Abstract
This article responds to appraisals of The Unmasking Style in Social Theory (Baehr, 2019). Critics of the book point to missed opportunities, arcane interests, and overstatements of the book’s central thesis. A structural sociology of unmasking is proposed. A cultural pragmatics of unmasking is recommended. The reply offers clarifications of the style, discusses the unmasking technique of elongation, and considers ways to mitigate unmasking in classroom teaching. Topics discussed include the limits of transparency and the hyperbole of “white privilege.”
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Notes
What I call elongation, the French feminist Elisabeth Badinter (2006 [2003]: 7) calls “amalgamation.” She trenchantly opposes it. “In place of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas,” she laments, “we prefer analogy and generalization. In short, we prefer the amalgam which consists in ‘combining diverse elements that hardly go together.’”
On American black scholars who reject the 1619 Project, see Jason L. Riley, “A bid to revise the New York Times’s bad history,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 18, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bid-to-revise-the-new-york-timess-bad-history-11582071646?emailToken=34b0a0ec7d1dbc4225ab02f39eac299eZ0+v3o/OWFTUUCcgHTdXPSJ6xS8mhmjX+FEvdepbRLU7wOiNrRn3qRWWc9kg9dQgnB3kvm42CInGRPNuGK1noPew01xMueJFE6+ntCPZotk%3D&reflink=article_email_share
The Guardian later apologized. See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/22/suffering-is-not-relative-guardian-editorial
Wood (2006) is explicit about the destruction wreaked by unmasking techniques on the historical consciousness. He uses four terms: debunking, deflating, defaming, and dehumanizing. Wood says that while earlier historians, notably Charles Beard and his contemporaries, had a basic respect for the framers, even as they debunked them, there is something “new and different about present-day academic vilification,” p. 7. Not concerned just to bring into the historical picture “lost voices of ordinary people,” the new outlook damns the framers as “failures”, p. 9. Their political greatness is denied and derided.
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Baehr, P. Out of Frankfurt: A Response to Critics of The Unmasking Style in Social Theory. Am Soc 51, 63–75 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09441-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09441-5