Article

History of the Human Sciences

1–21
Social types and ª The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sociological analysis sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0952695118807125
journals.sagepub.com/home/hhs

Charles Turner
University of Warwick, UK

Abstract
Social types, or types of persons, occupy a curious place in the history of sociology.
There has never been any agreement on how they should be used, or what their import
is. Yet the problems surrounding their use are instructive, symptomatic of key ambiv-
alences at the heart of the sociological enterprise. These include a tension between
theories of social order that privilege the division of labour and those that focus on large-
scale cultural complexes; a tension between the analysis of society in terms of social
groups and an acknowledgement of modern individualism; sociology’s location some-
where between literature and science; and sociology’s awkward response to the claim –
made by both Catholic conservatives and Marxists – that modern industrial and post-
industrial society cannot be a society of estates. These ambivalences may help to explain
why the attempts to use social types for the purpose of cultural diagnosis – from the
interesting portrait of arbitrarily selected positions in the division of labour to more
ambitious guesswork about modern culture’s dominant ‘characters’ – have been
unconvincing.

Keywords
abstraction, cultural diagnosis, division of labour, personality, types

A great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing it. The things he
describes are types because they are truths.
G.K. Chesterton

Corresponding author:
Charles Turner, University of Warwick, Department of Sociology, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: D.C.S.Turner@warwick.ac.uk
2 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)

Introduction
In 1923, in a lament for Catholic Europe, Carl Schmitt wrote that the modern age was
‘incapable of representation’. To us, attuned to the modern idea of representative gov-
ernment, the claim sounds odd, but part of what he meant was that there had once been a
coherent civilisation whose framework was provided by the public power of the church
and which was articulated by figures such as the pope, the monk, the cleric, the knight
and the merchant (Schmitt, 1996[1923]: 20). These figures were ‘representative’, not
because they stood for categories that individuals could fall into and out of at different
times in their life, or interest groups or classes in the modern sense, but because they
defined a social status, or estate, and as such expressed severally the order at the heart of
the whole society. Such representative figures had become defunct well before the early
20th century. As Marx and Engels’ famous passage had it: ‘all that is estate-like and
established dissolves, all that is holy is made profane, and human beings are finally
compelled to see their position in life, and their relationships with one another, with open
eyes’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 435; author’s translation). For them, the dissolution of
estates was driven by the collapse of the feudal mode of production that undergirded
Catholic civilisation.
Had they been liberals, Marx and Engels might have been saying that, freed from the
stifling embrace of estates, individuals could now breathe the fresh air of opportunity,
and base their relationships with one another on non-traditional ties, notably those of
commerce, within a common legal framework. Yet Schmitt saw both the Marxist and the
liberal story as apologias for modernity, liberalism seeing commerce and universal
exchange as liberation, Marxism seeing it as a necessary stage on the road to the godless
good society. In addition, both proposed a form of bad universalism, in which the
freedom of one group can be treated as the key to the freedom of all: the third estate
declares itself the nation as a whole, or the specific interests of the proletariat are seen as
the interests of humanity. Both commercial society and communism are the profanation
of all that is holy because they take human ambition beyond limits that had been
accepted for centuries; finite and imperfect in the face of God, people were limited by
their social estate, their standing. Medieval ‘representation’ was a reminder of this.
Schmitt, who would later move away from this romantic idea of society as an ‘organic
whole’, regarded as ‘pitiful’ the efforts of Auguste Comte, who in his own way lamented
the demise of European order just as much as Schmitt himself did, to find in such figures
as the scientist and the industrialist equivalents for the cleric and the knight. These
modern figures were not representative at all: they were either private individuals or
agents of anonymous forces.
On this account, modern society cannot be a normative order; rather it is a series of
unsteady compromises, arbitrary conjunctions between the radical immanence of eco-
nomic life, the organisation of that life via markets or state planning, social groups
defined by nothing more than shared interest, an instrumentalist public policy designed
to balance the interests of different groups or to seek the victory of one set of interests
over the others, and random quests for transcendence. Robert Nisbet thought that clas-
sical sociology arose when a number of thinkers saw this as a gauntlet to be picked up:
they accepted much of the conservative problematic and its main ‘unit ideas’, but then
Turner 3

used its normative political philosophy as the basis for their own analytic framework
(Nisbet, 1967). What happens, they ask, to the sacred, to authority, to community, and to
status, when they appear shattered by the rise of the modern state and modern industry?
How can ‘the form of togetherness called society’ (Scheler, 1987[1933]: 138) be thought
of as a coherent whole if its political arrangements articulate it down to the smallest unit,
the individual, while its social fabric is constantly pulled apart by class conflict?
However cultivated they may have been personally, Marx/Engels and Schmitt gave us
perhaps the two most hard-boiled and uncompromising forms of social or political
analysis we have: a primary message about sovereignty and ‘the political’ on the one
hand, or class struggle on the other, but in both cases too, a strong vision of an ideal,
normative order that contrasts with the present – for Schmitt, or the early Schmitt, the
Catholic order of the past, for Marx and Engels the communist order of the future.1
In focusing on class conflict like this, Marx played down the cultural aspect of
capitalist society, and some Marxist or Marx-inspired sociology later thought this disdain
for culture short-sighted. Yet in offering a richer interpretation of culture that sociology
risked making it harder get a firm purchase on how modern societies work. Most
instructive here was perhaps Adorno, whose negative dialectics offered a more complex
account of class contradictions, yet who sometimes found in them a kind of order that
pushes his analysis, as he himself might have put it, towards the very functionalism he
opposed (Turner, 2010). Moreover, some of the most economistic accounts of class are
to be found in those resolutely non-Marxist but scientistic versions of sociology that
focus on stratification and social mobility.
This problem of class versus status, and polity/economy versus culture that Schmitt
and Marx and Engels articulated, provides the background for much of what follows on
the use of social types. One of Marx’s most notable terms was ‘character mask’; in the
hands of other thinkers this might have led to sophisticated reflections on tensions
between social role and class position, or, after postmodernism, something more intel-
lectually baroque, but in Marx it refers simply to the whole existence of the capitalist or
the whole existence of the worker (Connerton, 1980: 47).
Before addressing the problem of types – call it the figure in this composition – I
need to fill in more of the ground with some remarks on Durkheim and Weber. In
theorising the articulation of modern society in terms of the division of labour, and in
making a plea for the importance of professional ethics, Durkheim in one sense did not
go very far beyond Marx. But his interest in the division of labour culminates in an
attempt to reverse the terms in which Marx sees it: while Marx wanted to see all non
property-owners as proletarians regardless of the type of work they did, Durkheim
wanted to see all workers, even those doing the most menial tasks, as professionals
capable of adhering to the ethics peculiar to their branch of activity: these localised
forms of integration would complement the regulation by means of which modern
society as a whole was held together. And in order to do this Durkheim had to introduce
the sort of cultural problematic that is not there in Marx. To be sure, Durkheim had no
interest in finding representative figures in Schmitt’s sense, but his state corporatism
did involve the search for a modern functional equivalent of a pre-modern society of
estates (Durkheim, 1958).
4 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)

