History of The Human Sciences: Reflexive Historical Sociology: Consciousness, Experience and The Author

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DOI: 10.1177/0952695105061409
2005 18: 141 History of the Human Sciences
Peter McMylor
Reflexive historical sociology: consciousness, experience and the author
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Reexive historical sociology:
consciousness, experience and
the author
PETER McMYLOR
ABSTRACT
This article examines the recent work of the sociologist Arpad
Szakolczai as he attempts to conceptualize the programme of reexive
historical sociology in the life-works of Max Weber, Eric Voegelin
and Michel Foucault as well as Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and
Franz Borkenau. Particular attention is paid to the innovative manner
in which the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner is used to
explore the biographies of these social theorists as in effect performa-
tive life-works in which crucial liminal periods and experiences are seen
as facilitating new understandings. It is suggested that the life-work
approach to social theory adds an important reexive dimension to the
analysis of social thought.
Key words biography, historical sociology, reexivity, Arpad
Szakolczai, Victor Turner
. . . the balancing act cannot be achieved once and for all, a thinker must
remain aware of his consciousness as permanently engaged in balanc-
ing the structuring forces, in the personal, social, and historical dimen-
sions of the process. And nally to be aware of the truth of reality as
an image emerging from a balancing process means to remain aware of
the tension between the balanced image and a power of imagination,
which is necessary to achieve symbols of truth at all . . . (Voegelin, 1990:
327)
HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol . 18 No. 4
2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) pp. 141160
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Reexivity is frequently seen as part of a new self-consciousness within social
science (see May, 1999, for an overview). It seems, then, more than timely to
examine the recent contribution of a social theorist who argues for the cen-
trality of the concept in much classical social thought. The sociologist Arpad
Szakolczai is not yet widely known among readers and practitioners of social
theory but he is the author of a signicant and cumulative body of work in
the form of a range of papers and now three interrelated volumes on key
social theorists. These volumes are Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel
Life-works (1998b; hereafter MWMF), Reexive Historical Sociology (2000;
hereafter RHS; for a brief summary see Szakolczai, 1998c) and most recently,
The Genesis of Modernity (2003; hereafter GM). Despite authorial claims
about each studys standing alone (made probably so as not to daunt the
reader as, cumulatively, the three volumes comprise more than 700 pages of
text excluding footnotes), they are best understood as three parts of a closely
integrated single project. At its heart this project proposes a close t between
the life and thought of the thinker conceptualized as life-works. The
volumes deantly restate the overwhelming signicance of the theorist for
the theory produced. They cover in some detail a wide range of thinkers, in
addition to lengthy engagement with Weber and Foucault, who, along with
Eric Voegelin, have pride of place in the work. The others are Norbert Elias,
Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau who are discussed mainly in RHS.
Weber and Foucault are of course discussed in detail in MWMF but two of
their works considered exemplary by Szakolczai, The Protestant Ethic and
Discipline and Punish, have chapters devoted to them in RHS, while in GM
about a third of the volume is devoted to the main three gures Weber,
Foucault and Voegelin.
Given the diversity of meanings attached to reexivity in the social sciences
at the moment (see Lynch, 2000: 2734 for an apparently exhaustive list of
denitions), we can suggest, following Lynch (ibid.), that Szakolczais use of
the term most closely conforms to what he, Lynch, refers to as reexive
social construction (2000: 28). This is a notion rooted in Weber and Alfred
Schutz and closely linked, as Lynch notes, to what he calls philosophical self-
reection with confessional and meditative aspects, though both share the
ontological assumption that human beings are self-reective (ibid.: 23). The
only signicant caveat for Szakolczai would be that the conditioning term
historical be added to reexive. When this is done, as we will see, a vast
area of contextual self-consciousness is made available for reection.
What we have in Szakolczais books is an exercise in genealogy in more
than one sense. It is a genealogy of a family of reexive historical sociolo-
gists, all in certain respects descended from the Weberian line even Foucault,
who worked on a parallel project, until later recognizing the links with Weber
(RHS: 21011; see also 1998d and 1997). It is also genealogical in the more
technical Nietzschean sense of looking for conditions of emergence and
HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18( 4) 142
effects. This is so, especially and paradigmatically for Szakolczai, in the way
Weber, most obviously in the Protestant Ethic thesis, takes from Nietzsche a
sense of the extent to which a particular piece of reality may survive, in
hidden undercurrents, its eventual dissolution (MWMF: 45). At the whole
projects heart is a recognition of the continuing inuence throughout much
of this body of theory especially in Weber, Foucault and Voegelin of
Nietzsches insight in the Genealogy of Morals into modernity as a distinctly
ascetic planet (see Szakolczai, 1993a and 1998a). When applied to his theor-
ists by Szakolczai, however, the search for long-term consequences of hidden
inuences leads not to a displacement of the theorist as author but rather to
a renewed focus on the life-work coupling that seeks to reveal the quest of
the author for insight and vision. How does he search for these features?
