Epilogue: To Be a Phoenix-Reflections on Two Noisy Ages of Prose

Abstract

Heroic ages of poetry are often followed by hesitant ages of prose, literary creativity by literary criticism, and the doing of by the of sociology. At least as I see it, the central thrust of this volume of the American Journal of Sociology, largely concerned as it is with the of sociology, nicely reflects our hesitant age of prose. The poetic core of sociology, I like to think on the other hand, lies in the doing tradition of the great problematic monographs like Le suicide, L'ancien rigime, The Protestant Ethic, The Polish Peasant, The Gang, Yankee City, Deep South, and Middletown, White Collar, The Lonely Crowd, Black Bourgeoisie, Union Democracy, Asylums, and so forth. Merton's Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England is very much a part of this poetic tradition. Its review by Benjamin Nelson, more than three decades after its original publication, may well be the most symbolically important thing about this volume. All civilizations, at one unfortunate time or another, have been pushed to the polar, lawless extremes of autocracy or anarchy. If autocracy is the anarchy of lawless, lonely tyrants, anarchy is the tyranny of lawless, lonely crowds. It is interesting that such a timeless and poetic work as Solzhenitsyn's First Circle was produced in autocratic Moscow, while the timely prose of Mailer's Advertisements for Myself seems such a telling symptom of anarchic New York. Perhaps the silence of autocracy is less of an obstacle to real poetic genius than the infernal noise of anarchy. In our own discipline, for example, the major monographs of Erving Goffman, poetic doer par excellence, were all done before the noise began. On the other hand, it is probably inevitable that sociologists, at the end of the noisiest decade in modern history, should be preoccupied with the of (see the recent books by Friedrichs (1970), Gouldner (1970), and Tiryakian (1971)). Thus the relevant problem today, so they say, is not the doing of but rather how it should be done, for whom (adults or children, boozers, or potheads!), and by persons of what theoretical, political, sexual, racial, class, or sartorial persuasions. But surely, as even Becker and Horowitz admit, it is good sociology which will last, regardless of what contemporaries think of the theoretical, political, or social