Curiously enough, a prominent interpretation of Weber suggests something sim-

ilar. According to Wilhelm Hennis, Weber’s project to grasp the peculiarity of the
modern world was overshadowed by a deeper anthropological concern with the
problem of how to live and how that problem has been addressed in different
cultures. He claims that Weber too was more than merely accepting a challenge
laid down by conservatism, because it turns out that ‘the central concept in Weber-
ian sociology is that of conduct of life (Lebensführung). In Economy and Society it
is absolutely clear that this belongs completely to the world of orders – of estates
(Stände), whereas classes have no particular conduct of life. They do have a stan-
dard of living’ (Hennis, 1987: 59). If Hennis is right, in order to take seriously a
problem that Marx dismissed, Weber had to use decidedly pre-modern tools, getting
a handle on the problems of personality by holding on to the analytical problem
of status.
While suggestive, I do not think this is quite right. Politically, Weber did think
Durkheim-style proposals to revive estates or guild-like corporations naı̈ve, as witnessed
by his negative comments about ‘organic social ethics’; but methodologically too,
although he does refer to the idea of a link between ‘personality and life-orders’, his
sense of status as an independent, cultural dimension of social being does not imply a
romantic problematic. If Lebensführung, the leading of a life, is indeed the central
concept of Weberian sociology, that sociology also acknowledges the ways in which
the leading of a life might be influenced by ideas, and by institutional initiatives, that cut
across all forms of group membership, be they class, status or life order. In other words,
even if we accept Hennis’s austere claim, ironically supportive of classical Marxism, that
classes do not have ways of living but only standards of living, ‘ways of living’ need not
be linked to ‘life orders’.

Types of types
In surveying and assessing the usefulness of social types, I want to suggest that they
have been a way of fudging or ignoring, rather than resolving this problem of class
and estate, the problem, that is, of what happens when sociology leaves the firm
ground of class and ventures out on the trickier terrain of ways of life, analysing
societies in which ‘status’ has lost its place. It is worth noting the ambivalence with
which the more systematic, less impressionistic forms of sociological analysis have
viewed social types. Thus, while Goffman’s ‘mental patient’ might be said to be a
social type, the account of that type’s moral career is a study of the logic and
dynamics of a type of interactional setting; likewise his account of stigma is not
a study of ‘the stigmatised’ but the logic of information control (Goffman, 1961,
1963). Much of Parsons’ work might be described as an elaborate account of the
world-orientation of the modern professional but it is hardly a portrait of a social
type any more than is his account of the ‘sick role’ (Parsons, 1949). Garfinkel’s
Agnes may be called an inter-sexed person, but he/she is not a type either, since the
focus there is on the manner, the mechanism through which such status is achieved
and maintained (Garfinkel, 1967).
Turner 5

Nevertheless, one can see from that brief list the promise at least of a sociology that
speaks in terms of social types or significant characters. This might be thought unsur-
prising in the light of the routine processes of typification we employ as competent social
members, sociology’s professional efforts being rooted in everyday ones (Berger and
Luckmann, 1966). And the variety of ways social types have been deployed may merely
reflect, in turn: the diversity of modes of social membership available within ostensibly
class-based societies, the modern state’s need for the administrative classification of
persons, the development of modern, institutionalised techniques of self-formation (the
apotheosis of which is doubtless homo sovieticus), and modern individualism, central to
which is an extension of the personality across lines of social stratification and the
possibility of working out a Lebensführung ‘from within the human breast’ as Weber
put it (Weber, 1978: xxxiii).
Yet a larger question hangs over social types: what sort of science does sociology
want to be? We can get a sense of this problem if we think about the different levels of
abstraction at which they have been deployed. On the lowest level they have been used
simply to document important locations in the division of labour of modern societies: the
lawyer, the salaried worker, the civil servant, the petty official, the domestic servant. On
a higher level are those figures who speak to the character of industrial and post-
industrial society as a whole: the bourgeois, the flâneur, the man of the crowd, the
madwoman in the attic, the hobo, the collector, the marginal man (Goldberg, 2012), the
scholarship boy. On a still higher, philosophical level of abstraction are figures who are
believed to encapsulate an entire historical epoch: psychological man, organisation man,
one-dimensional man, the narcissist, the pilgrim, the tourist, the manager, the aesthete.
This variety, not to say messiness, reminds us just how much sociology has owed both to
literature and to culture criticism, and also how far it has remained from defining ‘the
human being’ in such clear and striking terms that a single type would ground a dis-
ciplinary identity (Lepenies, 1986; Nisbet, 1976). Homo sociologicus has never acquired
the clean-lined elegance, with all of its attendant drawbacks, of homo economicus
(Dahrendorf, 1964; Morgan, 2006).

How many types can we take?

In what follows I will chart a path that leads more or less from the lowest level of
abstraction to the highest. We may begin with a famous formulation from the first
novelist with comprehensive sociological ambitions.

It was no small task to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous types of a period; for
this is, in fact, the number presented to us by each generation, and which The Human
Comedy will require. This crowd of actors, of characters, this multitude of lives, needed
a setting – if I may be pardoned the expression, a gallery. Hence the very natural division, as
already known, into the Scenes of Private Life, of Provincial Life, of Parisian, Political,
Military, and Country Life. Under these six heads are classified all the studies of manners
which form the history of society at large . . . These six classes correspond, indeed, to
familiar conceptions. Each has its own sense and meaning, and answers to an epoch in the
life of man. . . . And not man alone, but the principal events of life, fall into classes by types.
6 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)

There are situations which occur in every life, typical phases, and this is one of the details
I most sought after. I have tried to give an idea of the different districts of our fine country.
My work has its geography, as it has its genealogy and its families, its places and things, its
persons and their deeds; as it has its heraldry, its nobles and commonalty, its artisans and
peasants, its politicians and dandies, its army – in short, a whole world of its own. (Balzac,
2011[1842])

Balzac wanted to portray the new world of industrial capitalism in post-revolutionary

France in all its richness, variety and nuance. Yet one sees immediately how this might
be a problem for a broad-brushed approach like sociology that wants to operate with
more limited typologies and achieve its own sort of aesthetic power: two or three
thousand types in a single generation is too cumbersome. How much detail, then, how
many types, would help sociology achieve in its own way what Balzac did, but also do
what he did not, depict social change over longer periods of time?2 This question is
raised particularly sharply by Engels’ remark, made shortly after his friend’s death in
1883, that he and Marx had learned more about capitalism from Balzac than they had
from the political economists and historians (Marx and Engels, 2010: 71). That may be
true, but had Marx and Engels operated at the level at which two thousand types could be
identified, the political urgency of the message about a bi-polar class division would
have been lost.3
This seems to have been on the mind of Georg Lukács when he tried to revive interest
in Balzac. Despite having broken with him, he begins with an appeal to Weber.

