WP2012/03

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Disclaimer

The following list of recommendations is of highly personal nature. The texts are my favourites – not

anybody else’s. Other lecturers might recommend other readings. The list comprises titles and

examples ranging from philosophy to journalism, passing through literature, history, sociology,

political theory, economics and social anthropology. The list is by no means comprehensive. Another

year and different circumstances and a different list might have been the result. I would also like to

point out that this list is geared towards the English-speaking student (although it contains some

titles from non-Anglophone authors). To compile a similar list for a different language and culture

would produce a very different outcome. And finally, if you are interested in reading sociology titles

only, you might as well give up studying sociology now. What applies to languages also applies to

academic disciplines: those who only know one language (or discipline) don’t even know that one

well.

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Instead of an Introduction: A Personal Note

At the time I entered university as a sociology student the system was still quite open to suggestions

from students what to do when it came to first assignments. Being a somewhat uncritical admirer of

Adorno and Benjamin I wanted to do my first essay on something related to the early Frankfurt

School. My idea for the assignment was to describe how Alfred Sohn-Rethel (an early collaborator of

Adorno) had linked commodity production to epistemology.

I duly registered my topic with one of my professors who, as it happened, had studied with Adorno

and who had also worked at the famous Freud Institute. The professor was first surprised but then

agreed. I guess she did not want to curtail the enthusiasm of a newcomer. A few weeks later I

handed in my essay. To my complete surprise, she ripped the essay apart. Not only had I tried to

copy Adorno’s style by using such cheap tricks as postponing the self-reflexive pronoun as long as

possible (it only works in German), but the whole essay was full of jargon. To make a long story short,

I had only managed to produce a cheap copy of Frankfurt style reflection.

Fortunately, the professor showed some sympathy for a struggling student. Giving me another

chance, she suggested that I should submit another piece of work. However, one condition applied: I

had to do the essay on something that was totally different from critical theory. The suggestion was

that I should write my essay on speech-analytical philosophy.

For the next two months or so I struggled over my 15 pages. Anybody who has ever read some or

written about speech-analytical philosophy will know what I went through. It was as logical as it

could be. (The next step would have consisted of using mathematical formulas.) To make sense of

the reading you had to be as precise as possible and very careful about the meaning of individual

words and sentences and their proper relations. I finally handed in my essay − and got a pass.

The lesson was not forgotten: no more hiding behind jargon; the precise meaning of words was

something to strive for; equally, reading more carefully and being extremely vigilant while writing

were of the essence. Last but not least, I learned that one should never be too proud of what one has

produced; there is always a word one can take out.

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Some Literary Classics to Start With

There are many classics that are recommendable but since we are dealing here mostly with the

humanities and social sciences, I limit myself to recommending only a few shorter literary classics.

However, they are not only master examples of the economics of writing but also great lessons of

how substance and content find their appropriate form and expression – something that any student

should take note of.

Montaigne was not the first one to use the essay form (Seneca tried something similar long before)

but he was certainly the one who made the essay as we know it today popular. The man from

Bordeaux is always timely (or timeless, it depends on how you look at it). He covered almost every

aspect of social life, although he had of course no knowledge of what today is called modern society.

He was an astute observer and surely a true master craftsman when it came to writing. If you’re ever

short of ideas or looking for a good quote, Montaigne’s Collected Works (Everyman’s Library, London

2003) will not disappoint.

Any of Jonathan Swift’s essays are lessons from another modern craftsman. I recommend particularly

“A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders”. This letter was written to instruct

a younger generation of ministers on how to address a congregation. Although written for the

purpose of preaching, its appeal lies in the fact that it is actually an argument against the boring

aspects of preaching. Another piece by Swift stems from The Intelligencer, No. IX. “On Modern

Education” and deals with learning curves and why sometimes education works and sometimes

won’t. Both essays are demonstrations of Swift’s remarkable command of rhetoric, full of irony and

satire but also of substantial argumentation. (The two essays are available in various Swift editions).

Far less ironic than Swift was Heinrich von Kleist, a German writer who wrote under the spell of many

contradicting influences such as the French Revolution and Prussian reform culture. His work defies

any simple categorization. Two outstanding essays of his, “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts

Whilst Speaking” [written 1805] and “The Puppet Theatre” [1810], will draw any reader in − an

achievement of his extraordinary writing skills (both essays are available in Kleist’s Selected Writings,

London: J. M. Dent, 1997).

