ABSTRACT
In Enter Plato, Alvin W. Gouldner passes some rather harsh judgments on historians of social theory, claiming that the great majority of their works "have commonly been deficient in the virtues of both history and sociology, usually lacking the historian's grasp of documented detail and the sociologist's analytical thrust or imagination". Gouldner suggests that the history of social theory is an intellectual genre comprised of at least three parts—history, sociology, and criticism— and that the most important role the historian of social theory plays is that of critic. Gouldner would argue that in the process of avoiding a reification of culture, Jurgen Habermas has unwittingly reified system or society, thereby subordinating actors to systems that have become decoupled from and impervious to the willfulness and agency of flesh-and-blood human beings. Gouldner's passion for speaking the truth, then, made him enemies among those whose livelihoods or professional interests were at stake were the truth to be told.