The central category and criterion of realist literature . . . is the type, a peculiar synthesis
which organically binds together both character and situations. What makes the type a type
is not its average quality; not its mere individual being . . . what makes a type a type is that in
it all the humanly and socially essential determinants are present in their highest level of
development. (Lukács, 1964[1950]: 6)4

The novel has a duty to depict the ‘complete human personality’, and the creation of
types is vital to it. They must also be more than an heuristic tool; Lukács’ ‘highest level
of development’ is more than Weber’s ‘one-sided exaggeration of empirical reality’5;
indeed, Lukács even refers to ‘non-typical distortion’ and ‘non-typical bias’ in the work
of writers whose characters and situations fall short of what is required. Lukács admired
Balzac more than he did Zola because even though the latter was closer to him politi-
cally, in Zola’s more didactically sociological novels ‘the socially determined character
types are already established in advance’ (Jameson, 1971: 195). Balzac, despite his
mania for classification, achieves ‘the highest level of typicality’ by the use of ‘extraor-
dinary characters’ who turn his work into something comparable to epic drama.
Yet there was much strain in this effort to say that Balzac was better than Zola, since
Lukács thought that the highest level of typicality is one defined in terms of class rather
than any other criteria of significance, and so Balzac’s idea about two or three thousand
types was ignored. Instead, The Peasants was praised because, eschewing static indi-
vidual portraits of certain social groups taken in isolation, it shows the dynamic of the
interaction between a very limited number of groups: land-owning aristocracy, peasants
Turner 7

and provincial usurers. Frederic Jameson’s effort to rescue Balzac and Lukács from any
suspicion of class reductionism has an air of special pleading about it.

Balzac’s feeling for historicity and for historical change is so intense that he would be
incapable of imagining a fixed archetype of the social types, of the petit bourgeois for
example: the petit bourgeois in his work is always characteristic of a given period, of a
given decade, he is in constant evolution, in his style of clothing, in his furniture, in his
language and mentality, from the days of Napoleon to the last years of Louis-Philippe. Thus
a Balzac character is not typical of a certain kind of fixed social element, such as class, but
rather of the historical moment itself; and with this, the purely schematic and allegorical
overtones of the notion of typicality disappear completely. (Jameson, 1971: 195)

At the same time, while we can perhaps take the remark about class with a pinch of
salt, the point about the distinction between the use of social types in the realist novel and
other genres is important. In allegorical, satirical or dystopian/utopian fiction, for
instance, typicality is achieved, but at such a level of abstraction that the characters are
reduced to ahistorical ciphers. Gulliver and Winston Smith might fall into that category,
Bunyan’s characters certainly do.6 And they in turn remind us of the problem of how
abstract sociological analysis can allow its characters to be before it merges with psy-
chological or philosophical analysis. One halfway house between Balzac’s detail and
ahistorical ciphers can be found in the perhaps unlikely figure of his compatriot
Baudelaire.

Baudelaire’s enduring types

Recall Schmitt’s claim about the absence of ‘representative figures’ in modern societies.
I am suggesting here that if he is right it may go some way to explaining the fragmentary
way in which types and characters have appeared in the analysis of that society. For a
related point, consider now Baudelaire’s altogether more pithy account of the contrast
between medieval and modern: ‘there are only three proper beings’, he writes, ‘the
priest, the warrior, and the poet. To know, to kill, to create . . . All other men are malle-
able and subjugable, made to be put in harness, that is to say, to exercise what are called
professions’ (Baudelaire, 1986[1863]: 183). In contrast to Schmitt, Baudelaire saw those
proper beings as free rather than a part of a medieval normative order; whether he was
right to is less important than the fact that it allowed him to contrast them with modern
professionals. The rise of the middle-classes brings forth a new, pernicious sort of
limitedness, individuals constrained by the demands of society rather than modesty in
the face of God.
While Baudelaire’s remarks on types of persons may be a little wild, they do anticipate
some strands of modern sociology; they suggest an approach that is neither Balzac’s,
which populates a relatively short historical period with hundreds of types, nor Lukács’
version of Balzac, where social type means social class, nor symbolism or allegory, in
which ahistorical social types are used for an overtly didactic purpose. When, in ‘The
Painter of Modern Life’, he praises Constantin Guys it is for depicting types of persons
which, while they appear on a modern tableau, are not exclusively modern in Balzac’s or
8 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)

Marx’s sense; in other words, they have historical depth. Guys achieved this precisely
because he refused to imitate timeless classical models: he observed first and worked out
methods of depiction second, and it was this that, far from making him a ‘mediocrity’ stuck
in the present, allowed him to depict the social types that interested Baudelaire, namely
those that were the product of more than one generation: while ‘every period has its
deportment, its glance and its gesture’ in ‘the unities known as nations, professions or
classes, the passing centuries introduce a variety not only of gestures and manners, but also
of actual facial features’ (Baudelaire, 1986[1863]: 38). That was the point: it is the passing
centuries, not major upheavals like the French revolution, that produce these effects; or
rather, as David Riesman (of whom more later) put it, social types,

like geological or archaeological strata, pile on top of one another, with outcroppings of
submerged types here and there. A cross section of society at any given time reveals the
earlier as well as the later character types, the earlier changed through the pressure of being
submerged by the later. (Riesman, 1971: 32)

While ‘all creatures are stamped by the idiom of their trade’, Baudelaire praised Guys
for having no interest in those trades in which monotonous and violent labour ‘stamps the
face with the mark of servitude’.7 There is, he thought, nothing humanly interesting to
say about them even if one might sympathise with those condemned to lead such lives.
Thus in the painting entitled ‘The Consecration of the Burial Ground at Scutari’, ‘the
soldiers and officers have that imperishable air of “gentlemen”, resolute and discreet
which they carry to the ends of the earth’ (Baudelaire, 1986[1863]: 45).8 More striking is
the soldier’s beauty: his martial phlegm is derived from his readiness to die at any
moment, and there are sub-types, the elderly infantry officer, the handsome staff-
officer, the light infantryman, whose bearing suggests daring, and the artillery and
engineering corps with their ‘vaguely professional’ appearance. Baudelaire’s own inter-
est in prostitutes and dandies fed off a similar impulse; they are all parts of the modern
urban scene yet interesting to him because they are among the oldest professions.9
If Balzac was a monarchist and admirer of the English aristocracy who immersed
himself in modernity, the modern poet Baudelaire never quite conquered his admiration
for ‘proper human beings’ from a previous age. Nevertheless, both may be said to have
anticipated the use of social types by the early sociologists. Simmel is the most notable: the
miser, the spendthrift, the stranger, the religious person, the erotic person or the musical
person have historical depth yet take on a particular valence with the advent of modern
society and in particular the money economy, to which an entire chapter is devoted on ‘the
style of life’. Simmel’s types take us far beyond the division of labour, and so before
entering that level of abstraction I want to consider an account that appeared a generation
later but which combined Simmel’s influential culturalist orientation with a Marxian
concern with changes in class structure and the world of work (Simmel, 1971).

Siegfried Kracauer’s metatype: The rise of the salaried worker

Siegfried Kracauer’s 1930 study of a new generation of salaried office workers,
many of them women, was a landmark: the themes of class, estate, representative
Turner 9

figures, and the leading of a life were all there. But while both Balzac’s tableau
vivant of a particular historical moment, and Guys’ depiction of professionals with
historical depth addressed changes occurring spontaneously, so to speak, in the
division of labour and class structure, Kracauer’s study showed how new social
types, and new modes of Lebensführung were being actively created. To be sure,
this was happening in response to system imperatives, but these ‘salaried masses’
were not only expected to be equipped with specialist skills or a capacity for time
management; an entire set of personal aptitudes ranging from character to physical
appearance were required, and were being promoted through newly invasive man-
agement techniques. The personality and aptitude tests designed to promote these
qualities were mechanisms of rationalisation. Kracauer thought that they parcelled
out the person; moreover, while Balzac had taught Marx and Engels to see nascent
industrial capitalism in a new way, sociologists of the 1920s would be instructed by
another literary giant: ‘The works of Franz Kafka give a definitive portrait of the
labyrinthine human big firm – as awesome as the pasteboard models of intricate
robber-baron castles made for children – and the inaccessibility of the supreme
authority’ (Kracauer, 1998[1930]: 48). Kracauer was also careful to sort out the
relationship between the social types that emerged as an ideal and entered general
awareness, and the reality of the workplace.

