Philip Selznick: Ideals in the World  

Martin Krygier, University of New South Wales

4.30pm, Monday 13th February 2012, Seminar Room D, Manor Road Building

 

Philip Selznick (1919-2010) was a major American sociologist, whose work spanned most of last century, dealt with many subjects and spanned several disciplinary and sub-disciplinary domains. Central among them are general social theory, the sociology of organizations and institutions, communist organizational strategy, industrial relations, sociology of law; and also legal, moral and political philosophy. He produced a substantial and important body of writings which brought to all these various fields a distinctive combination of explanatory theory, empirical research, philosophical awareness, and normative engagement. He was a major figure in each of the fields he has touched, and one of very few to have been a participant, let alone influential, in them all. But while his name is well-known, his work is more respected than emulated and today more known about, I suspect, than known; cited than read. And if read, it is in that truncated snapshot common in the social sciences, of piecemeal citation, where it doesn’t much matter whose the idea was, or how it relates to its author’s other ideas; the only questions are what it is, how it fits with current work in a particular field or sub-field, and what we think of it. Applied to Selznick’s thought, this diminishes its significance, and misconstrues it. That seems to me a pity, and perhaps, to paraphrase Talleyrand, worse than a pity; a mistake. For beyond his many particular insights into the nature and quality of institutional, legal, and social life and development, there is his cast of mind; ways of thinking, animating concerns and values, and a distinctive (and fine) sensibility, that fuse humanist and scientific concerns without either embarrassment or false showmanship. Seventy years of his writings will be invoked to vindicate the claim.