class

Kelley Walker kelley at interpactinc.com
Wed Apr 18 01:58:39 PDT 2001


At 09:30 PM 4/17/01 -0500, Carrol Cox wrote:


>Kelley Walker wrote:
> >
> > and, carrol, not surprisingly, it isn't a study about what people
> > think. sociologists
>
>What was the size of the print run? If it was over about 1000 copies,
>then it wasn't a scholarly work but a work aimed at the masses and
>should be judged accordingly. Such works only sell to university
>libraries and a few fellow specialists. "One Nation" as a title
>disqualifies the work as a scholarly work. Whatever it says, and
>whatever method it uses, it is a political tract from the git-go. So
>what sociologists do or don't do simply is releveant to a work so
>titled.
>
>Carrol

Wolfe is a sociologist. he used graduate students in his research. he does all the things one does when writing a sociological monograph. it bears all the marks of a book written for the well-read audience, not for the section fill by rackjobbers at the local Walmart. it took him four years to write, to do the research. he thought deeply about how to do it. he presented papers about his work to scholarly audiences, as scholars often do. he did book reviews as a lead up, as part of his "lit review". he writes about being in a conversation with Bellah et al. and he foregrounds his interest in doing something along these lines in his first theoretical response to them in Whose Keeper.

i intend my diss to be a bestseller. and it will be. spank me!

One Nation, After All: HOW<<<< the middle class really thinks about... HOW, not WHAT.

Your objection was that it was about "opinions", it is not. It is not what sociologists do for the most part. We study social institutions, like "class" or "the family". We study social processes, such as socialization or professionalization or education. We study social practices such as "gender roles" or activism. We also study culture. There is a subdisciplinecalled the Sociology of Morality, which Wolfe addresses specifically in Whose Keeper? He makes an attempt to outline what it ought to be, to revivify it as a vibrant subdiscipline.

One Nation, is a study of middle class american culture, values, morality -- about the people who have a great deal of power to shape ideas. there is plenty to criticize him for but the nonsense that has been trotted out here--he is antifeminist, a homophobe, and is trying to say something about all of the US when in fact he is not is rubbish and based on knee jerk reactions about a man most of you've decided is a "bad" person who deserves scorn because he defected from the ranks of the left. fine. that's why i don't count myself a marxist any longer.



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