Szakolczais approach is novel and arresting but in a sense quite simple: his
is a reconstructive analysis of his chosen authors based on the principle of
treating their intellectual trajectory as a performance where the actual script
is the curriculum vitae, using the concept of liminality as developed by Victor
Turner (RHS: 56). In other words, the concepts of Turners processual
anthropology are applied to some apparently appropriate examples of
modern scholarship. It is a daring and innovative endeavour that demands
serious attention.
However, the project itself is set within a wider context of explanatory
ambition. To understand this ambition we need to grasp what motivates
Szakolczais choice of subjects and what they have in common. The key issue
is that all provide complementary insights into the peculiar nature of mod-
ernity, its conditions of emergence and their relationship to the process of
understanding. One clear denition comes from his summary paper present-
ing the lineaments of the whole project:
Reexive historical sociology argues that the relationship between
thought and reality or the question of the xity or malleability of
human nature cannot be solved in a context free manner. It depends in
a fundamental manner on the type of context. Under stable ordered
conditions, ideas may only reproduce the externally given realities and
the basic characteristics of human behaviour can be considered as exter-
nally given. Under liminal conditions, however, structures are dissolved
and can no longer be taken for granted, and for the production of new
forms, which will eventually be lled with content, much depends on
reexive thought. (Szakolczai, 1998c: 221, n. 5)
It is the liminal that preoccupies Szakolczai both in regard to the account
of the life of the theorist and in the formation of modernity itself which is
characterized as a period of permanent liminality (RHS: 21526). All these
reexive historical sociologists have in common an apparent need to grasp
modernity by moving to study a historical period prior to modernitys
REFLEXIVE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 143
emergence: Weber (economic ethics of the world religions); Foucault (ancient
world); Elias (ancien rgime court society); Mumford (ancient cities and
civilizations); Voegelin (classical Greece and Israel); and Borkenau (late
medieval origins of mechanistic thought).
Modernity then cannot be completely grasped on its own terms, and a key
motive for Szakolczais labours is to be found in the latest volume, GM. As
Szakolczai notes, it is now generally acknowledged that
. . . the modern global age has its antecedents in another period of
globalisation that started about two-and-a-half millennia ago, in the
axial age, and ended with the collapse of the Roman Empire, about a
thousand years later. This was not simply an age of empires, but of
empires that strove for world domination, trying to conquer the entire
inhabited planet, and thus they had ecumenic ambitions. (GM: 241; a
key inspiration for Szakolczai is Eisenstadts post-Weberian work,
1986, 2003)
Indeed it has recently been argued by the leading sociological theorist of
globalization building partly on Voegelins analysis (Voegelin, 1974) that
a signicant degree of reexive and scholarly self-awareness existed around
the theme of globalization within the classical period. This was reected
within the then new genre of world history by such writers as Polybius and
should be seen to have signicant parallels with our own contemporary
theorizations (see Inglis and Robertson, 2004, 2005). However, two areas,
Greece and Israel, initiated within this early globalized context sets of
cultural practices which fused philosophy/spirituality and religion with sets
of techniques and disciplined modes of life. These practices were of course to
have tremendous long-term consequences. Szakolczais project reects a
concern with the continuing signicance of these practices in the new age of
globalization, not least in the way these elements live on in the practice and
understanding of reexive historical sociologists.
Clearly such a project is massively ambitious and will take time to be criti-
cally assessed and absorbed by contemporary scholarship. What follows is
intended only to highlight some key aspects and to provide some contextu-
alization for Szakolczais contribution.
THE THINKER: EXPERIENCE AND CHANGE
So far modern social thought as it exists in Europe and North America has
been relatively uninuenced by intellectual currents that stem from the post-
communist societies that emerged in the period after 1989. It is the case that
prior to this time western social thought and political and cultural philosophy
had been signicantly inuenced by central and eastern European gures as
a consequence of Nazism and the Second World War: the so-called white and
red emigrations to Britain and most especially the USA Adorno, Marcuse,
Arendt, Popper, Michael Polanyi to name but a few (see Anderson, 1992, for
the impact on British culture). In the longer postwar period through the
1960s and 1970s signicant refugees from the protracted crisis and political
convulsions of the East European communist societies made their way to the
west: Lezek Kolakowski and Zygmunt Bauman from Poland, Agnes Heller
and George Markus from the famous Budapest School inuenced by Lukacs,
all have had a very signicant inuence on western social thought. The prin-
cipal nature of that inuence was at rst in relation to the crisis of commu-
nism and the problems of Marxism as a body of social thought. Bauman and
Heller have more recently made very signicant contributions to social
thought, well beyond the arenas of Marxism and post-Marxism, and explored
the contours of what became known as postmodernity (see Bauman, 1992,
1993; and Heller and Feher, 1989).
