Opening remarks: Alvin Gouldner's Theory and Society

Abstract

I take this opportunity to say something about the origins of Theory and Society and to relate that beginning to the gathering represented in this volume on the occasion of the twenty-first birthday of Theory and Society. These remarks, then, will be a remembering, and an invitation to join the Theory and Society collegium in a Gouldnerian celebration. Theory and Society, founded by Alvin Gouldner in 1974, was from the start two things: an intellectual project and a political project. The intellectual project was to find and publish the most creative social thought and analysis available, whether produced in the academy or out of it. The political project was to support a group of individuals - intellectuals - in their quest for a more just and humane world. Over the course of many years, Gouldner sought to understand the social and historical conditions that would support emancipatory intellectual work, and he came to the conclusion that what was needed as a start was a collegium. Theory and Society was to be that collegium, to become a liberated zone for new theoretical resources, a safehouse for a community of scholars. It was for social theory, personified in a community of critical theorists, to become the agent in developing a rational discourse about social worlds, capable, where previous grand visions had failed, of treading the delicate path between recovery and holism. Thus would societies be reclaimed for humans. Gouldner came to his notion of a collectivity of intellectuals, and the Theory and Society collegium, through years of thinking about how social theory was produced and how it was institutionalized. The social organization that the community became reflected Gouldner's ideas of creativity and his sociology of social theory.