Kieran Healy: Books on The Science of Social Life

A question like this invites me to conjure up a fantasy where I, a Wise Person, am approached by a cheeky but curious child. I take a momentary break from thinking Wise Thoughts, look into the middle distance, and say, “Well, Sociology is the science of social life. Sociologists ask questions about how people’s lives together are organized. Not just organized on purpose, but also organized by half-hidden rules and expectations we share or impose on one another.” I pause, quite pleased with myself. “Now, child, you may ask, how is that different from a discipline like History, or Psychology, or Anthropology, or Economics? To answer that question we must inquire into the development of academic fie—” I look around. The child has run away.

I am currently reading Law and Revolution by Harold Berman, The Origins of Unfairness by Cailin O’Connor and The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons.

Again with this fantasy where I shape the mind of a youth. “Child, during my earlier discourse you fled, but you have underestimated my ability to track you down. Let me push into your infant hands this copy of Pensées by Blaise Pascal or this edition of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong. May they entertain you as they did me when I was a boy!” I think the last book I really did encourage a young person to read was The Hoboken Chicken Emergency by Daniel Pinkwater. It’s very good.

As jobs go, most of the ones I’ve had have been perfectly fine. Even the relatively bad ones were mostly just boring. The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, defines a “pulverbatch” as the collection of menial jobs an author claims to have had before becoming famous. My pulverbatch is weak. My prospects for literary fame are therefore dim.

For me, the most enjoyable parts of teaching are not very pedagogically sophisticated. For example, sometimes I teach people about data visualization. It is very enjoyable to give someone a tangible skill or technique that they were unaware of before, that they can grasp quickly, and that they can immediately see will be useful to them. That’s a good feeling! But I also teach social theory. I think it’s an interesting and important topic, but this is a minority view. For various reasons, students often resent being made to learn and think about it. Many eventually come to understand why you put them through it, which is another way of saying that you successfully educated them. But this tends to happen after the course is done and by then they are far away.

On my specific career path of being a sociologist, the books I feel are important to read are the ones I teach in my courses. This is one of the main benefits of being an academic! You can take books like, say, The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, or Racecraft by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields, or The Sources of Social Power by Michael Mann, and say “Read this!” and then they have to read it. It’s great.

It would be very strange to have never read any book more than once. I re-read books constantly, either because I’m teaching it or because I’m trying to understand something better. One of the best things that a good undergraduate class can teach you is how to re-read something properly. For example, I don’t know anything about early modern German history, but I had to read Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany by David Warren Sabean, very slowly, carefully and repeatedly as part of a Sociology of Community course as a third-year undergraduate. I learned a tremendous amount in the process. The cases are fascinating: a girl who is branded as a witch; a man who publicly refuses to say his prayers; the ritual burial of a bull at a crossroads. For me, it was the first academic monograph whose structure and argument I really grasped. In the process, I came to understand how hard it must be to write a book that good.

I am bad at favourites, I’m afraid.

The physical layout of the book is directly inspired by The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. A book I knew already and really wanted to emulate in some ways is Visualizing Data by William S. Cleveland. That book (and another one of his, The Elements of Graphing Data) is one of those classics that aren’t widely known out in the world but which every expert in a field has sitting on their shelf. And a book I did not know before starting to write mine, but which I learned a great deal from, is Visual Thinking for Design by Colin Ware. There were many others besides these, of course.

What humanity needs right now cannot be delivered in book form.

Transformative Experience by L.A. Paul, because of the effect it had on its author.

I’m tempted to say The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life or Behavior in Public Places, both by Erving Goffman, because like many people over the past year I have forgotten how to do these things and will need to brush up on my skills. Everyone should read more Goffman.

The idea of me writing an autobiography is laughable. Good autobiographies are written by people whose lives are filled with notable or entertaining events, who are unselfconscious enough to be candid, but self-aware enough not to be tedious. I fail on all these counts.