Sociology in search of the booster: Review essay

Donald N. Levine. Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. 365 pp. $47.50 (cloth). 15.95 (paper). ISBN 0-22647547-6. A book by so eminent a colleague as Donald Levine merits attention whatever the subject matter. And such an effort prefixed by the word “visions” deserves special note. For it may be expected from a person who has spent a lifetime pursuing systematic thinking about the sociological tradition that he will offer some visions that should be helpful for everyone in that very tradition. Visions we need, I think, if there should be a valid justification in continuing what we have been doing in sociology since its foundation. The twenty-first century is close at hand, and it seems worth while to think about the future of the field. Let me begin with an unequivocal statement. I urge all serious social scientists to read this book. The enormity of the enterprise, coupled with the essential seriousness of the author, who offers us the harvest of thirty years of his thinking about sociology, earn the book broad treatment and discussion in the field. But what exactly is that “field”? For Levine, the field of sociology is an enormous intellectual enterprise that started right with Aristotle, i.e., more than two thousand years ago. And not only did it start somewhat earlier than those of us believed who thought it began with Auguste Comte, but it enlists among its contributors almost every thinker who played any significant role in West European and North American thinking during those last twenty centuries. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.