The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick

By Anthem Press

The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick is a collection of essays by renowned authors on the preeminent sociologist, Philip Selznick (1919–2010). He is widely recognized for his major contributions to a number of fields, including general sociology, sociology of organizations, industrial sociology, sociology of law and moral sociology. The contributions in the book cross disciplinary boundaries, bridge disciplinary divides, and display an awareness of and respect for Selznick’s humanist sensibility. Selznick would have felt very comfortable in this company. In that sense, all the chapters of The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick are true companions to Selznick’s sociology. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Aug 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785278273

Book preview

The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick

Anthem Companions to Sociology

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor: Bryan S. Turner – City University of New York, USA/Australian Catholic University, Australia/University of Potsdam, Germany

Titles in the Series

The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville

The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills

The Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel

The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to Karl Marx

The Anthem Companion to Maurice Halbwachs

The Anthem Companion to Max Weber

The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu

The Anthem Companion to Raymond Aron

The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah

The Anthem Companion to Robert K. Merton

The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

Praise for the Series

The Anthem Companions to Sociology offers wide ranging and masterly overviews of the works of major sociologists. The volumes in the series provide authoritative and critical appraisals of key figures in modern social thought. These books, written and edited by leading figures, are essential additional reading on the history of sociology.—Gerard Delanty, Professor of Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton

This ambitious series provides an intellectually thoughtful introduction to the featured social theorists and offers a comprehensive assessment of their legacy. Each edited collection synthesizes the many dimensions of the respective theorist’s contributions and sympathetically ponders the various nuances in and the broader societal context for their body of work. The series will be appreciated by seasoned scholars and students alike.—Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, University of New Hampshire

The orchestration and emergence of the Anthem Companions to Sociology represent a formidable and invaluable achievement. Each companion explores the scope, ingenuity, and conceptual subtleties of the works of a theorist indispensable to the sociological project. The editors and contributors for each volume are the very best in their fields, and they guide us towards the richest, most creative seams in the writings of their thinker. The results, strikingly consistent from one volume to the next, brush away the years, reanimate what might have been lost, and bring numerous rays of illumination to the most pressing challenges of the present.—Rob Stones, Professor of Sociology, Western Sydney University, Australia

The Anthem Companions, those that have appeared already and those that are to come, will give every sociologist a handy and authoritative guide to all the giants of their discipline.—Stephen Mennell, Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin

The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick

Edited by

Paul van Seters

Anthem Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-825-9 (Hbk)

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Contents

List of Contributors

Chapter 1.The Intellectual Enterprise We Call Sociology

Paul van Seters

Chapter 2.Philosophy for the Twice-Born: Selznick and Dewey in Dialogue

Kenneth Winston

Chapter 3.Power Relations across Organizations and Fields: Building on Selznick’s Concepts of Co-Optation and Institutionalization

Calvin Morrill

Chapter 4.Organizations, Institutions, and Law: The Sociological Significance of Philip Selznick’s Law, Society, and Industrial Justice

Lauren B. Edelman

Chapter 5.Post-Industrial Justice? Normativity and Empiricism in a Changing World of Work

Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck

Chapter 6.The Promise of the Rule of Law Ideal

Sanne Taekema

Chapter 7.Philip Selznick on Law and Society: Democratic Ideals, Communitarianism, and Natural Law

Bryan S. Turner

Chapter 8.Selznick’s Concepts of Culture and Community

Roger Cotterrell

Chapter 9.A Symposium on The Moral Commonwealth

Charles W. Anderson, George Steinmetz, Douglas D. Heckathorn, and Philip Selznick

Chapter 10.An Ecumenical Sensibility

Martin Krygier

Index

Contributors

Charles W. Anderson (1934–2013) spent his entire 36-year academic career at the Political Science Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, retiring in 1996. Initially he specialized in Latin American studies, publishing books such as The Political Economy of Mexico (1963) and Politics and Economic Change in Latin America (1967). Gradually, his interest shifted to normative political theory, which led to books such as Statecraft: An Introduction to Political Choice and Judgment (1977); Pragmatic Liberalism, for which he received a 1993 prize from the Conference on Political Theory; Prescribing the Life of the Mind (1993), on the culture and normative frame of the university; and A Deeper Freedom: Liberal Democracy as an Everyday Morality (2002).

