The Race of Time: The Charles Lemert Reader
The Race of Time: The Charles Lemert Reader, by
Charles Lemert , edited by
Daniel Chaffee,
Sam Han . Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010. 230pp. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9781594516467.
Richard Sennett has argued in a recent lecture at Cambridge University that sociology should be good literature, that it should achieve “lived experience on the page.” Like Sennett, Charles Lemert exemplifies this ideal. In books, articles, essays, and in brilliant cameos found in such texts as Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classical Readings, Lemert has written a literary narrative about sociology and social theory, about how we should understand, as he calls them, “social things,” and the limits to any such understandings. In The Race of Time he writes that “good sociology is good literature, in particular, good fiction, as Marx first demonstrated” (p. 83).
This excellent selection of Lemert’s writings, spanning his academic career, is edited by two of his former students Daniel Chaffee and Sam Han, who have also written a fine, contextualizing introduction to guide the reader through the trajectory of Lemert’s thought and major preoccupations. These stretch from early 1970s writings on epistemology, relativism and the relationship between religion and sociology, to a later concentration on the ramifications of globalization. In between there are essays dealing with race and multiculturalism, poverty and inequality, modernity and postmodernism, Durkheim’s legacy (using the evocative notions of “Durkheim’s ghosts,” and of sociology as “theories of lost worlds”), French structuralism, psychoanalysis and the meaning of dreams, the difficulties of living in increasingly deadly, disorienting, globalized worlds, and the fate of individualism.
Lemert frequently intersperses his narratives with stories about the lives of sociologists and social theorists, including his own—the latter most compellingly, and sometimes tragically, in his book Dark Thoughts, represented with three chapters here—but also those of people outside academia who he has known, including family, friends and acquaintances, and from whom he has learned about “social worlds.” The biographical is never far away when Lemert discusses sociology or social theory, and as this collection shows, the stories have become more prominent in his later writing, though this does not make it any less sociological. For, as he writes in the last essay in this book, “The stories that at first seem to be acutely personal are in fact caught up and suspended in social space” (p. 215). The echoes of C. Wright Mills, about whom Lemert has also written insightfully, are unmistakable: the task of the sociological imagination is to show how the personal problem is also a public problem, how biography relates to history and change.
Lemert has always been concerned with the nature and prospects of the discipline of sociology, and several essays here reflect this concern. Two essays dealing with Durkheim probe the hidden dilemmas and doubts that Durkheim himself obscured through his apparent certainty about sociology as a distinct discipline concerned with “social facts.” “Sociology: Prometheus among the Sciences of Man” traces the history and fate of sociology in Europe and America. Lemert uses the metaphor of Prometheus to suggest that sociology had the task of bringing fire to man, and failed after the 1960s because it did not honor that difficult task. Sociology’s uniqueness among the social sciences was its transdisciplinarity—the way that it drew on many other knowledges—and to the extent that it withdrew into the narrow confines of a discipline, it lost its fire and the enthusiasm of those, including students, it originally attracted. Sociology had also put itself in the straightjacket of science, a discipline that crushed its passion, especially in America where it had never had a secure home outside of the university. But this had also been part of its initial success—its alignment with science and with the hope that it inspired within and without the university that it could find the answers to society’s social problems had meant that it had the ears of important decision makers. But the game was up by the 1960s—sociologists didn’t have the answers after all—and the politicians and funding bodies turned elsewhere.
Globalization has become the master narrative of Lemert’s work since the 1990s; he sees it in terms of globalized worlds, not one global world. As he argues in “Whose We? Dark Thoughts on the Universal Self, 1998,” globalization has brought many different social worlds together, in conversation and conflict with each other; in some important instances this has revealed the incommensurability of such worlds, further undermining the idea of universal man, and the “universal we.” Social differences, differences in value and culture, need to be taken seriously. Lemert also addresses these issues in relation to multiculturalism (“Can Worlds Be Changed? Ethics and the Multicultural Dream”), where he argues that any reading of the multicultural, according to its inherent principle, renders the possibility of reaching universal ethical consensus impossible. It also raises serious questions for those who abide by Marx’s eleventh thesis: if the point of philosophy is to change the world, how does this work when we are speaking of myriad worlds rather than a single world, as Marx had imagined it? Relativism, Lemert argues here, is the one truth of our contemporary worlds.
Some of this is troubling, especially for the left whose hopes have been so firmly pinned, Lemert argues, on global enlightenment (or as he calls it, “enwhitenment”), guided by the idea that humanity is (or will be) as one. What is politics like if the left gives up on those ideas? And what of the whole architecture of human rights, built up since the Second World War, that rests upon a concept of common or universal humanity, and the certainty that there are fundamental rights that should not be breached, even if they are achieved in various ways in different social, cultural, economic and political circumstances? What would the true embrace of relativism, the acceptance of a strong notion of social and cultural autonomy (p.169) and really giving up on the belief in a “universal we,” mean for doctrines of global human rights? Lemert does not directly address the latter here, but his embrace of relativism certainly does not lead to him giving up the idea of global economic and social justice. In fact, he argues that elites have an unreserved responsibility to raise their voices in the name of global justice, but are too often silent.
Provocative, eloquent and always engaging, Lemert’s work is well represented in The Race of Time. If you are interested in the fate and future of sociology and social theory, buy and read this book—and after that, go back and read Lemert’s oeuvre.
- © American Sociological Association 2011