Bauman has been especially inuential and in publication after publication
has addressed some of the key social, political and moral dilemmas of the
present day. Like Heller, Bauman came out of a distinct left tradition in
eastern Europe and this background may be seen to have facilitated his
nding a place and a readership among progressively inclined western
scholars and intellectuals (see Smith, 1999 and Tormey, 2001). They both have
followed, or in some respect may be said to have led, much of the rethinking
that has been pursued by left intellectuals over the past two decades, and their
East European background and experience has given a special authority to
their writing. What these gures have in common is almost too obvious to
mention: they came to maturity under the postwar communist regimes
Bauman was born in 1925, Heller in 1929 and left while these societies
remained under communist control. All had been Marxists, even if eventu-
ally very critical ones.
Szakolczai is from a later generation and his formation is signicantly
different. The key difference really is that of being born within the established
communist order, with no other prior experience, and of living to see it fall.
In essence, Szakolczai directly experienced and indeed documented the
collapse of communism from inside the society. For his generation (he was
born in 1958) the energizing charisma of Marxism and communism was
already a spent force. A recent commentary on Hungarian sociology notes
that the discipline was already quite well developed and up-to-date by the
end of the 1980s. There were no signicant changes in paradigms. Ofcial
Marxism disappeared, but its inuence in the discipline was already insig-
nicant by that time (Nemdi and Robert, 2002).
However, what Szakolczai and his co-author Agnus Horvath encounted in
their study of communist personnel was highly personal and signicant.
They began research in 1988 when the Communist Party control had not
been relinquished, indeed a few months earlier the supervisor of the research
was expelled from the party. They noted that as their work progressed
people showed obvious signs of fear in our presence (Horvath and Szakol-
czai, 1992: 18). They persisted and were given a good deal of information
from people who risked something to do this. Then they had the stunning
experience as events changed around them in Hungary and elsewhere. They
had the sense that, Good heavens! Could it be that we are documenting the
dissolution of the Party? This perplexing feeling is available only to those
who lived in or were born into, like us, after 1956 a world that was thought
to be unalterable . . . (ibid.).
This, then, is Szakolczais own experience of liminality as both a profound
personal experience and a whole societal one. It is not difcult to sense here
what Szakolczai will later theorize via the concepts of liminality and stamping
as the potent personal biographical insight into the nature of human social
constructions and a heightened sensitivity to the processes of dissolution,
transition and change: what might be termed the fall and rise of order in
history (see Szakolczai and Fustos, 1999; Szakolczai, 2001b).
METHOD , THE SHAPE OF LIVES
Before dealing with the issue of method proper something needs to be said
about the meaning and choice of the term reexive historical sociology as a
description of Szakolczais enterprise. The three words reexive historical
sociology denote three major dimensions of the approach: reexive
alluding to a type of philosophical tradition, sociology to a domain of
empirical science, with historical operating as a qualifying term that
excludes traditions of sociological formalism. On the face of it, the term
might look like just one more appeal for more interdisciplinary work, in
which a synthesis of approaches is seen as providing greater intellectual reach.
Szakolczai, however, is quite emphatic in rejecting such an interpretation. As
he puts it, Reexive historical sociology as a discursive formation is not a
synthesis of sociology, philosophy and history but a special guration
he follows Elias (1978) fullling a series of conditions. It has a concrete,
empirical and experiential footing in contemporary life, avoiding both mere
philosophical speculation and copy of the natural sciences (MWMF: 15). We
have to remember that the animating focus of Szakolczais enquiry is the
investigation of modernity. However, as he goes on to argue, the empirical
basis of the investigation cannot remain within the realm of purely contem-
porary evidence but must involve what he terms a historical-interpretative
dimension (ibid.), otherwise it would be impossible to decide what aspects
are due to modernity and what belong to the pattern of long-term human
existence. Further, in his view, the historical dimension of the analysis must
not stop here but has to be given a theoretically informed sociological focus
around the processes of continuity or dislocation in what Szakolczai terms
the fundamental ordering codes of society. These codes, he notes, in any
concrete empirical study generally remain taken for granted (see also
Szakolczai, 1993a and 1998a). However, the bringing to the surface of
possibly hidden or taken-for-granted assumptions central to a genealogical
approach gives to the fully articulated practice of reexive historical soci-
ology what Szakolczai terms quasi-prophetic qualities, and this poses a
special problem concerning the conditions that enable somebody to obtain
this kind of in-depth knowledge (MWMF). It is here that the issue of the
relation of the life to the work takes its initial saliency for Szakolczai and
requires his analysis as a method for exploring the condition of this genuinely
reexive knowledge.
At the centre of Szakolczais method is the issue of experience, especially
the experience of the scholar/theorist, and it is in the creative exploration of
this particular type of life-experience that a signicant part of the real
originality of his work lies. To explore this he brings to bear a remarkable
synthesis of philosophical, sociological and, perhaps most tellingly, anthro-
pological approaches on the biographical data of the author. The most sig-
nicant sources here for his approach are to be found in the works of the
philosopher, political theorist and sociologist Eric Voegelin,
1
the anthropol-
ogist Victor Turner, especially in respect of his application of the philosopher
Wilhelm Diltheys work, and the ancient historian Pierre Hadot. All of them,
in different ways, contribute for Szakolczai to a new, or more precisely a
renewed, understanding of experience which takes us beyond the essentially
positivistic understanding of the modern Cartesian era.