Salaried employees today live in masses, whose existence . . . increasingly assumes a stan-
dard character. Uniform working relations and collective contracts condition their lifestyle,
which is also subject . . . to the standardizing influence of powerful ideological forces. All
these compulsions have unquestionably led to the emergence of certain standard types of
salesgirl, draper’s assistant, shorthand typist and so on, which are portrayed and at the same
time cultivated in magazines and cinemas. They have entered the general consciousness,
which from them forms its overall image of the new salaried stratum. The question is
whether the image decisively catches reality. It is congruent with reality only in part. To
be precise, it neglects in the main all those features, patterns and phenomena that arise from
the clash between present-day economic necessities and a living matter that is alien to them.
(Kracauer, 1998[1930]: 68)

By living matter Kracauer meant people who a generation before would have been
destined for a more recognisably proletarian existence and who were now faced with the
prospect of being required to conduct themselves in ways that more closely resembled
the ‘formal culture of the genuine bourgeoisie’. Ernest Gellner repeatedly says that most
work in industrial society involves the manipulation of symbols rather than the shaping
of physical material (Gellner, 1983, 1994); Kracauer describes a process in which the
transition from one to the other was not the long and gradual one Gellner implies but
accomplished in less than a generation. If personalities were being shaped it was neither
by (Hennis’s version of) Weber’s life-orders nor by the disciplinary imperatives built
into manual labour, but by an engineering of human souls. Seen against the grand projets
of Fordism and Soviet Prometheanism, we might call it light engineering, yet precisely
because of that it introduced an element of uncertainty into the world-orientations of
those affected.
10 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)

Many [of the new generation of office workers] remain insecure throughout their lives, like
that thoroughly petite-bourgeois female secretary of my acquaintance who tries to signal a
measure of experience by always inserting an English ‘Well’ into her conversation. She has
taken this ‘Well’ from the linguistic arsenal of the successful who get by effortlessly; but
despite this crutch she does not really make much progress, although she already has ten jobs
under her belt. An eventful life, but one that has no direction. (Kracauer, 1998[1930]: 69)10

In metropolitan Berlin there was the additional tension between newfound sexual freedoms
and the availability or non-availability of the language in which to express it. With
remarkable prescience Kracauer documents a young trade union activist’s keeping of a
meticulous record of his correspondence with a lover, who herself expresses her feelings in
the only written idiom in which she feels at home, the office memo: ‘“Dear young
colleague”, writes the nineteen-year-old girl. In this use of titles, some misplaced union
collectivism has a wretched little field day. If the latter’s linguistic creativity flags, busi-
ness German at once steps in to continue the muzzling. Kathe writes: “I am sending you
enclosed the programme for our parents’ evening”. And at the end of one letter she puts on
record: “I look forward to your next communication”’ (Kracauer, 1998[1930]: 72).
If The Salaried Masses documented the rise of new types of office worker whose
identity could not be reduced to a class with a ‘standard of living’, it also pointed up a
decline in the prestige of existing middle-class occupations and identities; the civil
service opens its doors to newcomers, new firms of office workers expand, the patina
of middle-class and professional exclusivity is worn away. One result, contra Marx and
Durkheim, is neither proletarianisation nor a coherent distribution of professions and
their ethics, but finer gradations of status consciousness within the non-manual labour
force and cruder ones between it and the ranks of ‘workers’.
Another takes us outside the workplace to types of a more general nature: there was,
Kracauer believed, a deep inner loneliness in a whole generation of people from various
formerly prestigious professional occupations who are detached from religion yet sceptical
towards modern rationalism. He gave a name to these relativists, but in so doing also
branched out into a more speculative and perhaps more questionable deployment of types
than even Simmel attempted: he called this déclassé generation ‘companions in misfortune’,
and claimed that they faced a number of options. One was the principled scepticism of Max
Weber, who simply kept going, fists clenched in his trouser pockets, through his trough of
misery. A second was that of ‘the short-circuit people’: wanting to ‘reconstruct the shattered
world from the perspective of a higher meaning in which they believe, to suspend their
flawed individuality’ (Kracauer, 1995[1922]: 132), they step into religious faith without
ever embracing it fully and so jump rapidly from one version of it to another. A third
approach was adopted by ‘those who wait’, who are neither principled sceptics like Weber
nor easily tempted by new intellectual fashions; it was these ‘hesitantly open’ social types
who, so he thought, would in future best be able to cope with the challenges of modern living.

Representative figures after all?

If we accept Kracauer’s way of putting it, both scepticism and hesitant openness would
be destroyed a few years later, as Weimar Germany collapsed and the short-circuit
Turner 11

people triumphed. He lived through Nazism, so to speak, in exile. Max Weber, having
died in 1920 shortly after predicting a polar night of icy darkness, would not. I want to
return to Weber now, both to give a sense of how rapid were the changes Kracauer was
documenting, but also because Weber had his own perhaps more instructive version, of
the speculative use of types exemplified by ‘short-circuit people’ and ‘those who wait’.
Shortly before he died, Weber had still thought it possible – perversely during the
slaughter of World War I – for his students to find a middle-class profession they could
devote themselves to. The scholar and the politician might not be representative in
Schmitt’s sense, and Weber made no effort to fit them into a grand plan á la Comte, but
nor were they members of the salaried masses; they could be proper beings in Baudelaire’s
sense, if they understood the challenging conditions under which such venerable vocations
now had to be practised. Then and only then they might become genuine ‘personalities’.
This had been a theme since Weber’s Freiburg inaugural address of 1895. At that time
he had been working on his own Prussian version of the human comedy, his report into the
transformation of agriculture east of the river Elbe, the changing social structure and the
demands this would make on those caught up in it. It is here that he makes his first
reference to social types and to another layer in our survey of them: the question of the
future, he says, is not whether people will be happy, but what ‘kind of people’ they will be
(Weber, 1994a[1895]: 15). He certainly did not come upon this through the statistics alone;
a vast range of reading had led him to it, among them the two figures that for him towered
above the rest: Luther and Weber’s debt to them is well-known but here I want to suggest
another connection: Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nietzsche himself said Emerson had been ‘a
good friend and cheered me up even in black periods’ (Nietzsche, 1967[1908]: 339): his
Übermensch owes something to Emerson’s ‘Over-Soul’ (Emerson, 1983[1841]). Weber’s
‘routinization of charisma’ is an echo of Emerson’s remark that human institutions are the
long shadow of a single individual; and it was from Emerson that Baudelaire borrowed the
idea that the task of modern art was to discover the eternal in the fleeting.
Now in 1850 Emerson had published a book of lectures on Plato, Montaigne, Sha-
kespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe and Napoleon. Its title, Representative Men. They were
all significant figures not (or not quite) because they were ‘great men’ addressing one
another across the centuries in some atemporal firmament of excellence, nor because
they were firmly rooted in their own time: the sceptic, the mystic, the man of the world,
the poet, the philosopher, are broad thematic types with scope for variation between one
age and another. Napoleon, for instance, represents the living labour of those with
fortunes to make rather than the dead labour (Emerson’s terms!) of the aristocracy.

