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Explains how major 19th and 20th century theorists can help us understand and preserve human species survival today

This book presents unique, critical, summaries of major works that the author proposes as the core classical sociological theory (Émile Durkheim’s), as the three main supplementary classical sociological theories (Karl Marx’s, Max Weber’s, and Abdurahman Muhammad Ibn Khaldûn’s), and as two key precursor theories (Thomas Malthus’s and Charles Darwin’s).

The author discusses, using many supporting quotations from the originals, themes from Darwin’s The Origin of Species; Malthus’s First Essay on Population; Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society, Suicide, Moral Education, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and The Rules of Sociological Method; Marx’s Capital, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and Wage Labor and Capital; Weber’s Economy and Society, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, and The Methodology of the Social Sciences; and Ibn Khaldûn’s The Muqaddimah, together with works that employ the same basic theme as the latter that originated as part of 20th century Western sociology.

Darwin introduced the concept of “natural selection,” that is, the non-foresightful, non-preparatory, and therefore probabilistically reactive, survival mechanism whereby a single hypothetically original life species has survived on Earth by differentiating itself into the hundreds of millions of species that have existed so far (most of which have already gone extinct). Malthus, however, had already introduced the idea of a proactive theory that would anticipate and prepare our species to meet survival threats before they actually occur.

The central question of this book, then, is What do the theories examined here contribute to our eventually constructing a sociological theory that would participate in identifying, forecasting, and preparing our descendants to meet future threats to human species survival?

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From the Book:

The conventional way of understanding and using classical sociological theory claims that knowledge of the political, economic, and other circumstances in which the theories were written and of the persons who wrote them are indispensable. We are told that “a correct appraisal of a particular thought is often difficult, if not impossible, if the social context in which it took root cannot be understood.” For example, “you cannot understand [Max] Weber’s thought if you fail to place yourself, through an imaginative leap, in the intellectual and social climate in which he wrote” (Coser 1977, xiii, xv). Twenty years later we can still read that “Brief biographies of the classical theorists” (Craib 1997, xv) are essential to understanding the theories they wrote.
This book rejects all such positions. We argue that for comprehending and making empirically descriptive, explanatory, and predictive use of theories, the only important thing is the extent to which the theories make empirical sense to readers and users in their times and places, not to the authors in theirs. We should therefore expect the “correct appraisal” of the theories to change, perhaps radically, with new times, new places, new readers. (Case in point: the twenty-first-century revival of interest in Einstein’s “cosmological constant,” which we are told he himself thought was the biggest mistake of his life.)
We argue that it simply does not matter who wrote the theories in question—we could just as well give numbers or Greek letters to the theories as name them. It does not matter when or where the writers lived, who they hung out with or fought with, what their genders, ages, socioeconomic statuses, ethnicities, races, or nationalities were, or anything of the sort. After all, who in their right mind would prepare for a trip through unfamiliar territory not by perusing an up-to-date roadmap, not by getting the car checked out, not by filling the gas tank, and so forth, but by reading up on the life and times of the people who invented the gasoline engine, the accelerator, the brake, the steering wheel?
It will surely be noticed, however, that all but one of the classical theories examined here were based on observations made mainly on just a few Western European societies (France, England, Germany, the United States). Only Abdurahman Muhammad Ibn Khaldûn, a Tunisian, wrote about Near Eastern societies, and nothing is said by him or any other theorist here about China, the oldest and the fourth largest of existing civilizations. Nevertheless, the theories discussed here are among the classical Western foundations of all the social sciences and we are concerned with them here because they seem sure to figure into the global theory of human sociocultural phenomena as it emerges.
“From the Introduction: Malthus’s and Darwin’s Precursor Theories”

WALTER L. WALLACE holds degrees from Columbia University, Atlanta University, and the University of Chicago. He has taught at Spelman College, Northwestern University, and, from 1971 to 2001, Princeton University — where he is now Professor Emeritus. He has also been a Staff Sociologist at Russell Sage Foundation. In addition to articles in scholarly journals and books edited by others, he is author of Student Culture (1966), Sociological Theory (author-editor, 1969), The Logic of Science in Sociology (1971), Black Elected Officials (with James E. Conyers, 1976), Principles of Scientific Sociology (1983), A Weberian Theory of Human Society (1994), and The Future of Ethnicity, Race, and Nationality (1997). He has served on the editorial boards of Social Forces (1984-1987), The American Sociologist (1988-1991), The Sociological Quarterly (1989-1992), The American Sociological Review (1997-2000), and Sociological Theory (2000-2003). He was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences (1968-1969), and is currently a member of The Sociological Research Association, and of The Advisory Board, International Journal of Comparative Sociology. He has been listed in Who’s Who in America since 1986.

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