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Smelser, Neil
particularities of your own life and of other people's lives -- that's what I mean by objectification, to
treat these experiences as objects for study rather than swimming through them in your own lifetime.
So, I guess a simple answer to your question is the objectification of social reality.
Looking back on your career, what are the sources, the conditions, that help us understand your most
creative moments? Where does creativity lie? Is it in part seeing the elements in a problem you've
just worked with?
I would describe it as a kind of an unfolding process. Perhaps I can illustrate. Later in my career I
decided to go back to the study of Victorian England. My dissertation was on changes in family life
in Victorian England, and that was where that impulse to look at education, which was so intimately
connected, came from. I didn't get around to education until thirty years later, but it was still there,
that kernel of [interest] -- but anything that's creative about that transition was not an immediate
insight. It was an accumulation, of changing of directions, of letting the subject matter speak to
you, of making new connections that you perhaps didn't even have before in mind. So, I would say
creativity is not a moment, it's a process. It's very hard to put your finger on it. I suppose one could
mention moments of insight in one's career that turned out to be original and extremely productive,
but it doesn't happen that way, it's not a snap of the fingers, it's accumulation of experiences and a
gradual falling together of connected elements that makes for creativity.
One of your books that we're going to be talking about, which I'm going to show our audience right
now, is The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis, published by UC Press. It's a collection of essays that
you've written over the lifetime of your career. One of the things that you focus on is academic
disciplines, both the constraints of academic disciplines and the opportunities that they pose. You're
in a position to look at your field of sociology and make some general observations about how it's
evolved in the time of your career; what does that tell us about academic disciplines generally?
Do you want me to comment on sociology?
Yes. That would be great.
In particular?
Yes. That would be good, and then we'll talk about psychoanalysis.
Okay. Well, sociology has, in some sense, not changed very much in the sense that it's two primary
and overwhelming preoccupations are first, the development of some kind of scientific viewpoint
and scientific method about the study of society, and second, a reformist impulse that it finds in its
very beginnings, in the progressive period in the United States. They form not only the key elements
of sociological investigation but the key points of tension in the field. In a way, a lot of the history of
the field has been battling between these two impulses, the reformist and the scientific, which again,
calls for much more objectivity and distance from the subject matter. The field, as I've experienced
it, beginning in the 1950s, was in a period of heavy and high optimism about the promise of social
science. This got really dashed in the sixties, not that people didn't think it was an important thing
to do -- as a matter of fact, it became much more popular and visible in those times -- but it got
corralled, momentarily at least, to the reform impulse that was so lively in the sixties and part of the
seventies. Since that time, it's settled into a multiplicity of disciplines. I'd say that its fragmentation
and differentiation is the key of the last twenty-five years, and it keeps getting bounced into by
various intellectual movements such as feminism, such as post-modernism, and it absorbs some,
resists others, and gradually accumulates a new and more complex richness of its own. A lot of
people think the field doesn't know where it is, and that's in large part because it's accumulated so
many different perspectives and never sheds very many of them.
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