a graduate of Manchester Grammar), sometimes curiously ventriloquized (the approving quote from T. S. Eliot in Meritocracy’s closing chapter is lifted from James’s book.) Indeed, Meritocracy is almost an explicit parody of its predecessor.

Thus the book comes from a very particular moment. It also comes from a very particular place. Emphatically and peculiarly English is its overwhelming focus on class, which was the English way of perceiving those issues that elsewhere went under the names of status attainment, racism, syndicalism, and so on. Indeed, many of the supposed evils of meritocracy—not only the relentless testing but also student salaries, for example—were standard practice in France at the time Young wrote, and one cannot but suspect him of some anti-Gallicanism. Also very English—indeed, very English working class—is the strong faith (on the part of the real Young, not his protagonist) in the family and family virtues, as well as in the dignity and worth of the experience embodied in older people. From Young’s adoptive family the Elmhirsts and their Dartington experiment comes another peculiarly English quality, the echo of William Morris and his Arts and Crafts movement that pervades the book.

The Rise of the Meritocracy is, then, a very particular book, a book of its place and time. Yet the issues in it are timeless. In a way, this prescience is shown by the list of predictions that—whether he liked them or not and whether he intended them or not—Young got right. He foresaw the emergence of China as a world power. He foresaw women having equal rights in university and workplace. He foresaw the reemergence of domestic service. He foresaw the abolition of the House of Lords. He foresaw the renaming and upgrading of many occupations. He foresaw the metric system, IQ crammers, and the obsession with economic growth. It is an impressive list. Just as striking, however, are the things he got wrong. Although defeated by the grammar school culture in Meritocracy, comprehensive schools in fact spread rapidly when Young’s friend Anthony Crosland became secretary of state for education. Eric James’s own Manchester Grammar School was driven into the private sector. By the early 2000s, most of the United Kingdom had comprehensive, state-funded schools, and the elite universities were down to 45% of admissions from the private sector. As for the labor force, Young (like everyone) missed the rapid shift to a service economy. Nor did he foresee the folding of clerical work back into the professions via the personal computer.

Culturally, he missed the rapid eclipse of the Shakespeare-and-Milton/Latin-and-Greek core of the grammar school tradition. By the late 20th century, the general culture even of the elite consisted of sports, situation comedies, and popular trends invented by advertisers aiming at young consumers. The children of privilege proudly wore the clothes of—and followed the music of—the lower classes. More important for his argument, however, Young failed to see that national boundaries would break down—in the book, international competition is the factor that justifies dystopic meritocracy—and that the highly planned, organized society that could have imposed such meritocracy would be energetically dismantled by neoliberal politicians in the 1980s.

As writing, the book is very strong: witty and even brilliant. A footnote on page 19 tells us that the old aristocrats bred birds which they tenderly shot, studied their amorous habits with field glasses, and themselves developed the appearance of their quarry. On page 38, we are told Englishmen of the solid center never believed in equality. They assumed that some men were better than others and only waited to be told in what respect. At times, the in-jokes get wearisome, if only because one has to know so much to recognize them; current readers won’t necessarily know that the Harvard Socialist Documents don’t exist, that the idea of Keir Hardie with a knighthood would have caused outrage among his miner constituents, and that Lady Avocet’s name refers to a bird—once thought extinct—that resettled the British Isles in the 1950s. (Some of the jokes have lasted better—the triple entendre of right-thinking people, for example.) Thus, for all its age, the book still reads easily and quickly. This is all the more important because later generations of sociologists often discussed these issues in ways less frank and certainly less interesting. In the 2000s, for example, sociologists discussed exactly the same issues as separated Young and James, but only through the most indirect of routes—making obscure criticisms of their opponents’ statistical mannerisms or assumptions. Such periphrasis was required by the then-conventional assumption that because sociology was scientific, the answers to Young’s questions would be found by discovering, at last, the correct mathematics.

