ABSTRACT
Only two of sociology’s classic figures contended directly with unmasking. They did so in radically different ways. The Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto transforms the unmasking style into a global optic; Marxism itself is unmasked. The Hungarian-German sociologist Karl Mannheim defangs the unmasking style to create the sociology of knowledge.
A third classical sociologist, Emile Durkheim, appears to unmask religion but draws back from doing so. He insists that religion is not an illusion, that science will never replace religion, and that the sacred exists.
While most post-classical sociological approaches (functionalism, role theory, exchange theory, ethnomethodology, dramaturgy, ethnographic analysis, interaction ritual theory, “pure sociology”) reject the unmasking style, the impact of unmasking is felt in neo-Marxism (notably, in the work of Pierre Bourdieu) and in radical social theory. Even writers that repudiate left-leaning sociology may still employ the unmasking style to do so. Raymond Aron claims that Marxism is a “secular religion” inhaling the “opium of the intellectuals.” Christian Smith claims that progressive American sociology is a “sacred project,” not the rigorous secular and scientific enterprise it claims to be.