The times, his constitution and his early circumstances combined to develop this pattern
democrat. He had the virtues of his class and the conditions for their activity. That common-
sense which no sooner respects any end than it finds the means to effect it; the delight in the
use of means; in the choice, simplification and combining of means; the directness and
thoroughness of his work; the prudence with which all was seen and the energy with which
all was done, make him the natural organ and head of what I may almost call, from its
extent, the modern party. His grand weapon, namely the millions whom he directed, he
owed to the representative character which clothed him. He interests us as he stands for
France and for Europe. (Emerson, 1982: 347)
12 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)

Emerson here is pushing towards the abstract end of the social types spectrum even as
he uses named individuals for them. If ‘social types’ comprehends occupation (Balzac),
class (Balzac filtered through Lukács), enduring professions (Baudelaire), and those
modern professions worthy of being called ‘vocations’ (Weber), ‘representative men’
transcend the division of labour and class structure entirely: or at least, Napoleon is
called upon to be ‘the attorney of the middle-class’ (Emerson, 1982: 355) and to stand for
a whole continent.
Now this procedure, of using the name of an historical figure for the name of a type,
was once roundly criticised by Hannah Arendt, who complained that Socrates and Jesus
had been used countless times in this way, the person in all his individuality transformed
into a normative model, with attendant distorting effects. If a great poet like Dante got
away with this it was because, as Etienne Gilson put it, ‘a character conserves as much of
its historical reality as the representative function that Dante assigns to it requires’
(Gilson, quoted in Arendt, 1978: 169). ‘It seems easy enough’, Arendt says, ‘to grant
this kind of freedom to poets and to call it licence’, but it is ‘worse when non-poets try
their hand at it. Yet justified or not, that is precisely what we do when we construct “ideal
types” – not out of whole cloth, as in the allegories and personified abstractions so dear to
the hearts of bad poets and some scholars, but out of the crowd of living beings past and
present who seem to possess a representative significance’ (Arendt, 1978: 169).
Emerson’s own approach never really caught on in the social sciences, and it may
have been Weber himself who discouraged it, his effort to construct an ideal type of the
sober modern capitalist out of the not very likely figure of Benjamin Franklin proving an
instructive failure. When writing political commentary, on the other hand, Weber did use
personified abstractions, as normative models and analytical tools. These are scattered
all over his work: in the vocation lectures, in the conclusion to the essay on China, in the
two-page fragment on the tension between the specialist and ‘the cultivated man’ and the
sections on the religious propensities of social groups in Economy and Society, and
perhaps most notably in the extraordinary wartime essay ‘Suffrage and Democracy in
Germany’, where he says that political democracy requires the cultivation of at least
some dominant ideal of human conduct that cuts across social divisions and to which all
citizens can aspire; he then proposes somewhat fancifully that Germany cannot offer a
democratisable ideal – an ‘exemplar’ in Max Scheler’s sense of the term (Scheler,
1987[1933]) – that matches those of ‘the cavalier’ in Latin countries or ‘the gentleman’
in Anglo-Saxon ones (Weber, 1994b[1918]).
Weber’s account of Germany’s need for exemplars like ‘the cavalier’ and ‘the gentle-
man’ was fairly rough-edged. In After Virtue, for all his declared hostility to Weber,
Alasdair MacIntyre tried to polish it. Having set up the central problem of modernity as
‘emotivism’, in which the social world is seen as ‘nothing but a meeting place for
individual wills’ (MacIntyre, 1981: 24), and in which there is no rational foundation for
moral judgements or ethical conduct, he claims that the modern age has nevertheless
seen the emergence of some dominant ‘characters’. These are more general than posi-
tions in the division of labour, or even than social roles. Characters are distinguished by
the fact that the personalities who inhabit or embody them have specific constraints
imposed on them that accompany them throughout their lives. Now the pervasiveness of
the division of labour in modern society, and of occupational role expectations as a
Turner 13

primary vehicle of social control, might lead one to believe that the sort of stock
characters one finds in pre-modern literary genres – MacIntyre’s examples are Japanese
Noh plays or English medieval morality plays – are largely meaningless: society is
simply too mobile. Many occupations are indeed not character-forming at all: dentists
or rubbish collectors may have a specific set of duties to fulfil while on the job, but
having exercised their reason privately as Kant would say, what they do in their spare
time is their own affair. Yet MacIntyre claims, as a matter of analytical principle, that all
cultures, even the most modern and mobile, can be understood in terms of their dominant
characters:

one of the key differences between cultures is the extent to which roles are characters: but
what is specific to each culture is in large and central part what is specific to its stock of
characters. So the culture of Victorian England was partially defined by the character of the
Public School Headmaster, the Explorer and the Engineer; and that of Wilhelmine Germany
was similarly defined by such characters as those of the Prussian Officer, the Professor and
the Social Democrat. (MacIntyre, 1981: 26–7; Breasted, 1964)

The reply to the objection that these are all occupational roles like any other is that
they are much more than this: they are, he says, ‘masks worn by moral philosophies’ (and
emphatically not Marx’s character masks); ‘Victorian public school headmaster’ or
‘Prussian army officer’ are more all-embracing than ‘dentist’ or ‘rubbish collector’.11
Having established character types for England and Germany, MacIntryre then sug-
gested that there are also dominant characters for the modern age as a whole, which cut
across the distinct traditions of individual nation-states: these are the manager, the
aesthete and the therapist – the one whose life is defined by finding the means to achieve
pre-given ends, the one who, in possession of the means, must seek new ends with which
to exercise them, and the one whose task it is to rebalance personalities disrupted by
these imperatives.
Zygmunt Bauman tried something similar, contrasting modern and postmodern soci-
eties through a distinction between the pilgrim on the one hand and strollers/tourists/
vagabonds/’players’ (in this sense, actors) on the other. While the (Protestant) pilgrim’s
wanderings were tied to an identity-building project that promised some future reward,
‘in the postmodern world the vagabond and the tourist are no more marginal people or
marginal conditions. They turn into moulds destined to engross and shape the totality of
life and the whole of quotidianity’ (Bauman, 1993: 242).
Part of the inspiration for this sort of approach came from Philip Rieff, who had
himself announced one of the most abstract of all embodied abstractions, ‘psychological
man’ (Rieff, 1966: 60–1). The decades after the 1950s, he said, would be spent trying to
figure him out, with much work to do before he was as well-known as the Greeks’
political man or the 18th century’s economic man. MacIntyre and Bauman belonged
to a whole generation of scholars who took up Rieff’s challenge, offering sweeping
cultural diagnoses on the basis of equally sweeping claims about the emergence of a
new social type. Very notable here has been the narcissist, a type who seemed to many to
be a key to the problems of the post-1960s American ‘me generation’. A few years ago
14 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)

the career of the concept of the narcissist appeared to have run into the ground but it has
been revived, to a notably different purpose (Lasch, 1978; Lunbeck, 2014; Walsh, 2014).