Roger Cotterrell is Anniversary Professor of Legal Theory at Queen Mary University of London and a fellow of the British Academy and of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. In 2013 he was awarded the Socio-Legal Studies Association Prize for lifetime contributions to the socio-legal community. His books include Sociological Jurisprudence: Juristic Thought and Social Inquiry (2018), Living Law: Studies in Legal and Social Theory (2008), Law, Culture and Society: Legal Ideas in the Mirror of Social Theory (2006), Émile Durkheim: Law in a Moral Domain (1999), Law’s Community: Legal Theory in Sociological Perspective (1995), and The Sociology of Law: An Introduction (1992).

Ruth Dukes is professor of labor law at the University of Glasgow and principal investigator of the project Work on Demand: Contracting for Work in a Changing Economy, funded by the European Research Council. She is the author of The Labour Constitution: The Enduring Idea of Labour Law (2014). She is a member of the Young Academy of Scotland, the Adapt International Scientific Committee, and the executive committee of the Institute of Employment Rights. In 2009, she was awarded the Wedderburn Prize by the editorial committee of the Modern Law Review. In 2011–12 she was an early-career fellow of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and a MacCormick Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

Lauren B. Edelman is Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research addresses the interplay between organizations and their legal environments, focusing on employers’ responses to and constructions of civil rights laws, workers’ mobilization of legal rights, dispute resolution in organizations, school rights, empirical critical race studies, and disabilities in the workplace. Her 2016 book, Working Law: Courts, Corporations and Symbolic Civil Rights, won the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association and the George R. Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management. She is also winner of the Harry J. Kalven Jr. Award from the Law and Society Association for empirical scholarship on law and society.

Douglas D. Heckathorn is professor emeritus of sociology at Cornell University and the editor-in-chief of Rationality and Society. He also serves on the editorial boards of Legal Theory and Constitutional Political Economy. He is the original developer of the respondent-driven sampling (RDS) method, which provides means for drawing statistically valid samples from hidden and hard-to-reach populations. His awards include the Lon L. Fuller Prize in Jurisprudence and the Outstanding Article Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. He has published in journals including American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, Journal of Politics, and American Journal of Political Science.

Martin Krygier is Gordon Samuels Professor of Law and Social Theory, UNSW Sydney; honorary professor, RegNet, Australian National University; and senior research fellow, Rule of Law Program, CEU Democracy Institute. He is author of Philip Selznick: Ideals in the World (2012), Civil Passions (2005), Between Fear and Hope (1997), and co-editor of Spreading Democracy and the Rule of Law? (2006), Rethinking the Rule of Law after Communism (2005), Legality and Community (2002), The Rule of Law after Communism (1999), Marxism and Communism (1994), and Bureaucracy: The Career of a Concept (1979). In 2016 he was awarded the Dennis Leslie Mahoney Prize in Legal Theory. He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and member of the Order of Australia.

Calvin Morrill is Stefan A. Riesenfeld Professor of Law and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines how social conflict emerges and matters for institutional change. He focuses on dispute resolution in organizations, school rights, social movements and organizations, legal consciousness across the life course, and immigrant entrepreneurship and law. His works include Navigating Conflict: How Youth Handle Trouble in a High-Poverty School (2018), The Executive Way: Conflict Management in Corporations (1995), and articles appearing in such venues as Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, American Anthropologist, American Journal of Sociology, Law and Social Inquiry, and Law and Society Review. He has received scholarly awards from the Academy of Management, American Sociological Association, and Pacific Sociological Association.

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) was professor of sociology and later professor of law and sociology at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, from 1952 until his retirement in 1984. He founded the Center for the Study of Law and Society, in 1961, and the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, in 1978, both at UC Berkeley. His books include TVA and the Grass Roots (1949), The Organizational Weapon (1952), Leadership in Administration (1957), Law, Society, and Industrial Justice (1969), Law and Society in Transition (1978), coauthored by Philippe Nonet, The Moral Commonwealth (1992), and A Humanist Science (2008). The first edition of his textbook, Sociology, coauthored by Leonard Broom, appeared in 1955, the seventh and last edition in 1981.

Paul van Seters studied law (JD) at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and sociology (PhD) at the University of California, Berkeley. He is professor emeritus of legal sociology at Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He was director of Globus: Institute of Globalization and Sustainable Development. His research interests include law and communitarianism, corporate social responsibility, and the global civil society. Among the books he co-edited are Globalization and Its New Divides (2003), Communitarianism in Law and Society (2006), A Handbook of Globalization and Environmental Policy (2012), and Global Social Movements and Global Civil Society (2014).