Henry Thoreau’s Walden or, Life in the Woods (Everyman’s Library, New York 1992 [1854]) is very

different when compared to the texts of the three writers just mentioned. Walden is a report of a

year of solitary retreat at Walden Pond, a lake in Massachusetts. Each chapter of that report is

actually a self-contained essay; the most outstanding is perhaps the “Economy” chapter. I also

recommend Thoreau’s Journal because it allows for an insight into how Thoreau worked and how he

turned observation and reflection into good writing. (A good selection of the Journal has recently

been published by the New York Review of Books Series; New York 2009). Stanley Cavell’s The Senses

of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) shows how Thoreau invents himself as a

writer, almost in an existentialist way.

Herman Melville’s short stories belong to my all-time favourite readings, particularly his novellas

“Bartleby, the Scrivener”, “Benito Cereno” or “Billy Budd” (all three texts are available either

separately on their own or together in various editions of Melville’s short stories). “Bartleby” is

perhaps the most modern story of the three. Melville writes like Kafka before Kafka. The pace at

which the story is set keeps the reader at the edge of his seat. It describes the weird ginger-eating

scrivener who simply resists engaging with what he clearly regards as a hostile world. The reader is

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left in constant suspension as to an explanation of his standard reaction to orders and demands (“I

prefer not to...”) − until the last page gives a hint as to the secret and strange behaviour of Bartleby.

“Benito Cereno” is equally well paced. The story builds up bit by bit until the tension becomes almost

unbearable, pretty much towards two-thirds of the story, when suddenly all hell breaks loose. “Billy

Budd” is again differently paced and reveals the tragic story of how law is applied without any sense

of justice – a very modern story, indeed.

From the modern classics I recommend Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (New York: Scribner 1925).

This is a collection of the shortest stories one can possibly imagine (it takes some discipline and skill

to write short stories that run only over a couple of paragraphs). Hemingway learned his trade first as

a journalist and it is through his journalistic pieces that Hemingway made his name. His best

newspaper articles are available in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,

1967). Most outstanding in this collection are perhaps the reports and articles from the Spanish Civil

War. The shorter writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote, two contemporaries of

Hemingway, are equally recommendable. Any sociologist must find Fitzgerald’s portrait of American

East Coast society in The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925) and in “Echoes of

the Jazz Age” (in the essay collection The Crack-Up; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931)

fascinating. The same applies to Truman Capote’s craftsmanship, particularly his true crime report In

Cold Blood (New York: Random House 1965). No criminologist could do better.

Any reference to excellent examples of how to use the short form of the essay effectively has to

mention George Orwell. His essays “Imaginary Interview: George Orwell and Jonathan Swift”, “The

Prevention of Literature” and “Why I Write” and “Politics and the English Language (all in: Essays,

London: Everyman’s Library, 2002) are of the first order. There are, however, many other

outstanding authors who have given insights to, and have commented as to how they compose their

texts. I just recommend here three of my favourite writers. Norman Maclean’s short novel A River

Runs Through It (Chicago, University of Chicago Press) is far more than a fly-fishing story and

amounts to a somewhat disguised philosophy of life. The explanatory essays that go along with the

short novel and help the reader to understand the text have recently been published in The Norman

Maclean Reader (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). Maclean here tells the story of how

he was taught to write effectively by his Scottish Presbyterian father: “Being a Scot, he tried to make

me write economically. He tried to make me write primarily with nouns and verbs, and not to fool

around with adjectives and adverbs, not even when I wanted to write soul stuff. At nine o’clock,

when the first period began, he would assign me a 200-word theme; at the end of the ten o’clock

period he would tell me, ‘Now rewrite it in 100 words’; and he concluded the morning by telling me,

‘Now, throw it away.’ Sometimes in my study room alone I shed as many tears as I sacrificed words.

In the next period, to brace me up, he would say, ‘My boy, never be too proud to save a single

word.’”

Ralph Ellison’s Essays (The Modern Library: New York, 2003) also give an insight into the author’s

laboratory (he is the famous author of Invisible Man) and so do Robert Musil’s selected essays,

Precision and Soul (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). Here you can learn more about

the thinking behind two of Musil’s unsurpassed masterpieces, the novella Törless and the 1000plus-

page The Man without Qualities.

If you are looking for examples of how to use the shorter form (an essay, a narrative or short story, a

longer diary or journal entry) and how to use pace, melody, expressive skills in order to transport

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meaning to greater effect, these recommended texts are as good as it gets. To gain a more

comprehensive idea of what good literary writing and the skills involved are all about, check out Greil

Marcus and Werner Sollors (eds.) A New Literary History of America (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). In this magnificent compilation you will find plenty of hints.

The entries themselves are excellent examples of how to write with a limited amount of space

available. Those who want to orient themselves in what is often regarded as a complex and often

confusing international world of letters should read Pascale Casanova’s fascinating account The

World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). It will help to make the most

important connections.

Reading and Writing: Some General Remarks

The secret to good writing lies of course in good reading. Are you surrounding yourself with good

literature? If you read sociology or social science material only you are in trouble already. Think

again: Why would you want to cut yourself off from most of what humanity has produced in the long

course of its existence? It is like dealing only with a tiny percentage of what the human race has

experienced.

While it is true that the number of social science books is on the increase, there is no automatic

relationship between massive output and quality – au contraire. Let’s be frank, most of the social

science literature has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to readable prose. Often social

scientists have serious trouble making themselves understood, usually by hiding behind jargon and

highly specialised and technical language.

On the spectrum of bad writing one can encounter usually two extremes. Theoretical texts often end

up being written in the most obscure of languages, amounting to pure jargon or totally logic-free

argumentation, free of any consistency. The writing of Slavoj Zizek (a social theorist from former

Slovenia) would certainly qualify as a negative example. In particular French social theory seems to

be infested with this kind of expression; from Jacques Lacan (psychoanalytic theory) to Julia Kristeva

(literary criticism) there are plenty of examples of how to make texts look obscure (and thereby

attractive to some). Not to be misunderstood, my argument is not one against theoretical reflection

and abstraction but simply one against charlatanry. Even if one feels ambiguous or is in doubt, why

not say so instead of pretending otherwise? The other extreme of bad writing is represented by

those social scientists who hide behind numbers (“quantoids” as one of my esteemed colleagues

once called them). In some extreme cases counting even has replaced judgement (“just the facts,

Madam, just the facts”), as if there were such a thing as interpretation-free ‘objective’ data. As Max

Weber rightly pointed out in his public address “Science as a Vocation” (1922) (re-published in: Hans

Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds.: From Max Weber, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1946) our task as

academics and intellectuals is to be clear when we address an audience. This of course presupposes

that we ourselves make an effort of gaining clarity first.

A good starting point for a list of recommendations would be not to begin with reading or writing

examples but to look first at how language itself works and what it can achieve. One of the most

comprehensive accounts of what language is and what one can do with it is David Crystal’s

magisterial Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Chrystal’s How Language Works: How Babies Babble. Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or

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Die (Overlook Press, New York 2005) picks up on some selected themes from his earlier

Encyclopaedia. Enlightening is also Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the

World (London: Harper Collins 2005). This comprehensive study looks at the history of languages,

how our language(s) came into being and how older languages died while others survived.

What we do when we think and what happens exactly when we are using words and concepts and

how this all relates to consciousness and social action is discussed in some modern philosophical

classics such as J. L. Austin’s How to do Things with Words (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1962), Charles

Sanders Peirce’s essay “How to make our ideas clear” in: Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York:

Dover Publications 1955), John Dewey’s: How we think (Dover Publications, Mineola, NY: 1997

[reprint of the original 1910 publication]), Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logicus (London:

Routledge 2001; originally from 1922) and Benjamin Lee Whorf’s Language, Thought, and Reality

(MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 1956). For those who are more interested in the psychological effects

and the exact science of reading and descriptions of what exactly happens in your brain while you’re

reading I recommend Maryanne Wolfe’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading

Brain (New York: Harper, 2008), and Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The Science and

Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking 2009).

Reading, writing and knowledge production are inseparately linked as Peter Burke’s A Social History

of Knowledge shows (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). One would think that it is almost impossible to write

a history of reading and not write at least a thousand pages but that is exactly what Alberto Manguel

has done in his rather short but concise A History of Reading (London, Penguin 1996). The Library at

Night (New York: Knopf 2006) by the same author is a variation on the theme of reading habits and

looks, as the title suggests, at the purpose of book collections and libraries. Manguel’s essay

collection A Reader on Reading takes Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (London: Penguin,

1998) seriously by elaborating on the idea that all true reading is actually subversive. Sometimes

reading can indeed be a cure and lift the spirit, as Marcel Proust has reminded us in his reflections On

Reading (London: Souvenir Press 1972): “Reading can become a sort of curative discipline and

assume the task, through repeated stimulation, of curiously reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of

the spirit. Books then play for it a role similar to that of the psychotherapist for certain

neurasthenics”.

Guglielmo Cavallo’s and Roger Chartier’s A History of Reading in the West (Cambridge, Polity, 1999)

contains contributions of some of the best historians on how reading, reading patterns and

audiences have changed over the last three thousand years. Robert Darnton’s The Case for Books

(New York: Public Affairs, 2010) and Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2010) will both tell you that despite all the scaremongering about the

disappearance of books we will continue to read.

Anthony Grafton is probably the most outstanding humanist scholar writing today. In Forgers and

Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1990) he tells us that despite common belief, copying and forging are pretty much activities at the

heart of western civilisation. However, with the rise of the footnote it became harder to hide behind

forging and copying. Grafton describes the social history of that change in his The Footnote – A

Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). The same author’s essay collection

Worlds made out of Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2009) is a wonderful account of humanistic scholarship and how it has survived until

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today. Particularly the masterful essay “The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950-2000 and

Beyond” needs specific mentioning.

Note also how important translations are. There is hardly a better discussion about the world of

different languages and how they relate to each other through translation and interpretation as

George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press

1975). It is truly sad that not more attention is paid and credit given to those skills and outstanding

interpretations without which we would have no access to other cultures and societies, never mind

gaining a deeper understanding of them.

In terms of what to avoid at all costs when it comes to argumentation, try Harry Frankfurt short

polemic On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Towards the end of George

Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” (to be found in various Orwell collections) you will

find some very practical hints on how to improve your writing while constructing an argument: “(i)

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii)

Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it

out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a

scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (vi) Break any of

these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

Before Orwell Herbert Spencer said similar things. Although we read Spencer today as a promoter of

Social Darwinism, this should not lead us to assume that he couldn’t write. The opposite is true as his

literary success and his Philosophy of Style (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1892) demonstrate. Spencer

was also the first one to consciously refer to an economic style of writing. Here is a short taste: “We

have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more

effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the

proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together. As in a narrative, the

events should be stated in such sequence that the mind may not have to go backwards and forwards

in order to rightly connect them; as in a group of sentences, the arrangement should be such, that

each of them may be understood as it comes, without waiting for subsequent ones; so in very

sentence, the sequence of words should be that which suggests the constituents of the thought in

the order most convenient for the building of that thought.”

Baltimore’s home-grown H. L. Mencken was of course the ultimate wordsmith. In numerous articles

and essays he commented on the appropriate uses of language; for a representative sample of his

numerous comments and interventions consult the two ‘Best of Mencken’ collections: A Mencken

Chrestomathy (New York: Alfred Knopf 1949) and A Second Chrestomathy (New York: Knopf, 1995).

In contrast to Spencer, Mencken believed that style cannot be taught: “For the essence of a sound

style is that it cannot be reduced to rules – that it is a living and breathing thing, with something of a

demoniacal in it – that it fits its proprietor tightly and yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in

fact, quite as securely an integral part of him as that skin is. It hardens as his arteries harden. It is

gaudy when he is young and gathers decorum when he grows old. On the day after he makes a mash

on a new girl it glows and glitters. If he has fed well, it is mellow. If he has gastritis it is bitter. In brief,

a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and it cannot ne anything else. To attempt

to teach it is as silly as to set up courses in making love.”

Before he died from a complicated and debilitating nerve disease, historian Tony Judt dictated short

and fragmentary pieces of memoirs to his secretary. They were published in a series of articles in the

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New York Review of Books. Amongst the various pieces, the one-page article “Words” was probably

the most outstanding contribution (NYRB, June 2010). Here is a short excerpt from what Judt had to

say about the inability to express yourself: “In a world of Facebook, My Space, and Twitter (not to

mention texting), pithy allusion substitutes for exposition. Where once the Internet seemed an

opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias of the medium – ‘I am

what I buy’ – brings impoverishment of its own. My children observe of their own generation that

the communicative shorthand of their hardware has begun to seep into communication itself:

‘people talk like texts’. This ought to worry us. When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they

express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatising language

no less that we have privatised so much else… Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity:

we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to

assert it unambiguously (‘It’s only my opinion…’). Rather than suffering from the onset of ‘newspeak,’

we risk the rise of ‘nospeak.’”

What to Do and What to Avoid: Some Tips Specific to the Humanities and Social Sciences

Jean Grondin’s Introduction to Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) introduces the

reader to the history of the art of interpretation. He starts with Hermes, the messenger of the Gods

and finishes with the famous Habermas-Gadamer debate on what function hermeneutics has

nowadays. Of course, most of what Grondin has to say relates to the great work of his teacher Hans

Georg Gadamer, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, and his magnum opus Truth

and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1996).

Staying with the art of interpretation for a second, it is crucial to grasp the central ideas and

meanings of what writing in each academic profession entails. The modern historian’s case was first

made by Marc Bloch in The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992 [first

published in English translation in 1954]). Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob have tried to

update Bloch in Telling the Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), while Hayden

White’s Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 1973) is the attempt to take a closer

look at historians’ styles. White identifies a number of different styles and shows how classic Greek

poetics has remained an inspiration for historians even as they try to write history in modern times.

In the 19th century a new realism would attempt something new and different (as can be detected in

the works of Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville and Burkhardt); however, Marx, Nietzsche and Croce

rebuked such attempts. White argues that style is actually condensed substance and not just of

secondary importance. Similar attempts to do the same type of analysis for sociology are still missing,

apart maybe from Wolf Lepenies’ Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1988), which tries to identify various styles, literary, scientific and

sociological for the time of sociology’s emergence as a discipline in 19th century France.

Another attempt of defining good writing and the use of appropriate theories and concepts is E. P.

Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978). Thompson depicts

both the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and the apparently more conservative structural

functionalism of Parsons and Smelser in a way that is not only revealing but also highly entertaining.

When talking about debunking myths, John G. A. Pocock’s essays from Politics, Language and Time

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971) or Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press 2009) explains to readers what modern intellectual history is all about. Particularly

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sociologists of ideas or those interested in the sociology of knowledge should take notice. In contrast,

Claude Levi-Strauss destroys the myth of the social anthropologist as neutral observer. Philosophizing

about the ‘in-between cultures’ position, he allows the reader to take a closer look at the social

anthropologist’s engine room in his Tristes Tropique (London: Penguin 1973). The same is true for

Clifford Geertz’s definition of the discipline in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books,

1973). Particularly Geertz’s first essay in this collection, “Thick Description”, should be recommended

reading for any sociologist or social scientist.

Since its emergence as a discipline, sociology has struggled to make sense of its enterprise. Despite

all efforts there is still quite a lot of nonsense around. Harvard sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin made it

his task to have a go at the worst. In Fads and Foibles in Sociology and Related Sciences (Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 1976[first edition 1956]) Sorokin paid special attention to uncritical and

somewhat naive ‘quantoid’ ideology such as ‘operationalism’ and ‘testomania’. A few years later,

Robert S. Lynd took stock again and described his vision in Knowledge for what? The Place of Social

Science in Americas (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967 [originally from 1939]). Lynd

warns against the separation of scholar from technician. He thinks that in an increasing technological

world the scholar appears to be “lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down”. However, the

social scientist who only looks at the technical side and methods and who is trying to be only

pragmatic is equally mistaken. Lynd maintains that “social science is confined neither to practical

politics nor to things whose practicality is demonstrable this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Nor is

its role merely to stand by, describe, and generalize, like a seismologist watching a volcano… The

responsibility is to keep everlastingly challenging the present with the question: But what is it that

we human being want, and what things would have to be done, in what ways and in what sequence,

in order to change the present so as to achieve it?”

It is not only the masterful paraphrasing of Talcott Parsons and the debunking of grand theory and

abstracted empiricism that have made C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1959) an instant classic. Any student should also read carefully Mills’

appendix of Sociological Imagination, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”. Mills was first and foremost

an essay writer as the posthumously published collection Power, Politics and People (New York:

Oxford University Press 1963) shows. Part Four of this collection contains most of his essays on

knowledge. This should be required reading for any sociology student.

Lingua Franca is a journal that cares about the use of language. Following the fake post-modern

article from Alan Sokal in Social Text in which he exposed the jargon that many in the humanities and

social sciences took as gospel and the response it received makes a truly remarkable read and should

serve as a warning: Lingua Franca (ed.) The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy (Lincoln,

Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) Partly in order to avoid such nonsense from being

published and partly in an attempt to improve sociologists’ writing skills Howard S. Becker has

published Writing for Social Scientists (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986). In contrast to

the many how-to-do books, Becker relied on his own experiences from writing seminars. The

practical suggestions make sense: Editing by ear, getting it out the door, numerous drafts and

constant re-editing are the most common sense recommendations. Susan Bell’s The artful edit (New

York: W.W. Norton: 2008) is a short book that adds to Becker’s tips. She notes that

“the art of writing (and therefore editing)…rests solidly on the art of reading. The micro-edit in

particular thrives on a writer’s ability to ‘read slowly’”. Bell gives tips on the appropriate use of

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language, the dangers of repetition and redundancies, the advantages of clarity, the role of

authenticity, the sense of continuity, the function of beginnings, endings and transitions.

After such radical criticism, maybe some reminding of what scholarship is all about is in order.

George Steiner’s No Passion Spent. Essays 1978-1996 (London: Faber and Faber 1996) and his

Lessons of the Master (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2003) should be in every

student’s collection and should be pulled out every once in a while so that essential insights are not

forgotten. Against the rhetoric of intellectual synergies that seems en vogue these days, particularly

amongst social scientists (but by no means confined to them), Steiner reminds us “we have all heard

moving and very just things about groups, about not being a loner. Personally, I believe that anarchy

is one of the ideal and hopes and utopias of anyone who wants to do serious thinking and work. It is

when you find yourself agreeing with another person that you should begin to suspect that you are

talking nonsense. I repeat: there is no community of love, no family, no interest, caste, profession or

social class not worth resigning from.” Almost needless to say, such a position also finds expression in

individual writing and reading. If somebody tells you that this is the right course, or that this is the

best direction research can take, walk into the other direction.

Some Select Titles, which Can Serve as Examples of Good Writing in the Humanities and Social

Sciences

What a good observer Karl Marx was is not only evident in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis

Bonaparte (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1913) but also in his articles for the New York Tribune, published

as Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism (London: Penguin, 2007). Those who

have doubts concerning Marx’s writing skills should also read Robert Paul Wolff’s Moneybags Must

Be So Lucky: On the Literary Structure of Capital (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press,

1988).

Moving over to the New World and the beginnings of sociology there, Thorstein Veblen remains a

great example of somebody who veers with excellence between the still emerging disciplines of

economics and sociology. Enthralled with Social Darwinism, Veblen is one of the few who manages to

use the evolutionary perspective to great enlightening effect as various of his essays (a

representative sample is: The Portable Veblen; New York: Viking, 1948) demonstrate. Particularly

Part IV and V of the Portable Veblen dissect American institutions in a way that can still make people

awe.

Half a century separates the beginning of American sociology from its presumed peak in the middle

of the twentieth century. Robert K. Merton’s essay on The Sociology of Science (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press 1973) makes clear that it is possible to write well about dry topics such as

the sciences without using structural functionalist or other technical jargon. Merton’s skill is arguably

at its best in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (co-written with Elinor Barber; Princeton NJ:

Princeton University Press 2004). If you are more the type of person who is into rational choice, you

should try Jon Elster’s Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Theodor W. Adorno’s later writing is notoriously hard to understand but his radio addresses and

short essays collected in Critical Models: Interventions and Code Words (New York: Columbia

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University Press 2005) are a real feat. The same is true of a collection of Adorno’s elderly friend,

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968).

How knowledge, power and sociological enterprise are related has always been the main concern of

C. Wright Mills, as his essay collection Power, Politics and People (New York: Oxford University Press,

1963, particularly the last section) demonstrates. Similarly, Lewis A. Coser tries to identify how ideas

are transmitted by looking at different types of intellectuals in his Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View

(New York: Free Press 1965). Coser writes about the topic without any pretence or jargon. The same

applies to Richard Hofstadter’s more historically informed Social Darwinism in American Thought

(Boston: Beacon Press 1992), and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books,

1963). An updated version of what Coser, Mills and Hofstadter tried to achieve can be found in

Jeffrey C. Alexander’s prize-winning essay “Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo: How Intellectuals Have

Coded, Narrated, and Explained the ‘New World of our Time” (published in Alexander’s essay

collection Fin de Siècle Social Theory, London: Verso 1995).