The supple-minded and neglected scholar is a type too

There was a paradoxical price to be paid for the use of all such very general types: while
they went far beyond the immediacies of the division of labour and class, rather than
adding to the social sciences’ repertoire of analytical tools, they looked serviceable only
for a rather monolithic cultural critique of modernity. Not being one of a battery of types,
the tourist or the manager or organisation man or the narcissist were often asked to
operate, so to speak, on their own, to bear more analytical weight than they could.
I close then, with two notable attempts to do social analysis using social types as Max
Weber thought all ideal types should be used, as heuristic devices that come in sets.
David Riesman’s trio of tradition-directed, inner-directed and other-directed personal-
ities, which first appeared in 1951 (Riesman, 1971), and Alfred Schutz’s man on the
street, expert and well-informed citizen, which appeared in 1946 (Schutz, 1951), are
noteworthy for two things: firstly, if these types are not positions in the division of
labour, or roles, neither are they characters in MacIntyre’s or Bauman’s senses; they
are personality types (Riesman) or modes of world-orientation defined in terms of
‘relevance structures’ (Schutz, 1951: 126); secondly, both of these three-fold distinctions
between types appear to be classificatory but are not, so that any concrete individual
person might be able and likely to be a combination of them or adopt different ones under
different circumstances, just as any concrete polity contains elements of charismatic,
legal-rational and traditional authority.
To be sure, Riesman did, initially, link his tradition-directed, inner-directed and other-
directed personalities to the Middle Ages, post-Renaissance Europe and the consumerist
West respectively. The basic idea was that all societies, very broadly defined, have a
dominant ‘mode of conformity’ (Riesman, 1971: 32). Two revolutions in such modes of
conformity took Europe from tradition-directed to inner-directed and from inner-
directed to other-directed modes. The first – the Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-
Reformation and Enlightenment – cut Europeans off from family- and clan-oriented
traditionalism and taught them how to build a society of strangers; the second, beginning
in the middle of the 19th century, marked a shift from an age of production to one of
consumption, and expanded the range of strangers who needed to be reckoned with and
the range of types of relationship with them any individual had to master.
Though Riesman linked the concept of inner-direction initially to certain positions in
the division of labour, it covered ‘a very wide range of types’ (the banker, tradesman,
small entrepreneur, and engineer all fall under it) and notably cut across distinctions
between Protestant and Catholic (Riesman, 1971: 14); common to them all, Riesman
believed, was that conformity is maintained from within the person, not through external
words and phrases or gestures; tradition does not disappear, however the individual
becomes aware of different traditions and the idea of tradition, but without being plunged
into a world of open choice; that choice is limited by the fact that the non-primary groups
that take people outside the family do not leave them directionless. Other-directedness,
by contrast, is characteristic of societies in which resources are plentiful enough for
Turner 15

capital accumulation to satisfy new consumer needs; the problem faced by individuals is
now not merely the material world and how to conquer scarcity, but other people. Other-
directed types include the bureaucrat and Kracauer’s salaried employee.
The tradition-directed person feels the impact of his/her culture as a unit but has it
mediated by family/group. The sanction for inappropriate behaviour is shame; the inner-
directed person is given a psychic gyroscope by parents to keep him/her on course in a
world of strangers, and when it goes wrong he/she experiences guilt; the point here is that
‘many inner-directed individuals can remain stable even when the reinforcement of
social approval is not available – as in the uptight life of the stock Englishman isolated
in the tropics’ (Riesman, 1971: 24). The other-directed person, the one who emerges with
the advent of consumer culture, is equipped not with a gyroscope but with radar, and
responsive to a much wider circle of influences.12 The prime motivation here is not
maintenance of status but emotional tuning-in, and the chief psychological sanction not
guilt but anxiety.
Riesman tried hard to avoid the attribution of characteristics to societies wholesale, as
in Ruth Benedict’s account of shame cultures and guilt cultures. He was also prescient in
adding anxiety to an apparently exhaustive list of social sanctions.13 The shame-guilt-
anxiety distinction gained attention because of its focus on the problems Riesman
believed were in store for those unable to supplement the gyroscope with radar. In a
reprise of themes in Kracauer, he suggested that there would be consequences for
individual characters from the loss or attenuation of production/exploration and the
move towards consumption and personal relations, or from the manipulation of things
to manipulation of symbols and messages. Indeed, a new preface written in 1969, 18
years after the original publication, contains a passage that, following the UK’s EU
referendum and the US presidential election in 2016, has the ring of prophecy, and
makes the fact that Riesman is barely referred to today one of the more curious cases
of intellectual neglect in the modern social sciences:

given the political structure of the veto groups, it is hard for me to imagine how it will ever
become politically possible to integrate the really poor inside America, let alone outside,
without at the same time greatly raising the levels of living of lower, but not poor socio-
economic groups. That is, the still only insecurely affluent lower-middle and upper working
classes cannot be persuaded to be generous to the truly deprived, especially if these are
black and obstreperous . . . if they themselves do not live on an ever-rising incline of con-
sumer satisfaction. . . . The Lonely Crowd did not take seriously enough the problem of
continuing the expansion of resources to moderate the envies and resentments of the
morally indignant not quite poor. (Riesman, 1971: xvii)

As this passage shows, Riesman sought a form of cultural diagnosis centred on the
adjustment of the personality in class-divided consumer society, but he used social types
in combination and as value-neutral tools of analysis; ‘other-directed personality’ is
more abstract than MacIntyre’s ‘manager’ or ‘aesthete’.
A more determinedly abstract yet still discernibly sociological approach, and one that
avoids ahistorical ‘personality types’, was Alfred Schutz’s ‘well-informed citizen’
(Schutz, 1951). Again, the well-informed citizen was one of three social types, the other
16 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)