George Steinmetz is Charles Tilly Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan and was professor at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research. In 2017–18 he was visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2020 he was awarded the Siegfried Landshut Prize by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. His research interests include the sociology of empires, states, and cities; social theory; and the history and philosophy of the social sciences. His most recent work is The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (forthcoming) and The Social Sciences through the Looking-Glass (forthcoming, with Didier Fassin).

Wolfgang Streeck studied sociology, law, and economics at Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt and Columbia University in New York. He was professor of sociology and industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, where he continues to work as a senior research associate. His topics of research interest are economic sociology, industrial relations, the political economy of capitalism, and institutional change. His books include Re-Forming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political Economy (2009), Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2014), How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (2016), and Critical Encounters: Capitalism, Democracy, Ideas (2020).

Sanne Taekema is professor of jurisprudence at Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She obtained her PhD from Tilburg University in 2000. Her dissertation, The Concept of Ideals in Legal Theory, published as a monograph in 2003, compares Philip Selznick’s work on ideals to that of Gustav Radbruch. Her current research interests include legal and philosophical pragmatism, methodology of legal research, and rule of law theory. Recent publications include Methodologies of Rule of Law Research: Why Legal Philosophy Needs Empirical and Doctrinal Scholarship, Law and Philosophy (2020), and Between or Beyond Legal Orders: Questioning the Concept of Legal Order, in Jan Klabbers and Gianluigi Palombella (eds), The Challenge of Inter-Legality (2019).

Bryan S. Turner is professor of sociology at the Australian Catholic University, professor emeritus at the Graduate Center CUNY, and honorary professor at Potsdam University. He won the Max Planck Award in 2015 and directs the Centre for Social Citizenship at Potsdam. He is the founding editor of two journals—Citizenship Studies and Journal of Classical Sociology. He was awarded a Doctor of Letters from the University of Cambridge in 2009. His recent publications include Jürgen Mackert, Bryan S. Turner, and Hannah Wolf (eds), The Condition of Democracy (2021), and Rob Stones and Bryan S. Turner, Successful Societies: Decision-making and the Quality of Attentiveness, British Journal of Sociology (2020).

Kenneth Winston, former lecturer in ethics at the Harvard Kennedy School, is now retired. He served as faculty chair of the HKS Singapore Program and received the Manuel Carballo Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2005. Recent publications include Ethics in Public Life: Good Practitioners in a Rising Asia (2015) and the edited volume Prospects for the Professions in China (2011, with William P. Alford and William C. Kirby). For the volume Unpacking Participatory Democracy edited by Aruna Roy and Suchi Pande (2021), he contributed the essay Notes on Building Democracy in Rural India. He has also written extensively on the work of Lon L. Fuller, former professor of jurisprudence at the Harvard Law School.

Chapter 1

THE INTELLECTUAL ENTERPRISE WE CALL SOCIOLOGY

Paul van Seters

Introduction

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) was one of the preeminent sociologists of his time. He is widely recognized for his major contributions to a number of fields, including general sociology, sociology of organizations, industrial sociology, sociology of law, and moral sociology. He was professor of sociology (and later professor of law and sociology) at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, from 1952 until his retirement in 1984. He founded the Center for the Study of Law and Society (in 1961) and the Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Program (in 1978), both at UC Berkeley. The Law and Society Center and the JSP Program are still thriving and over the years have brought legions of students and scholars from all over the world to Berkeley.

This opening chapter of the Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick is organized as follows. The first section presents biographical information on Selznick’s family situation and his experiences in childhood and early youth in Newark. This information helps us to understand his intellectual formation and predisposition. The second section and the third section focus on his years in college and graduate school in New York City, from 1935 to 1942. In this period, both his academic and his political interests became manifest. The fourth section explores Selznick’s lifelong commitment to a broad perspective of what sociology as an academic discipline could and should be. This broad perspective stands out most significantly in what he himself considered his magnum opus, The Moral Commonwealth (1992). In the fifth and final section, the discussion turns to Selznick’s last book, A Humanist Science (2008), in which he argues that sociology is both a humanist science and a branch of public philosophy. In contemporary sociology, there have been lively debates on public sociology. Some of that literature is quite critical of the work of Selznick. What is the relation between public sociology and public philosophy? This chapter ends with an attempt to answer that question.

