Introduction

While it is true that being a social theorist is to become an observer of life and its development from an outside perspective, it is also true that, in Weberian terms, ethical neutrality cannot disregard experience itself in addition to values as necessary tools for making sense of reality. Indeed, according to Weber, there is no research or social theory without being aware of one’s own values and experience.

In this sense, Stephen Turner’s autobiographical book, Mad Hazard, is firm evidence that a scholar’s understanding of social theory is inevitably enriched by the tendency to analyze the lived events to which it relates, since lived experience enhances the ability to grasp the attempt to theorize in intellectual life and offers a perspective on how that theory observes social reality.

Sociology as participative knowledge is deeply concerned with the personal equation of the scientist in question. The sociologist’s personal equation is thus in a position to eliminate or correct errors of observation. Furthermore, the personal equation that participates in social observation is a qualitative one, thus it involves the sociologist’s own social being, his or her specific existential experience, cultural background, political behavior, family ties, ‘values’ in Weberian terms, and even his or her attitudes and stereotypes. For a sociologist, writing one’s own biography means writing down one’s own guiding assumptions for research, opening up data and reasoning to the deeper meaning from which they emerge. According to Mannheim, it is not consciousness that organizes reality. Rather, reality and experience ultimately organize and shape consciousness and thought.

Chances

The decision to call this essay “The Silver Lining in the Clouds” is a quotation from the Preface to the book, which I believe capable of precisely expressing this invisible path that guided Turner’s biographical essay, given his sociological awareness and his ability to grasp the meaning between intertwined events. A capacity which is necessary for bottom-up social theorizing. In this book, which is extremely detailed and fascinating in the way it describes social, historical and personal events in the same flow, there is this interconnection between intellectual life and everyday life that always keeps the attention high, and which explains, as I have already described previously, the personal equation of Turner as a social scientist. The book is conceived as an ongoing process of situating the events of Turner’s life within the history, social patterns, transformations and scientific encounters of a particular era, providing a key to how his intellectual work as a sociologist functioned to make sense of it, to critique it, and to develop theoretical forms about the possible future consequences of particular events.

Somehow, all the experiences, whether good or bad, all the occasions and fortunate opportunities, make up the small pieces of the bigger picture of this intertwining of practical life and intellectual life, always in a constant relationship, along with the ability to traverse it with the lens of an observer.

From the very first chapter, where the origins of his family are described, and even earlier with his grandparents, there is this hint of a double reality: objective facts filtered through a lucid mind which is apparently an external observer. This book therefore appears as a social operation alongside the one which Turner himself declared, that of a father’s desire to show his sons his other side: that of his professional life, but also that of his life story from its origins. It proves that the sociologist’s most indispensable and irreplaceable research tool is his (or her) own experience as a social being. A sociologist can never ignore his or her own personal history, and it is precisely this quality that makes it possible to understand the data of social life through personal experience, which becomes a particular cipher to unveil and make sense of the world. Sociology as a science which seeks to identify the social conditioning of the actions of individuals, that is, not a science of human action per se, which, as much criticism of early sociology would have it, would make it pure determinism, but rather a science of the conditions that constrain such action, in which the subject ultimately has freedom of choice, which is still a freedom conditioned by the contingencies in which he or she finds him- or herself acting. In other words, sociology observes how, from the conditions of the subject, the latter succeeds or fails in bridging the gap due to social, economic, cultural, or structural conditions, between his or her own condition and aspirations for fulfillment. Aspirations which, according to the Frankfurt School, encounter a further obstacle in advanced modernity, namely that they are false, system-induced aspirations and thus no longer even real aspirations of the subject. Here, in this process of sociological reflection, the sociologist Turner, through his autobiography, somehow offers, without triumphal marches or complaints (his words), the path of choices, encounters, fortunes and misfortunes that life has presented to him and what he has made out of them. It shows exactly how these events and eventualities developed his life path and contributed to shaping his professional reflections and personal decisions alike.

“I went to Munich in 1982 for a conference and had dinner with Peter Lassman and Irving Velody was sheer chance. That Sven Eliaeson had been pointed out to me by Dirk Kasler at the same conference as the future Swedish Weber expert. That William Outhwaite and I had been, improbably, invited to the same conference in Toronto on organizational theory a couple of years before. That I happened to be the USF Press committee chair when Roger Gibson finished a manuscript for the first book on Quine and that he then miraculously landed a job at Washington University. That Paul Roth was at the University of Missouri-St. Louis at the time, and David Henderson was writing a dissertation that engaged with mine, and that we could encounter each other in person, beginning a long and productive relationship. That my parents had bought a summer home in the Prairie Club’s Camp Hazelhurst in Berrien County, Michigan, that I could spend nine summers at and connect with the philosophers of social science at Notre Dame and join their reading group.

(…)That Richard Rorty was correcting the proofs on Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature the summer I spent at Princeton at his NEH seminar. That Stanford Lyman was in New York that same summer and was friendly and eager to connect. These, and many other bits of luck that I have mentioned in this narrative, were all chance events that had large consequences for me. They all happened before I was 30, or shortly after (…).