Of these key gures perhaps Voegelins work is least widely known and to
see how Szakolczais life-work approach operates it is necessary to have some
sense of what Voegelins emphasis on experience means. The conceptual use
of the term experience as a category at the centre of social explanation stems
from Voegelins deep dissatisfaction with his and other attempts to produce
a history of political ideas (see Voegelin, 19979) qua ideas. Voegelin was
eventually to argue that the language of political ideas had to be grasped as
the symbolization of engendering experiences which were themselves events
within the historical eld (for full details see Szakolczai, 2001a). As Szakol-
czai notes in Voegelins History of Political Ideas, interest in in-between
periods of disorder, disorientation, spiritual disintegration or transition is
omnipresent, and the crucial role of sentiments and experiences in what he
would articulate as symbolizations were based on real feelings of anxiety
generated in human beings actually undergoing a period of dissolution of
order (19979: 355). Whatever the future history of the idea of symboliza-
tion its roots were to be found in real human experiences, and crucially these
real human experiences were those which in the broadest sense had been
undergone by the author. The author for Voegelin, who was writing The
History initially in the 1940s, was rooted in society and the theorists work
of symbolization was itself an event in the conscious life of the society and
could in certain circumstances go on to have massive consequences once the
formative experiental context had passed.
2
It is the anthropologist Victor Turner who led Szakolczai to Dilthey
(Szakolczai, 2004; Turner, 1985). Dilthey sought to supplement Kants three
great critiques of pure and practical reason and of judgement with a critique
of historical reason. For Szakolczai, the signicance of this is the focus on the
weaknesses of Kants category of experience (Erfahrung) with its claim that
experience is basically unstructured and incomprehensible without the
categories supplied by the transcendental mind. Szakolczai has gone on to
point out more recently that
. . . Diltheys entire work was based on the opposite hypothesis: human
experiences do have a structure of their own. The task of the interpreter
is not to impose an external order on experience, rather to elucidate
their internal, real, existing structure. In order to indicate this funda-
mental difference, Dilthey came up with a new concept, hardly used
before in German: Erlebnis, or lived experience. (Szakolczai, 2004:
65)
3
For Victor Turner, Dilthey was a liberation from the formalism of Kantian
and structuralist thought. As he put it:
Like an anthropologist in the eld Dilthey begins, so to speak, in
medias res . . . we feel and think immediately, we live through (erleben)
our own thoughts and feelings, experience them directly . . . [though]
Dilthey writes of structures of experiences. These are not cognitive
structures, though they contain thinking. They also involve emotions
and volitions, in other words they are structures of action. (Turner,
1985: 211)
But Turner also points out that this conception of experience is not a self-
enclosed unity since it carries within it direct relations with the past (ibid.).
This is crucial because meaning arises in memory, in cognition of the past
and is cognitive, self-reexive, orientated to past experience and . . . the t
between present and past (1985: 214).
Turners processual anthropological account of experiences as events
occurring in a social context found a theoretical partner in Dilthey who
seemed to legitimate his eld practice. Now Dilthey has never been without
his critics, and a concept like lived experience can pose problems for the
contemporary reader as it can seem vague or gestural and redolent of 19th-
century romanticism. However, Harrington has recently defended Diltheys
emphasis on reective empathy and re-experience as tools of social science,
as he puts it, in respect of the interpretation of phenomena like lived experi-
ence.
Feeling and empathy are Diltheys words to defend a point more
familiar to contemporary readers [as the idea that] speech and under-
standing are rule-governed acts, but following rules also involves
knowing how to apply these rules creatively to unexpected situations
and circumstances which is not something for which the speaker or
reader can in turn rely on rules. In practice empathic relations with
others experiences is an unavoidable dimension of the human sciences.
(Harrington, 2001: 324; see also 2000)
What Szakolczai takes from this encounter of Turner with Dilthey is prin-
cipally the capacity to treat a modern social theorists life analogously to the
way in which Turner treated the traces of experience in anthropological data
traces that are engendered by a variety of lived phenomenological contexts
which can be structured by anthropological analysis.
Before turning to how Victor Turners analysis is actually applied by
Szakolczai we must note a third source of inspiration for his work. This
comes from the pioneering scholarship of Pierre Hadot, the ancient historian.
Pierre Hadots work was very signicant as he, along with a range of other
scholars, including such important gures for Szakolczai as Jan Patocka (see
Szakolczai, 1994a, 1994b; Patocka, 1999, 2002), is responsible for having
recovered the largely lost sense of what the actual practice of philosophy had
meant in the ancient classical world. Central to this practice was the idea of
Philosophy as a Way of Life, which formed the title of one of Hadots most
signicant works and, of course, was a signicant inuence on Michel
Foucault (see Hadot, 1995).