Growing Up in Newark

Selznick was born in 1919, in a working-class family in Newark, in northeastern New Jersey. He had a sister, his only sibling, who was two years older. His parents, Louis Schachter and Etta Bragar, Jewish immigrants from Romania and Russia who had come to the United States around 1910, divorced when he was one or two years old. He never knew his father. For a number of years, he lived with relatives in northeastern New Jersey. When he was age four or five, his mother remarried and set up a new household in Newark. His stepfather, Manuel Selznick, also a Jewish immigrant, worked in the garment industry, while the family earned some extra income by running a store. His elementary school registered him under the name of his stepfather, and thus he became Philip Selznick. A few years later, his mother and stepfather got divorced too (Webb 1982, 7; Cotterrell 2010, 1–2).

Neither politics nor religion played a prominent role in the family in which Selznick grew up, though he did prepare for and went through the Bar Mitzvah ritual. As he emphasized consistently in interviews, throughout his life, his Jewish background, and Judaism generally, never had much meaning for him (Cotterrell 2010, 3). As to politics, his stepfather vaguely thought of himself as a Democrat and voted for Roosevelt, but for the most part [he] was indifferent and apolitical (Webb 1982, 7). Selznick’s relationship with his stepfather was very distant; as a youngster, he was always aware of being somewhat marginal (Cotterrell 2010, 3). Under these circumstances, it was only natural that he developed into a rather lonely child, already at an early age very much his own person.

Selznick’s passion for reading strongly reinforced this psychological inclination. He was well aware of this passion and of its big impact on his life:

I became something of a bookworm rather early in my life, and so I think I lived in this world of books. I read every one of [Alexandre] Dumas’ books. I read a great deal— […] ten, eleven, or twelve years old. I read a lot of things like the Greek myths and so on, and I was a regular patron of the library. I think that helped to define me more than anything else. It was the world of reading and I was able to read, and so I think I probably gradually distanced myself from family life. (Cotterrell 2010, 2)

Selznick continued to cultivate this intellectual style and profile during his high school years. He went to the top high school in Newark, which was a well-known college preparatory school. People in Newark used to compare it to the Boston Latin School. He was not one of the super students there (no straight A’s), though he thinks he probably belonged to the top 15 percent. About his teachers, he was particularly fond of the very good German teacher and, though somewhat less so, of the Latin teacher. In hindsight, he thought these experiences were quite significant for becoming the person he wanted to be: Yes, languages were important to me, also as kind of a new world. Besides, I think probably I’ve always had a fascination with words (ibid., 4). So already before he entered college, Selznick was leading the life of an intellectual, reading books, learning languages, crafting words.

Discovering a New World at City College of New York

After Selznick finished high school in Newark, the family (he, his mother, and his sister) moved to New York. In 1935, he entered City College of New York, where he graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Social Science (BSS). In the three years plus a summer that he attended City College, his intellectual development was deeply affected by two—for him—entirely new experiences, one in the academic sphere, the other in the political sphere. While these two experiences were to some extent related or overlapping—after all, the location where all of this took place was in both cases City College—it merits to look at these two experiences separately, first the academic one, then the political one.

Academics

The first two years at City College, Selznick took courses primarily in science (survey courses in biology, physics, chemistry, and so on) and in philosophy. All of this was new to him, it opened a new world, and he thought all of this was wonderful. As he reflected upon this much later, I would say, between philosophy and science, those were the formative things for me (Cotterrell 2010, 7). The teacher who impressed him most was the naturalist-pragmatist philosopher and legal scholar Morris R. Cohen, whose course on Philosophy of Civilization he loved. His third and last year at City College, he enrolled in the honors program, for which he wrote a study on the Culture and Personality School in anthropology. That study gave him a lifelong admiration for the work of the anthropologist-linguist Edward Sapir, especially because of Sapir’s 1924 article in the American Journal of Sociology, Culture, Genuine and Spurious (Webb 1982, 7; Krygier 2002; Cotterrell 2010, 22).