two being the ‘man on the street’ and the ‘expert’. The character of each is defined through
a particular ‘social distribution of knowledge’ (ibid.: 120), and their activity structured
through the relationship between ‘zones of relevance’ (ibid.: 126). That is to say, in
anything we do there are things we need to know, those we know we may need to know,
those we might not need to know, and those we will never need to know: call them, if you
are a fan of Donald Rumsfeld, known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns and
unknown unknowns. The difference between these types depends on the hardness of the
boundary between those zones. The ‘man on the street’ going about daily tasks has a series
of ‘in order to’ motives; that is to say his sense of what is relevant is all his own, but he
accomplishes his projects on the basis of recipe knowledge. He makes a clear distinction
between what he needs to know and what he does not need to know: in order to call his
wife he needs to know only how to dial a number and what to say to begin and end the
conversation, not how a telephone works, though he may need to know where to get it
fixed should it fail him. The expert, by contrast, say a scientist working in a large phar-
maceutical research company, while he also has a clear distinction between what is
relevant and what is not, has relevance that is imposed by the nature of his profession,
and his motives are what Schutz called ‘because motives’ (Schutz, 1951). He is given a
task and uses whatever knowledge is needed to get it done, but his job is not to ask why he
is doing it. In contrast to both, the well-informed citizen is not so much someone involved
in a quest for more empirical information about the world, but one ready to hold open or
blur the boundaries between zones of relevance. He or she is neither involved in routine
projects nor in the unquestioning carrying out of an imposed task. Each of us at different
times in our lives or during a single day may experience all three modes of world-
orientation: there are activities that require recipe knowledge, those that require expertise,
and those where the social distribution of knowledge is more open-ended.
Schutz had a diagnostic point that remains of central importance for a culture in which
expert knowledge plays a prominent role: more and more of our everyday projects
involve our unthinking use of devices that are themselves the product of the activity
of experts, activity which is unthinking in its own way. Weber’s remark that the modern
worker knows incomparably less about his tools than someone in the Middle Ages did, is
generalisable way beyond the context in which it was first made. What is less so is his
additional claim that one does not need to know. Schutz’s point was that for democracy
to work, the demos has to be capable of exercising political judgement, judgement that is
difficult when so much of our life depends on the activity of experts whose activity we
are not in a position to evaluate, and when one of the main conduits for such judgement
as does occur is public opinion. For public opinion, Schutz claimed, was a kind of recipe
knowledge writ large. Just as Riesman’s other-directed personality is not a concrete
person or group of persons but code for other-directedness, so the well-informed citizen
is not a group of more discerning individuals, or the republic of letters that Kant’s version
of enlightenment was cashed out in, but code for a mode of world-orientation.

Conclusion
We began with Schmitt on the absence of representative figures. We then saw a succes-
sion of writers trying to make sense of modern society through a mode of cultural
Turner 17

analysis that populates the social scene either with a greater variety of figures than class
analysis can accommodate, or with a limited number of types who are nevertheless more
difficult to place socially than classes are. While this approach has proved tempting, its
virtues are not easy to discern, and the accounts difficult to cash out in conceptual terms.
I suggest two broad conclusions, one substantive and one formal.
The substantive one might be that such failure is the inevitable result of the fact that
Schmitt was right: modern societies have no equivalent of the monk, the knight, and the
cleric, and the rich tableau of social types that the cultural historians and sociologists
have identified is an index of cultural incoherence; however decisive statements about
pilgrims, tourists, managers and aesthetes may sound, they are more a testament to the
imaginations – or the whims – of individual thinkers, to their own sense of significance.
Thus if MacIntyre was right to say that modern societies were morally incoherent, he
also said that traditions are extended arguments about the goods internal to them; beset
by arguments about what counts as significant, it is then hardly surprising that contri-
butions like his own make use of typological constructions that appear arbitrary. At the
same time, perhaps this is a price worth paying for living in modern societies with
relatively fluid social structures. For Schmitt’s ‘absence of representative figures’ we
can read ‘liberal democracy’; if his normative order contained a limited number of
estates, communism sought to redefine class as estate and thereby produce a single
model social type, homo sovieticus.
The formal conclusion might be that the lack of definitiveness in sociologists’ use of
social types tells us something about the discipline of sociology itself, with its ambiguous
position between science and literature, between the dryness of social stratification
surveys (Savage, 2015) and the richness of the novel. If that is true, then the task of
students of society who wish to make serious use of social types is a daunting one. How
should they proceed?
There seems to be no template. Schutz’s hesitantly open, well-informed citizen might
give us the required attitude; he or she is after all one for whom the lines between zones
of relevance are blurred. And as Emerson himself said, while empiricism gives us real
men and women without any sense of their significance, and over-abstract generalisa-
tions give us mere ‘skipping ghosts’ (Emerson, 1982: 319), the true student of history
will understand that only through the use of types can one say something significant
about those real men and women. The challenge is to deploy social types flexibly but
firmly, as ‘a coat woven of elastic steel’ (ibid.: 320).
That is easier said than done, not least because after a century of this sort of account
the line between the frivolous use made of social types by opportunist authors (Goodhart,
2017) and the serious use made of them by scholars such as MacIntyre and Bauman is
less clear than it ought to be. To be sure, ‘people of somewhere’ and ‘people of nowhere’
are clumsier than ‘managers’ and ‘tourists’, and in any case, the former are tools leaned
on too heavily, while the latter are the summary of discussions that can pretty well stand
without them. And yet sophisticated tools – and techniques for using them – are what the
social sciences need. Here, while we may be ecumenical and say that sociology has
always had a place for both broad brush cultural diagnosis using social types as headline
terms, and more formalistic and sophisticated theorising, particularly in its accounts of
the nature of social action, they might have learned more from one another than they
18 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)

have (Brubaker, 2002). I think Riesman and Schutz – Riesman especially – were trying
to bridge that gap in the 1950s; I am not sure that many have journeyed across it since.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. Nisbet rather missed his own point when he claimed that Marx’s ‘portrait’ of ‘The Bourgeois’
is paradigmatic for many later accounts of the new types of people who began to appear in
Europe in the 19th century (Nisbet, 1976). Seen in the light of what social historians have
given us as it is barely a sketch, but that is just the point: its very two-dimensionality makes it
all the more powerful.
2. An inventory of Balzac’s characters compiled in the 1920s did come up with about two
thousand (Preston, 1926). See also Collini (2004).
3. More recent criticism, ever-more attuned to sins of omission, has suggested that the teeming
world of types in Balzac is still not as various as it might be (Lucey, 2003).
4. Lukács’ remark that typical is not the same as average recalls Balzac’s contemporary, the
statistician Quetelet, who in 1835 announced the concept of the average human being. An
astronomer by training, he had proposed that, since different measurements of the speed of the
planet Jupiter produced different results, in the absence of improved measuring instruments,
the greatest accuracy was to be had by taking an average of all the inaccurate ones. From these
decidedly iffy beginnings he extended the idea of the average measurement to almost any-
thing, transforming it in the process into a standard of excellence. Thus while we all have our
own height or weight, those with an average height or weight could be considered not only
normal but the norm, and any height or weight that differed from this could be considered
deviant. The average human being became a rallying cry for an era of social levelling.
5. Weber’s batteries of types of rule, modes of religious organisation, religious sensibilities,
action, and so on, however mixed up they were with his effort to diagnose his time, and
however much they were originally rooted in particular historical realities, were supposed to
be resources that any scholar could use to analyse any society at any period. Lukács thought
that Balzac’s types also transcended their own time, but not in that way; they were, on the
contrary, types of people that were still recognisable today but which Balzac had captured in
their historical emergence.
6. By the same token, if the novel is ‘a hybrid form which must be reinvented at every moment of
its development’ (Jameson, 1971: 172), then Balzacian realism, with its marrying of type to
character, is only one direction, and one stage. Thus it is one thing for the plot to be ‘acted out
by particular people in particular circumstances, rather than, as had been common in the past,
by general human types against a background finally determined by the appropriate literary
conventions’ (Watt, 2001: 15); it is another for that emphasis on particularity to be taken as far
– several steps too far in Lukács’ eyes – as modernism took it. The relationship between the
Turner 19