What this pattern of scholarly enquiry did was attempt to escape from the
tradition of treating philosophical work as purely a set of texts, which may
or may not have been understood as located historically but could, with the
right scholarly apparatus, be brought into relations of dialogue with other
texts. Instead, what can be derived from Hadot is an attempt to step back
behind the written texts and look at what the social practice of philosophy
might have meant in the vastly different historical context of the ancient
world (see especially Hadot, 2002). What Hadot pointed to was the role
played by a variety of ascetic practices, including meditative exercises and dis-
ciplines orientated towards the transformation of the self in the practice of
the philosophical life. In so doing, he opened up a range of issues about the
relation between what, since the Enlightment, had seemed to be the clearly
secular discourses and practices of philosophy and what appeared to be the
domain of the distinctly spiritual and religious.
For Szakolczai what this work provided was the possibility of viewing the
thought of his theorists all in certain respects dissidents in relation to the
dominant abstracted Cartesianism and Kantian rationalism as capable of
exploration via carefully understood life-experiences. However, the clues that
Hadot gave, whilst no doubt they were in part mediated by Foucaults own
interest in these matters, only fully crystallized for Szakolczai when he
explored and absorbed the work of Victor Turner.
The really surprising aspect of Szakolczais work is that, given the signi-
cance he attaches to Turners work (extensively referenced in MWMF, RHS
and GM as well as in 1998e, 2001b, 2001c, 2004 but this by no means exhausts
the references) he does not subject Turner to detailed biographical life-work
analysis.
4
Naturally there are limits to the ambitions of any work and it may
well turn out that such a study will appear. Nonetheless, what we have here
are some important concepts and suggestions derived from Turners work
that are put to good use in Szakolczais studies.
The central issue concerns the concept of liminality and liminal situations.
In Turners anthropological thought, the liminal was closely linked to the
actual account of rites of passage that were in turn linked to signicant trans-
formations of the status and self-understanding of the people involved. The
rite itself consisted of three phases: the rite of separation, the rite of transition
and nally the rite of incorporation or reincorporation. It is, however, for
Turner and most especially for Szakolczai the middle phase that is most
important, for the period of transition is also the period of liminality, the
period of uncertainty, malleability and transformation. This is the vital
moment or period of transformation from one status to another, from, say,
childhood to adulthood. It is a difcult period almost by denition for the
individual involved but it is also difcult for the society within which it is
taking place for the normal social rules are in certain respects suspended
during the transition. As Szakolczai puts it:
In this way, rites of passage offer a conceptual framework combining
the dislocation of social structure (socio-political level) and loss of
identity (personal level). However the situation is potentially explosive;
therefore the period of suspension was strictly limited in time and place
and was guided by special masters of ceremonies. Once the ritual was
performed, the state of suspension (an equivalent of a state of emer-
gency in modern states) was over, the structural and normative charac-
teristics of order were restored, and everything returned to the same,
except for some individuals changing their place within the order, and
also their very mode of being. (MWMF: 23)
Szakolczais condence in his initial focus on the concept in relations to his
other intellectual sources became stronger when he found he could point to
the late understanding by Turner (1985) that Diltheys work on the nature of
experience and his own work on liminality, based on rites of passage, were
attempts to grasp the same thing. Turner believed that these connections
emerged clearly when the etymology of the word experience was looked at
carefully, revealing its association with attempt, venture, risk and later the
Latin term for trial, proof, experiment, peril, danger, and testing (MWMF:
22; also see GM: 67, and Szakolczai, 2004).
This focus on rites of passage seems to offer some solutions to theoretical
and conceptual issues well outside the terrain of anthropology. It can,
Szakolczai suggests, take us beyond the xity of the subject of knowledge
that we inherit from the Cartesian and Kantian traditions by giving real
signicance to the lived reality of this subject. The experiences of the
theorist/researcher are seen as real events happening in the biography of the
person and their society but not purely as singular irruptions, beyond
reason, but having their own form and structure (ibid.). Experiences within
the life of the subject can be understood in certain circumstances as decisive
in shaping the subject in ways analogous to aspects of the spiritual exercises
that, in the ancient practice of philosophy as a way of life, were seen as necess-
ary for genuine knowledge.
At this point Szakolczai introduces Webers concept of stamping to make
clearer at least one aspect of what is implied by the idea of vital or forceful
experience. Stamping is the term Weber used to examine in his sociology
of religion (the term comes from the essay translated as The Social Psychol-
ogy of World Religions; Gerth and Mills, 1948), the key directive element
that inuences the practical ethic of the particular religion; these elements
have stamped the most characteristic features upon practical ethics (MWMF:
234; emphasis added). So the suggestion here is that we can think of certain
experiences in the life of the author as stamping, or long-lasting in their
effects. Naturally determining what these experiences are is an empirical
matter.