Selznick’s involvement in the honors program also led to more contact with Morris Cohen, as Cohen was the faculty advisor and coordinator of this program. Cohen’s major philosophical work was Reason and Nature, originally published in 1931. That person and that book left deep marks on Selznick’s education: "What really impressed me about Cohen—I think it had a big influence on me—was, well, just the quality of his mind. I was a very close reader of his major book, Reason and Nature. That affected me a lot." However, Cohen’s influence on Selznick’s intellectual ambitions went much further than that:

I think I always had […] Cohen as a kind of role model. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea that it would be very gratifying that I could write a book that I could think of as my Reason and Nature. In other words, he had written this general book, in which he dealt with broad issues and so on. I sort of liked the idea of doing something like that. (Cotterrell 2010, 7)

It is important to emphasize here that Selznick received all this—for him—new, strong, intellectual input without any awareness that he was on his way to becoming a sociologist, notwithstanding the fact that he was receiving his BSS with a major in sociology. On the contrary, he once said that at that moment, I really didn’t have any particular ideas about the larger significance of sociology, but I think gradually that developed (Cotterrell 2010, 5). That gradual development had everything to do with the political sea change that would turn Selznick’s life upside down during his last year at City College.

Politics

In his third year at City College, Selznick had a transformative experience, after he got involved in radical politics. This took place after he had met and become close to a remarkable group of about 30 students, nearly all staunch anti-Stalinists, about twelve of them Troskyists, who convened on a daily basis in Alcove 1 of the City College cafeteria (Kristol 1995). This group constituted the core of what Douglas G. Webb (1982, 2) has labeled the New York Sociologists. Webb lists the following people as the most prominent of these New York Sociologists: Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Philip Selznick, Alvin Gouldner, Peter Rossi, and Melvin Tumin. In a second category, Webb places the following less famous people: Harold Orlans, Chester Rapkin, Morroe Berger, William Petersen, Gertrude Jaeger Selznick, Rose Kohn Goldsen, Zena Smith Blau, Alice S. Rossi, Frank Riessman, and Ely Chinoy. In a third category, Webb mentions people who could be included with certain qualifications: Lewis Coser, Rose Laub Coser, Peter Blau, S. M. Miller, and Thelma Herman McCormack (ibid., 3).

Webb identified a number of indeed remarkable similarities in the social origins, educational experiences, and ideological commitments of these New Yorkers:

All were born in New York City (or the neighboring cities in northeastern New Jersey) between 1912 and 1924, the sons and daughters of working-class or lower middle-class immigrants; […] nearly all were the children of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who came to the United States between 1890 and 1914. All attended New York-area colleges and universities as undergraduate or graduate students, with about half taking their bachelor’s degrees at City College and three-quarters their doctorates at Columbia. In addition, all were committed radicals and even revolutionary socialists in their younger years. A few had Stalinist sympathies, but the overwhelming majority were supporters of the anti-Stalinist left and vigorous opponents of the Communist Party and the deformation of socialism in the Soviet Union. (1982, 3)

In the course of the past five or six decades, many books by and about the New York Sociologists have been published (see, e.g., Wald [1987] 2017; Dorman 2000). However, the central theme in these books is not so much where the people came from but where they went to politically after they had first met at City College. What happened with their radical political preferences after they had finished their dissertations? As Webb (1982, 3) analyzed this development somewhat cynically: By the 1950s […] all [New Yorkers] had become disenchanted, in varying degrees, with their earlier positions. Some still considered themselves socialists, but their socialism was more moderate and subdued. Most, however, became liberal democrats, critical perhaps of certain aspects of American life yet unwilling to champion truly radical changes. Moreover, Webb (ibid., 3–4) pointed out, this change of political taste or conviction created the opportunity for a new generation of academic sociologists to step forward:

In abandoning or at least toning down the ideological passions of their younger days, the New Yorkers moved away from intense political involvement of any sort and came to identify themselves more and more as simply professional academic sociologists. Their major goal became not so much to change the world but rather to explain it. Most retained some political interests, but these no longer provided the primary or a crucial focus for their lives. In the end, as Daniel Bell summed up the situation [in The End of Ideology] in 1960, one’s commitment is to one’s vocation [as teacher and scholar].

Douglas Webb in 1978 had written a lengthy study of four of the New York Sociologists, aptly titled From Socialism to Sociology: The Intellectual Careers of Philip Selznick, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell, before, in 1982, he wrote the much shorter paper on Selznick, Philip Selznick and the New York Sociologists, which I referred to above. While Webb is excellent on the New York Sociologists, and on Selznick’s position in this group, on two counts his analysis is somewhat incomplete. First, he misses an important aspect of the significance of the New York Sociologists, who in fact were part of a much broader movement later known under the name of the New York Intellectuals. Second, he seems to underestimate the extent to which Selznick was one of the key members of the New York Sociologists, while at the same time, in important ways, he significantly differed from most of the other members of