Fortunately, we are past those years. The modern practical theory of justice did not begin to emerge from stratification theory until sociologists took seriously Young’s plea for multidimensionality and asked about a truly multidimensional quality of life. Only then could we address the question of Young, John Dewey, and even Karl Marx about how on the one hand to allow each individual to become the best version of herself and on the other to create a just social structure, at the same time managing to preserve the virtues of family life without thereby reaping a harvest of invidious privilege. The Rise of the Meritocracy is thus an appropriate first reading for this year’s annual list. As always, we have selected six works of varying type and provenance: important and unimportant, famous and unknown, theoretical and empirical (and in this case, even fictional). And as always, we preempt competition by choosing only the work of dead authors, as we preempt canonization by continually choosing new old books. By reading together a set of old work across the year, we reaffirm our faith in our discipline’s past and renew our allegiance to the tradition of critical inquiry into social life. We have in many ways progressed beyond our predecessors, but rereading them reveals at once the common heritage of questions and frameworks that lies behind our surface differences in data, methods, theories, and heroes.

II

Henry David Thoreau

Walden; or, Life in the Woods. By Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1854. Pp. 357.

THE EMERGENCE OF A FULLY THEORIZED ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY after 2015 brought Walden briefly into sociological prominence. But its semiautobiographical framework and allusive density made it ill-suited to a discipline with one foot in the scientific study of society, even if its other foot was firmly placed on Thoreau’s home turf—the normative understanding of social life. Worse yet, the endless riches of Thoreau’s journals provided an inescapable temptation to discover "what Walden really means," reinforcing the book’s status as fixed literary classic rather than open social theory.

Yet Walden has much broader sociological relevance than we have usually thought. Of course, it is a central work for environmental sociology. But to its theory of man/environment relations it adds theories of consumption, social relations, space-time, and action. Ostensibly autobiographical, it is nonetheless a sociological analysis.

It is ironic that Thoreau’s sociological relevance should be urged by one who is not an American. But sociological canons are usually made by foreigners. It was after all Americans who started the vogue for Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, just as they would later for Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. And conversely it took Europeans and Asians to release the theoretical core of the Chicago School from the trammels of its self-veneration.

Walden is a short text, but a long read—a paradox not at first apparent. One revels in its simple aphorisms for many pages before realizing that everything in it—from metaphor and paragraph to topic and chapter—is designed by a complex and even devious mind. Thoreau writes very self-consciously. Indeed, the counterpoint of themes and references and arguments becomes at times overwhelming. For Thoreau does not write in rigorous abstractions, be they macrosociological or metatheoretical or even phenomenological. There is no list of concepts, no polemic with predecessors: no formal propositions or clearcut definitions. He simply bushwhacks through the intellectual underbrush that lies between his own particularities and what is universal in the human project. That is the very definition of theory, and if one of Thoreau’s paradoxical conclusions is that our particularities cannot be (indeed should not be) escaped, we are all the wiser for having made the journey, scratches and all.

Walden presents Thoreau’s reflections on two years spent living in a small cabin he built by a pond in Concord, Massachusetts, on land owned by his friend and mentor, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It begins with a review of the classical problems of social theory by means of reflections on Thoreau’s cabin-building and settlement. We see all the stuff of social life: eating, drinking, talking, reading, and working, and beyond them the fundamentals of valuing, acting, and feeling. Love alone escapes, as it escaped—except in one essay and one brief moment—Henry David Thoreau himself.

The book then works through the annual cycle, from summer planting in the bean field to autumn moon and harvest, to the frozen pond in winter (whose ice literally supports Thoreau’s elaborately scientific investigation of its depths), and finally to the return of spring. Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed, and the second year was similar to it, Thoreau tells us, managing in one characteristically dense sentence to paraphrase the Bible (AV Matt. 22:39), to emphasize cyclical temporality, and to deftly misrepresent his own activity. He has never told the reader that his main work in two years at Walden was to write or edit three book-length manuscripts, including the first draft (there were seven total) of Walden itself. Nor are we much aware that during his two Walden years he was at one point jailed for civil disobedience and at another took a two week trip to locate and climb Maine’s dramatic rooftop, Mount Katahdin.