Now there are of course fairly obvious difculties in applying the ideas of
Turners liminal rites-of-passage approach to modern society in general and
modern social theorists in particular. One apparent difculty, recognized by
Szakolczai, is the limited nature of clearly observable rites of passage in mod-
ernity. But, by following some hints in Turners own work, he is able to note
the characteristic modern incompleteness concerning liminal experiences.
Indeed right at the centre of much of Szakolczais recent work is a view of
modernity as a permanent state of transition or permanent liminality (see
RHS: 21526; Szakolczai, 1998e, 2001b, 2001c). Despite the absence of formal
aspects of successful and recognized transition, Szakolczai nevertheless
argues that in the personal biographies of thinkers there are genuinely liminal
situations and that proper conceptualisation of such situations would
provide us with an approach to the conditions of the possibility of under-
standing and tools to understand the thinkers of the tradition (MWMF: 25).
He puts the issue very clearly and almost too baldly in his second major
work:
The central idea is that most breakpoints of an individual life are not
that difcult to identify. In most cases they correspond to the major
rites of passage in ones life and are available in a reasonably accurate
and detailed curriculum vitae. In our contemporary world, due to the
excessive formalization and emptying of all rites of passage, it is for-
gotten that such rituals do not simply perform a formal-legalistic
function but are the emotional and experiential breakpoints, liminal
experiences. Dates of initiation, maturation, appointment, promotion
and publication are not just trophies . . . but provide the emotional and
existential context of the work. (RHS: 6)
The analysis of the thinkers experiential liminality is explored via two
distinct strategies: one is via their cultural formation beginning with child-
hood but in a manner that eschews the models of psychoanalysis, and the
other via the developed concept of the reading experiences. These are
encounters with certain works that strike a chord with personal experi-
ences, providing a driving force of intellectual work (1998c: 212). They are
singular intellectual encounters in which the tension built up between the
self and the world, personal experience and scholarly research is discharged,
propelling a long-term research project that Szakolczai describes as meta-
objective in the sense that such a project is aiming not simply at the empiri-
cal analysis of objective reality, but the reconstructive analysis of the very
forms of conduct, and of the self, that objective, positive empirical research
takes for granted (ibid.).
This concept of reading experience then plays a vital role for Szakolczai as
it ties conceptual material and research projects to the experiental dimensions
of an authors life. To operate properly it does require careful biographical
documentation and equally careful interpretation. Given the detail and space
given to the accounts of the life and works of Weber and Foucault it is not
surprising that it is these accounts of the effects of reading experiences that
seem in general most convincing. Nevertheless, these detailed accounts also
reveal some of the inherent difculties of the approach.
In the case of Weber it is important to establish carefully the timing and
impact of the reading experiences of what Szakolczai describes as the four
key background gures in modern social thought (1998c): Marx,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Freud. It seems highly likely that Weber read
Marx seriously in the autumn of 1887 and that it left an impact on the writing
of his dissertation in relationship to his emphasis on the origins of property
rights (MWMF: 10910). He read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in early 1892,
at a crucial liminal period at which his habilitation had just been nished and
he stood on the threshold of an academic career and faced the difcult issue
of a possible marriage to his mothers favourite, Emmy Baumgarten
(MWMF: 11224).
Szakolczai argues that especially the reading of Nietzsche and a support-
ing reading of Kierkegaard gave a powerful impulse to the life and work: the
move from law to economics and to the marriage with Marianne. This
ambitious argument made over twelve pages (ibid.) is complex and subtle.
The key coincidence is that it was in late 1891 and 1892 that Nietzsche
became, with the re-edition of a series of his books, the single most discussed
cultural gure in Germany. Weber was probably introduced to him via
Simmel and, given Webers then uncertain position, Szakolczai is quite right
to suggest that an inuential reading was likely. Weber seems to have been
unhappy about a long-term legal career and doubtful about marriage to
Emmy, and it is quite possible that reading Nietzsche and Kierkegaard,
Weber was empowered to cut through this Gordian knot of professional and
personal commitments (MWMF: 117).
The difculty of this analysis is, as Szakolczai concedes, the paucity of
information, and especially the fact that there are very few personal letters
for the years 1890, 1891 and 1892. However, Szakolczai, rather desperately
one feels, tries to make a virtue of this situation by relying on Webers self-
characterization as unable to express himself about things that are close to
him (MWMF: 113). However, if this is the case and we do not have docu-
mentary evidence from the subject or those close to him it can be too easy
to make what we might call the intellectualist error of assuming the central
signicance of books and reading, even for an intellectual like Weber. Here
one feels that the couple life-works has been drawn too tightly and may even
point towards a form of reductionism albeit a different one from the familiar
psycho-sexual and economic types. Nonetheless the concept of reading
experience is instructive and useful even if it carries a risk of over-extension
and there is little doubt that Nietzsche was a decisive inuence on Webers
work and the tradition of enquiry he helped initiate.
