Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2024

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the history of science, or on sociological theory. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

(Left almost-finished in 2024, because I got interrupted, and posted in 2026, because I wanted to procrastinate about half-a-dozen research projects.)

Michel Morange, A History of Biology [doi:10.1515/9780691188782]

This aims to be comprehensive, from the ancient Greeks to pretty-much now. The chapter on medieval Islam wasn't very deep, otherwise this is truly excellent, particularly when covering the very complicated 20th century. I don't have much more to say, because it is so good, except that I should try to get my brother to review it. §

Ali Seay, Go Down Hard

Mind candy: dueling psycho-killers go on a date; mayhem ensues. §

Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought (1965)

1. Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, De Tocqueville; The Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848
2. Durkheim, Pareto, Weber

I got interested in Aron back in the late '90s, when I lived down the street from a Santa Fe bookstore run by someone who was obviously very conservative, but had brains and taste; this meant they also stocked books by authors who were not conservatives, such as Aron. (The store vanished long ago, and I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.) This work is, basically, Aron's sociological theory course, a matter I will come back to below; I started reading it in 1998 and only just finished, because life is like that sometimes.

Somewhat eccentrically, Aron starts with Montesquieu. On the one hand, he has a point that Montesquieu had systematic, interesting thoughts about what we would call "societies"; on the other, if you're going to go there, so did Machiavelli and ibn Khaldun... He then skips ahead a century or more to go over Comte in great detail. He not only coined the word "sociology", but set many patterns of thought which persists to this day, however embarrassing that might be to some (most?) contemporary practitioners (cf.). Marx comes next, re-treading some ground from Aron's The Opium of the Intellectuals. (As in the earlier book, Aron is more sympathetic to Marx himself than to later Marxists.) Tocqueville gets respectful treatment, with somewhat more emphasis on The Ancien Regime and the Revolution than Democracy in America. The final chapter in volume 1 considers how these thinkers, and their disciples, tried to explain, and were shaped by, the revolutions of 1848. (A lot of Marx, for instance, comes down to "Wait, we were winning --- what went wrong?")

Volume 2 is an account of the three figures who were more dominant influences on sociology, as Aron knew it, even than Comte or Marx: Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto. The last is an unusual choice for a book like this, but Aron is persuasive that it's a good one. In addition to providing a clear, non-mathematical account of the relevant parts of Pareto's economics, Aron presents him as the archetype of attempts to use economists' modes of argument to explain sociological phenomena, and so to claim the sociologists' domain as their own, an endeavor that has grown vastly since Aron's day *. Overall, in this part of the book, his sympathies are plainly with Weber, but he is at pains to be fair.

I am sure that present-day sociologists would find all sorts of ways in which these books are no longer suitable as an introduction to sociological theory. (Though there was in 2019 a "Routledge Classics" edition, now out of print, with a new introduction by contemporary sociologists making the case for its continued relevance.) For my purposes, which included learning more about Aron's own views, it was just fine, and my taking 26 years to finish the book in no way reflects negatively on it.

--- I have often marveled/grumbled at how, when sociologists teach their students "sociological theory", what they do is teach them an interpretation of selected Ancestors, with which 19th/early-20th century writers getting to count as Ancestors being the subject of intra-tribal contestation. This is very, very different from taking a theory course in physics, or evolutionary genetics, or even demography. (Those disciplines might mention a few Ancestors in passing, or to explain eponyms, but when, e.g., you're learning linear irreversible thermodynamics, you do not study Onsager's body of work, you learn the modern form of one or two results originally due to him.) If there is disagreement within the field about the right theoretical approach, well then it develops two (or three or four) bodies of theory. (In statistics, Bayesian theory courses cover different stuff than courses on frequentist statistical theory; but actually developing the theory, rather than engaging in exegeses of De Finetti and Neyman, lets us improve both, and identify points of overlap, as well as divergence.) I realize it's presumptuous of me to have an opinion about how another discipline reproduces itself, but I can't help feeling that the non-sociological pattern is better for actually developing theory. It's true that there's something Philistine about the a-historical approach's Markov assumption, its blithe assurance that everything important from the past is contained in the present state of the theory. But this Philistinism does indeed seem to help the collective endeavor to understand the world... (Cf.) §

*: The fact that the authors of Freakonomics have probably never heard of Mind and Society, let alone read it, does not make the affiliation any less real. It'd be interesting to know whether Gary Becker knew about this side of Pareto's work; if so, I think one could make a reasonable case for an actual line of descent. ^

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Writing for Antiquity; Biology; Commit a Social Science; Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime