ABSTRACT
Quoting Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach, “the human essence … in its reality is the ensemble of the social relations,” Ferrarotti (1983: 66) points out that “every human life reveals itself through its less generalizable aspects as a vertical synthesis of a social history.” In our context, the narratives evoked in conversations between interviewer and interviewee provide a basis for grasping the “insights and oversights … the combination of vision and nonvision, and … answers to questions which were never asked” which constitute the “relation of the individual to his [sic!] vision of history … not simply a Weltanschauung, but a structural field in which men live their history and which guides their practice….” (Grele, 1991:138). This can be accomplished by looking at how present-day sociologists tell about the past and about their expectations for the future (see Kohli, 1981). As an exploration of professional and personal biographies of sociologists which can shed light on the recent history of the discipline and on possible changes that are crystallizing (see also, Munck and Snyder, 2007; Swedberg, 1990), the project that I carried out is therefore at the intersection of a sociology of sociology and oral history as related to a profession (Ritchie, 2003; Shopes, 2002). Since the focus is on sociologists discussing their craft, the collection of oral materials is not beset by doubts about accuracy – doubts that routinely concern historians. As requested, the interviewees talked about what they have found to be significant in sociology and their references to their work and to the discipline are the pertinent content; what they say is by definition bona fide evidence of the way in which they have interpreted characteristics of, and standpoints in, the social sciences.