INSIGHT AND VISION
Reexive historical sociological insight is a particular type of understanding
and interpretation of the world, even if there are wide differences in the kind
of analysis produced by individual thinkers. What all such thinkers have in
common is a wider comparative and interpretative capacity that goes beyond
the formal disciplinary boundaries and beyond the powerful empirically
focused and detailed analysis of the particular that is the hall-mark (a necess-
ary hall-mark) of much of modern scholarly work. You would expect, there-
fore, to nd that the kind of thinkers attracted to reexive historical
sociology would have difculties, or in some measure be isolated from or
alienated by, much of modern educational experience. A search for knowl-
edge would take them outside many of the strongly institutionalized settings
of school and university or to encounters with gures marginalized within
these educational settings for many of the theorists discussed Nietzsche was
a signicant encounter but one that normally took place outside any formal
curriculum. For Szakolczais life-work approach there are two liminal situ-
ations that require particular attention. The rst is the clear life-cycle tran-
sition that occurs after the end of formal schooling the rst term at
university often in a new town or city, or the gaining of a rst job or in the
personal realm a new long-term relationship, or marriage, etc. Such a period
may or may not coincide with the subjective period Szakolczai calls a time
of trouble (MWMF: 28). This is a period of depression perhaps, during the
protracted attempt to stabilize personal life and academic or scholarly career
positions while still maintaining the commitment to insightful or even vision-
ary conceptions of transdisciplinary knowledge.
The model of the quest seems to ow naturally from the idea of liminal
situations and experiences that stimulate original insights and visions of the
world. The nal stage of a rite of passage is, of course, reabsorption, a return
of normality with the fruits of ones transformation. Again Szakolczai
makes his case most strongly with his detailed parallel account of Weber and
Foucault (MWMF: 89262). Their lives are each divided into the three-part
scheme that Turners conceptualization of liminal transformation suggests:
each with the same chapter titles, Background and Early Years, Years of
Crisis and Quest, New Focus and Recovery. The suggestion is clearly that
there was a childhood preparedness and early apprenticeship followed by a
difcult transitional time of trouble, before a mature unity and focus were
achieved. The evidence is well marshalled and the parallels work remarkably
well, with Webers breakdown in 1897 marking his break into a liminal time
of trouble and Foucaults difculties after completing Discipline and Punish
from 1975 onwards culminating in a car accident in July 1978 and a near-
death experience that seemed for a time to push him away from research and
into journalism. But this crisis was followed in 1980, for Foucault, with the
decisive move to study the classical world and early Christianity. This
provides a powerful parallel with Webers post-liminal move to the study of
the ancient world in the Economic Ethics of World Religions.
Texts of scholarship once produced, of course, have a life of their own and
their meanings can never be nally reduced to an authorial intention.
However, it can also be a productive exercise to read the scholarship of
thinkers as enacted life-works, as in some respects a form of performance
and as a distinctive guration which was also a way of moving on within a
unity of self and work. It is from this that the authors appear to produce
insights or visions not as Szakolczai is at pains to point out in an irrationalist
sense but from the personal experience of the re-cognizing of links that
previously were overlooked because they were hidden . . . or taken for
granted (RHS: 105). This sense of performance insight is perhaps best
captured via what Szakolczais reading of Webers life-work highlights.
Weber accepted the diagnosis of modernity in Nietzsche as the issue of
nihilism and in Kierkegaard of resignation. But Weber sought to sharpen
and deepen the analysis, in a sense to ll out the sociological content of these
ideas. This was done in part via concepts like disenchantment and rational-
ization, but the key term, Szakolczai believes, is religious rejections of the
world (RHS: 154 and 1998e). Webers vision can be summarised in the idea
that there is a fundamental afnity, but also a direct, causal-genealogical
connection between the contemporary state of affairs and the religious rejec-
tions of the world (GM: 47). The analysis points to an understanding that
the globalized world of modernity is shot through with secularized versions
of inner world asceticism and eschatology. But the upshot of this is a further
paradox, in that this understanding itself points to an afnity between Weber
and critiques of society (including Nietzsche and Marx) and the old prophets
of Israel in the ancient world Weber, of course, famously identied himself
with Jeremiah. But Webers diagnosis points to contemporary contradictions
and problems of modernity as being at least in part due to the long-term
lasting effects of these earlier prophetic stances, which gives the prophetic
stance a paradoxical character to say the least. In this sense, the context of a
permanently liminal world encourages those analysts with some of the
deepest insights into the humility of an anti-prophetic stance. For if one sees
the contemporary world stamped with the performance principle of ascetic
this-worldly activity (Weber), and/or an intramundane-eschatology
attempting to translate a transcendent realm of perfection into an immanent
historical reality (Voegelin on modernity as gnostic), then the telling without
a proffered solution may still be a performance with long-term effects.
CONCLUSION
Any assessment of this body of work must at this stage be provisional.