realist novel, the modernist novel and sociology is discussed too little. But it is a tantalising
idea that the classical sociologists, who managed to combine epistemological self-awareness
with robust criteria of significance, were heir to much that was good in the realist novel as
Lukács defined it, and that today’s sociologists, disdainful of the philosophy of the social
sciences, are heir to much of what he said was bad in the modernist novel. ‘The selective
principle which apparently underlies modernist writing is no more than a crude selection of
content on the one hand, and of technique on the other’ (Lukács, 1978[1916]: 35) might have
been a description of many social science PhD theses, where a battery of the latest research
tools is fired at a randomly selected target.
7. In ancient Rome it was only slaves who were not entitled to a ‘persona’ (Mauss, 1985: 17).
8. Scutari, on the European side of the Bosphorous, was the original site of Florence Night-
ingale’s military hospital and cemetery before they were moved to Kädikoy on the Asian side,
where the cemetery can still be found. The consecration in the painting was carried out by
Bishop of Gibraltar. In recognition of Britain’s support for the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean
war a church was erected in the Beyoğlu district of Constantinople; it is part of the diocese of
Gibraltar to this day.
9. Caesar and Alcibiades were dandies for Baudelaire.
10. Kracauer appears well ahead of his time here, as does the now forgotten Frances Donovan,
whose participant ethnographies documented the rise of a new generation of working women
in the USA in the 1920s (Donovan, 1919, 1929, 1938).
11. While the main focus of commentary on MacIntyre has been his claim that the Kantian project
of providing a rational foundation for morality was ‘bound to fail’ because it ran up against
‘modern social ontology’, seen against the background of MacIntyre’s approach to social
analysis, Kant’s (Protestant!) idea of enlightenment presupposes that there are no ‘characters’
at all: the Prussian Officer, Kant thought, is no less capable than the dentist of leaving his
professional duties aside and making public use of his own reason. World War II destroyed the
Prussian Officer as a type; the Social Democrat fared much better and, as anyone who has
attended an academic conference at which Germans are present will attest, the Wilhelmine
Professor has not entirely faded away.
12. Riesman’s father ran a company that manufactured gyroscopes. Some sociologists’ metaphors
are closer to home than others.
13. In the mid-20th century, without anyone having to mention interdisciplinarity, there was
considerable to and fro between the social sciences and literature. The Lonely Crowd of
1951 came out four years after W.H. Auden – resident, like Riesman and Hannah Arendt,
in New York, and acquainted with both – published the book-length poem ‘The Age of
Anxiety’. Auden in turn had been much influenced by Jung’s Psychological Types of 1921,
so much so that the poem features characters modelled on its eight-fold schema.

References
Arendt, H. (1978) The Life of the Mind. New York: Free Press.
Balzac, H. (2011[1842]) Introduction to The Human Comedy. https://balzacbooks.wordpress.com/
2011/07/14/balzacs-introduction-to-la-comedie-humaine/.
Baudelaire, C. (1986[1863]) ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in C. Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare
and Other Prose Writings. London: Soho Books, pp. 21–72.
Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics. Cambridge: Polity.
20 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)

Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Breasted, E. K. (1964) Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany: Social Types in German
Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brubaker, R. (2002) ‘Ethnicity without Groups’, Archives Europeenes de Sociologie 43: 163–89.
Chesterton, G. K. (1907) ‘Introduction’, in C. Dickens, Great Expectations. London: J.M. Dent.
Collini, S. (2004) ‘On Variousness; and On Persuasion’, New Left Review 27: May–June.
Connerton, P. (1980) The Tragedy of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dahrendorf, R. (1964) Homo Sociologicus, 4th edn. Koln: Westdeutscher Verlag.
Donovan, F. (1919) The Woman who Waits. Boston: Richard J. Badger.
Donovan, F. (1929) The Saleslady. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Donovan, F. (1938) The Schoolma’am. New York: Frederick A. Stokes.
Durkheim, E. (1958) Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Emerson, R. W. (1982) Selected Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Emerson, R. W. (1983[1841]) Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) ‘Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed
Person’, in H. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, pp. 118–40.
Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gellner, E. (1994) Conditions of Liberty. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Goffman, E. (1961) Asylums. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Co.
Goffman, E. (1963) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall.
Goldberg, C. A. (2012) ‘Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American
Sociology’, Laboratorium 4: 199–217.
Goodhart, D. (2017) The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics.
London: Hurst.
Hennis, W. (1987) Personality and Life Orders: Max Weber’s Theme, in S. Lash and S. Whimster
(eds) Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity. London: Allen and Unwin, pp. 52–74.
Jameson, F. (1971) Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kracauer, S. (1995[1922]) ‘Those Who Wait’, in S. Kracauer The Mass Ornament: Weimar
Essays, trans T. Y. Levin. London: Harvard University Press, pp. 129–42.
Kracauer, S. (1998[1930]) The Salaried Masses. London: Verso.
Lasch, C. (1978) The Culture of Narcissism. New York: W.W. Norton.
Lepenies, W. (1986) Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lucey, M. (2003) The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Lukács, G. (1964[1950]) Studies in European Realism. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.
Lukács, G. (1978[1916]) The Theory of the Novel. London: Merlin Press.
Lunbeck, E. (2014) The Americanzation of Narcissism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Macintyre, A. (1981) After Virtue. Aldershot: Duckworth.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1977) Werke. Band IV. Berlin: Dietz.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2010) Collected Works Vol. 47. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Turner 21

Mauss, M. (1985) ‘The Person: A Category of the Human Mind’, in M. Carrithers, M. Collins and
S. Lukes (eds) The Category of the Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–25.
Morgan, M. S. (2006) ‘Economic Man as Model Man: Ideal Types, Idealization and Caricatures’,
Journal of the History of Economic Thought 28: 1–27.
Nietzsche, F. (1967[1908]) ‘Why I am So Clever’, in F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals and
Ecce Homo. New York: Random House, pp. 236–58.
Nisbet, R. (1967) The Sociological Tradition. London: Heinemann.
Nisbet, R. (1976) Sociology as an Art Form. London: Macmillan.
Parsons, T. (1949) Essays in Sociological Theory. New York: Free Press.
Preston, E. (1926) Recherches sur la technique de Balzac: le retour systematique des personnages
dans la Comedie humaine [Research into Balzac’s Technique: The Systematic Return of
Characters in the Human Comedy]. Paris: Les Presses Françaises.
Rieff, P. (1966) The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Riesman, D. (1971) The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Savage, M. (2015) Social Class in the 21st Century. London: Pelican Books.
Scheler, M. (1987[1933]) ‘Exemplars of Persons and Leaders’, in M. Scheler, Person and Self-
Value: Three Essays. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 125–98.
Schmitt, C. (1996[1923]) Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press.
Schutz, A. (1951) ‘The Well-Informed Citizen’, in Collected Papers Vol. II. The Hague: Nijhoff.
Simmel, G. (1971) On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Turner, C. (2010) Investigating Sociological Theory. London: Sage.
Walsh, J. (2014) Narcissism and its Discontents. London: Palgrave.
Watt, I. (2001) The Rise of the Novel, 2nd American edn. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weber, M. (1994a[1895]) ‘The Nation State and Economic Policy’, in M. Weber Political
Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–28.
Weber, M. (1994b[1918]) ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany’, in M. Weber, Political
Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 80–129.

Author biography
Charles Turner teaches sociology at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Modernity
and Politics in the Work of Max Weber (1992), and Investigating Sociological Theory (2010).