A reflection on Gouldner's conceptions of state power and political liberation

Conclusion: Learning from Gouldner

Although Gouldner's arguments in his study of Stalinism may not be fully adequate — even to explain that complex historical episode, let alone to provide grounding for a full comparative-historical and morally sensitive political sociology — they do, I have maintained, offer a more workable approach to questions of state power and better glimpses into the requisites for responsible, humane politics than the more sweeping “theoretical” pronouncements Gouldner offered on these matters at the end of The Two Marxisms. Aside from gaining clarity about which particular arguments from Gouldner's partially contradictory legacy I, as a political sociologist, will want to rely and build on in the future, I also learn a broadly “methodological” lesson from this juxtaposition of grand theorizing and historical investigation. I alluded to that lesson back at the start of this reflection by invoking Arthur Stinchcombe's argument in Theoretical Methods of Social History that good theory comes from concrete historical analysis rather than from elaborations of general ideas.

To me it is quite obvious that, where Gouldner's explorations in political sociology are at issue, better theory did come out of an historical investigation than out of the critiques of sociological functionalism and Marxism to which he gave his greatest and most passionate lifelong efforts. I value the critiques for their vivid characterizations and telling criticisms, and for what they tell us about how social theories develop. But as a political sociologist, I will do well, I conclude, to listen more closely to Gouldner's methodological prescriptions at the start of the essay on Stalinism: “Social theory should focus,” Gouldner said, “on the development of empirically grounded case studies of critical historical episodes, rather than on encyclopedic textual reinterpretations, or on merely logical deduction of the supposed requisites of emancipation.” “Generally, social and political analysis gains more from careful theoretically refined case studies... than from grand theories of emancipation whose historical function is the provision of Weltanschaaungen. ” It is, of course, only testimony to the richness of Gouldner's thought that he himself can have the last word, even in a discussion devoted, however gently, to criticizing him.