Undoubtedly specialists who work on the particular theorists must have their
say. It is quite clear that Szakolczais method is necessarily fragile and very
much dependent on the sensitivity of his biographical interpretation. It is
clear that his task has been easier with some gures like Weber and Foucault
where extensive work on the lives had already been done. In the case of
Voegelin, the essay in RHS is 41 pages long and is a major biographical and
theoretical reconstruction (RHS: 3373). This was based on extensive
archival work and in unpublished sources in consultation with those who
knew and worked with Voegelin. This has resulted in a signicant contri-
bution to scholarship on this writer.
Nonetheless, the use that the biographical reconstructions are put to is
bound to be highly controversial. Is the central claim that a scholar and his
(all the theorists discussed are men) scholarship be best understood as a life-
work unity? Are concepts like liminality, experience, performance and
the idea of scholarship as a quest tenable in this context? It is I think inevi-
table that the evidence that Szakolczai adduces in support of his claims will
by its very nature not convince everyone. If we take, for example, the concept
of reading experience the evidence may seem circumstantial and the some-
times quite dramatic claims for its impact speculative. A premature closure
against this approach should be resisted, though, as it is all too easy to dismiss
delicate exploratory examinations of this kind. If, however, the social sciences
continue to open up to the claims of a self-conscious reexivity it is likely
that they will nd resources in work like Szakolczais that deals with the per-
formative aspects of scholarly activities. The concepts of rites of passage,
liminal experience, and a quest-type structure to scholarly lives and
enquiries provides a persuasive way of making sense of lives and work. There
is evidence to suggest that narrative, story and quest are ways that human
beings in many, perhaps all, cultures make sense of their lives (see MacIntyre,
1981: 190209; Williams, 1984; and the discussion in McMylor, 1994: 1569).
It is not unreasonable to see this process at work among social theorists and
scholars in regard to their own work and indeed in our own. If liminality is
a pervasive experience within modernity then the continuing practice of
reexive historical sociology is a real necessity. Szakolczais work will then
send us back to his chosen exemplars in order to seek inspiration as to how
to continue the work or quest of understanding the present and, of course,
ourselves.
NOTES
1 For Voegelins relationship with sociology see Petropolus (1998).
2 Voegelins whole view of experience and consciousness comes from the inuence
of, but in the end profound dissatisfaction with, Husserls phenomenology. His
understanding of the issues emerged from his long spoken and written
discussions with his lifelong friend the sociologist Alfred Schutz. Both he and
Schutz recognized the limitations of Husserls phenomenology as being in
principle orientated to the model of the experience of objects in the external
world (Voegelin, 2002: 43). This emphasis on intentionality towards objects is
not, as both Voegelin and Schutz agreed, the only mode of consciousness.
Equally important is consciousnesss participation within reality that makes
intentionality possible. This sense of our participation within reality opened up
the whole eld of human symbolic understanding of order throughout history
as in Voegelins view being the necessary task of the political scientist. This was
the only alternative once neo-Kantian typications and Husserlian phenomen-
ology were abandoned. But crucially institutionalized idea-symbols can have a
potent negative and blocking effect on changed social realities.
3 It should be noted that there appears to have been some change in Szakolczais
view of the importance of Diltheys work since MWMF, published some six
years before the passage quoted above, for in this earlier discussion he notes
Diltheys attempt to reconceptualize experience via the category of Erlebnis but
goes on to enter the following serious caveat: However, by trying to counter
the Kantian universals by a similarly universal conceptualisation of lived
experience, Dilthey was trapped in a romantic philosophy of life (MWMF:
22). However, to judge from the recent 2004 paper this claim of a competing
universalism to Kants seems in effect to have been withdrawn and instead
Dilthey is praised for his fundamental insights concerning the structures of
experience and for understanding of the links between life and work and for
his pioneering application of these methods in his biography of Schleiermacher
(Szakolczai, 2004: 65).
4 The issue of anthropology is very signicant here when one looks at the key
theoretical volumes that Szakolczai has so far published (MWMF, RHS and GM)
and notes the centrality of, in the rst instance, Victor Turners work but then
also the work of a range of scholars in anthropology, and the allied areas of
mythology and comparative religion: for example, Ren Girard, frequently refer-
enced throughout much of Szakolczais work and discussed at length in GM (see
especially 1822 and 1536, and Szakolczai, 2001c). One could add the anthro-
pologist Georges Dumzil (see GM), the mythologist Karl Kernyi (Szakolczai,
2004) and key background gures like Mircea Eliade, Arnold van Gennep and
Gabriel Tarde; and so one sees that there would be plenty of scope for a
companion volume by Szakolczai on what might be termed reexive anthropo-
logical sociology.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
PETER McMYLOR is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of
Manchester, UK. He is the author of the book Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of
Modernity. His research interests include: social theory, comparative and
civilizational sociology, economic sociology and the sociology of religion.
Address: Sociology, School of Social Science, Roscoe Building, University of
Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Tel: +44 161 275 2000. [email:
p.mcmylor@manchester.ac.uk]

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