Any reading must begin with the most familiar Thoreau—the Thoreau who placed man in nature. Walden’s nature is not the Enlightenment’s nature: sublime, awesome, and inscrutable, a challenge to human daring and an omnipotent boundary to human power. Thoreau was not Sir John Franklin, who sailed to icy immortality in the Northwest Passage only a month before Thoreau moved to Walden Pond. He did not seek the Northwest Passage; he sought himself. Like Petrarch and Augustine before him, he found humans to be the most puzzling and profound works of nature.

Thoreau’s embedding of humanity in nature is clearest not in his arguments but in his choice of metaphors. Throughout the book nature is described in human/social metaphors and vice versa. In the chapter Sounds, the morning train leaves a train of clouds stretching far behind and higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, while a few pages later the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour. The whole chapter Solitude argues that nature provides authentic society, while shortly afterward The Village describes Concord as a beast with vital organs, defines news as a grain consumed by worthies with sound digestive organs, and identifies gossip as whatever was in the wind (precisely the same words Thoreau had used for his own ecstatic listening to nature in the opening pages of the book). Brute Neighbors allegorizes local fauna—an ant war occupies several pages—and The Pond in Winter uses the dimensions of frozen Walden to discuss human ethics. By contrast, Former Inhabitants treats bygone locals as passing animals, and in Visitors a Canadian woodchopper becomes a (much admired) animal man.

This melding of the human and the natural rejects the common view that Thoreau aims to exchange society for nature. Rather, he wants to embrace the natural: to collaborate with nature, since we are ourselves natural beings. Not for Thoreau the model (capitalist) farm, a great grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk. Under a high state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of men. He prefers an unmediated, noncommercial encounter with the physical and biological world around us. In sociology, we have seldom theorized such an encounter. There have been various beginnings; the turn-of-the-century debate about gender essentialism, the 19th-century obsession with instincts, the reductionist frivolities of cognitive neuroscience. And of course there are the arguments of more recent environmental sociology. But we still await a truly general theory of man in nature to complement our theories of man in society.

While Thoreau’s insertion of man in nature shapes his theory of society decisively, we must recognize here two very different readings of that theory. In the 19th- and 20th-century reading, Thoreau withdrew from society to nature, thereby reducing society to its ultimate unit, the individual. For such readers, Thoreau rejected not only capitalism and commerce, but indeed everyday social life itself. The more modern reading has noted that Thoreau left Walden without regret after two years. In later life, he would never forsake the natural world, but neither did he hide in it from future challenges. On this reading, Thoreau at the pond represents not so much an individual as he does the whole of human society itself. He seeks the essentials not only of personal life in nature, but indeed of social life in nature.

These essentials are set forth in the early chapters. Political economy is, to be sure, mercilessly parodied (while [the poor student] is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably). But at the same time Thoreau considers the basics of food, shelter, and barter as forthrightly as did Smith himself. Indeed, Thoreau’s hymn to the railroad and its commerce (in Sounds) is every bit as extravagant as anything in Smith. The railroad is a comet, a rising sun. The ripped sails it carries to the papermaker are proof sheets that need no correction, their condition telling the history of the storms they have weathered. Commerce, he tells us, is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unworried. Indeed, commercial men may be among the strong and valiant natures that Thoreau thinks have no need to read Walden, because they already live as Thoreau would have us live: deliberately rather than habitually, in the present rather than in the future.

In his systematic shedding of what he feels to be the inessentials of social life, Thoreau seems akin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Romantics, and the other world rejecters. But the book’s narrative is more subtle. It does begin with detachment from everyday society: from the burden of property, from the slavery of divided labor, from the dominance of clock time, from the endless sway of fashion and opinion. (And, it must be noted, from women; there is a fog of misogyny in the early chapters that burns off very slowly.) But after this detachment, Thoreau parts company with the Romantics, whose ecstasies never ripened into the rigors of subsistence