What actually happens when you are writing regularly is beautifully dissected in Richard Sennett’s

The Craftsman (London: Penguin, 2008). Almost a prototype of the good craftsman that Sennett

refers to is the social anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Particularly his late essay collection Available

Light (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) is outstanding. Equally, the two master pieces

that the interdisciplinary wizard Jared Diamond wrote are highly recommendable: Guns, Germs and

Steel (London: Jonathan Cape 1997) and Collapse: How Societies Choose and Fail or Succeed (New

York: Viking, 2005)

Maybe because by design they have to appeal to a wider audience, political theory and political

philosophy have often produced great examples of good writing. A magisterial tour de force through

2500 years of political theory is to be found in Sheldon S. Wolin’s Politics and Vision: Continuity and

Innovation in Western Political Thought (expanded edition; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

2004).

For the twentieth century a good start would be Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Writings (New York:

Schocken Books, 2007) or her Essays in Understanding 1930-54, (New York: Harcourt Brace and

Company, 1993). In a distinguished category of their own are Albert O. Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of

Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University

Press) and Judith N. Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984) and

various essays that she wrote. Some of the best are to be found in the posthumous collection

Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1998). Remarkable

exercises in clear thinking about complex issues are also Stephen Holmes’s Passions and Constraints:

On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Norberto

Bobbio’s Democracy and Dictatorship (Cambridge: Polity, 1989) and The Future of Democracy

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987). More recently, Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s

the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) has attracted a huge following

with his new exploration of an old yet never dated theme.

Anybody who reads Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (New York: Fontana Press, 1994

[original 1835 and 1840]) will be astounded not only by the depth of insight and argumentation but

also the lightness of the style. Even more than 180 years after its first appearance it still makes a

fascinating read and gives people ideas. More recently a wonderful translation of Tocqueville’s

letters and writings after 1840 have appeared (Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings (eds.)

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Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings; Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press 2009). This collection allows for a genuine insight into Tocqueville’s intellectual toolbox. Joseph

Ellis’s Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) deals with

the period prior to Tocqueville’s visit to America. Not only is this one of the most fascinating times in

American history, the book itself is a page turner. The same can be said for Perry Miller’s history of

the American Jeremiad in his The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press, 1953). Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1978) takes off where Miller left it. In terms of style and writing he

doesn’t have to hind behind his predecessor. E. P. Thompson’s Customs in Common (London: The

Merlin Press, 1991) is an outstanding collection of essays on 17th, 18th and early 19th century English

history. Particularly the mix of social history and social anthropology makes this collection an

appealing read. The same can be said for an intellectual foe of Edward P. Thompson, Tony Judt.

Judt’s portrait of Europe after 1945, Postwar (London: Penguin, 2005), is beautifully written and

combines aspects of contemporary history with politics, sociology, economics and literature. Dan

Diner’s Cataclysms: A History of the 20th Century from Europe’s Edge (Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press, 2007) is a tour de force through the 20th Century and, as an account, much better

argued and much better written than Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes. Joyce Appleby’s The

Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010) is the

masterful attempt to take stock of capitalism’s history so far (including the dodgy bits). Finally if any

sociologist ever tells you that we are living in modern, postmodern or late modern times − be aware.

Never ask a sociologist for what time it is; it is safer to consult a historian. After all, it is the historian’s

job to deal with events and structures in time. Reinhart Koselleck is not only an expert on time

structures but also writes beautifully. See particularly his collection The Practice of Conceptual

History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

If you’re looking for further first class examples of good writing and if you want to keep up with good

books, you should read the New York Review of Books regularly. Some humanities and social science

journals are better than others. I don’t want to get into rating journals here, but pretty much

everyone would agree that Past and Present would be a good example of a journal that only

publishes prime articles. Note also that various professional associations give hints as to what is

considered good writing in each discipline. I particularly recommend the websites of the American

Sociological Associations (www.asanet.org/) and the American Political Science Association

www.apsa.org/, not because they are American but because they are the biggest associations and

had over the years plenty of experience to do with didactical and pedagogical issues specific to their

discipline.