They gave me a set of connections that were more than enough to keep me busy for the rest of a long career, they produced personal relationships that grew and that provided the greatest satisfactions, and education, I could have received.” (Turner, 2022: 218).

Turner’s work and publications have primarily been concerned with the concept of practices at the intersection of sociology and philosophy, that is, between reflecting on the implications of the concept and observing the fallout in life. Moreover, in his work there almost seems to be a need to re-establish the foundations of sociological observation, challenging theoretical approaches through the empirical study of practices on the one hand, and engaging in a comparative dialogue of assumptions on the other. There is an attention and sensitivity to the real in Turner that is continuously referred to in his sociological analysis and is rarely found in contemporary theorists of the discipline, such as the awareness that “social theories are ideal-typical constructions with a problematic relation to this substrate,” (Turner in Adair Toteff, 2021) which becomes even more clear when reading his autobiography. And this is what also determines Turner’s ability to see the collective dimension as a production of the experience of the individual, and thus in its necessarily problematic nature, or in the concept of normativity, as a social product, or even the need to unveil the question of apparent irrationality (in Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer). The ability to observe the dynamics of social reality in its fixed aspects of Durkheimian social factuality is one of the leading issues that is also present in the autobiography.

In fact, this autobiography is itself a superb example, or arguably a masterpiece, of sociological analysis, since it reads biography as a conditioned part of the social structure, namely political contingencies, economic eventualities, and the personal vicissitudes of life. Biography is a tool for collecting the narratives and meanings of a life experience, throughout a particular time period, as an encounter between subjects in a life span. In truth, it is not the author’s attempt to set himself up as an example of an extraordinary fellow human being, or to celebrate his own abilities or incapacities. Rather, it is a deeper, more conscious question, rooted in the convictions of the sociologist regarding knowledge. That is, to tell one’s story as a story, affirming that every story has a form as well as a partial conditioning force on the individual, ultimately also necessary to become what one is in the complexity of a thousand possibilities, but also aware that one’s story is only one of a series of life stories capable of shaping what a sociologist would call the ‘collective characteristics of an era’.

And this is already a characteristic that reveals Stephen Turner’s ability to enter into the complexity of social life, even his own, and to mediate it with the attitude of a social scientist with a participant distance.

Choices

One peculiarity that accompanies this distance is already evident in the first chapter, namely the external commentary on biographical information as a narrative from the outside, expressed in the chapter “Cleaning Up: Reconciling Normativity, Collective Intentionality, and The Brain,” in which Turner questions the choice of his (intellectual) battle and the ongoing process of getting there, between disciplines that oscillate between following fashionable trends or, on the contrary, approaching subjects and scholars as an “antiquarian” and not wanting to fall into either:

“One must choose one’s battles”(…) The problem was my problem – no one else was worried about this particular range of issues. And the “work” to be done here was mostly philosophical, rather than a matter of inventing a new theoretical vocabulary or agenda. So there was no point in writing for the journals: that would have required the problems to come in the form of recognizable topics and part of an ongoing dialogue. (Turner: 198).

But also the exploration of the ongoing process and genesis of an idea to become a book, or the goal it pursued: “This was the aim of Explaining the Normative, which grew out of my struggles over the decade with the issue.” (Turner: 203).

There are three main themes on which I would like to fix a sort of thematization of this impressive and fluid biography by Stephen Turner, who begins by explaining with simplicity how this enterprise was motivated by a very personal desire, namely, to acquaint his sons with those parts of his life that remain unknown in everyday life, but which give it additional meaning:

“My major motivation for writing this memoir is that I never felt I had communicated any of this, or enough of this, to my sons. There is a moment to tell one’s story, a moment when it can be a kind of dialogue, and this moment never seemed to come. My own father told me much more, and I spent several summers going around to buildings with him, doing what needed to be done, but mostly just watching him supervise, negotiate, deal with businesses – shade shops, laundries, plumber supply shops, paint stores, and so forth. With my own sons I tried to give them the childhood I didn’t have: little league, support for anything they wanted to do, lessons, and a bit of soccer, and availability at all times to play catch, go to the beach, toss the football, and interact. I took time to travel with each of them, and there was no lack of contact. But I didn’t feel there was ever the right time or the right receptivity to tell the rest of it. It is difficult to explain one’s attitudes apart from the environment in which they were formed. This is in part what I have tried to do here (…).” (Turner: xviii).

So if the first implication is an existential motivation, a second implication concerns an approach to biography, or rather, autobiography, as a necessary path of the Weberian self-reflection to make overall sense of what one has experienced, the underlying values, and how that too was part of the environment that shaped decisions and choices.

“Autobiographies are often either triumphal accounts or complaints. I hesitate to make this one either. It is not bitter, or at least not intended to be bitter. Nor is it a story of triumph, over the odds, or in any sense other than the story of a satisfactory life of the mind and the partial fulfillment of early dreams. Many biographies and autobiographies of intellectuals resemble the journey of an express train, rushing between major stops, going from success to success. This one is more like the meandering route of a local, with stops in many villages. These villages, the small communities in which friendships and mutual understanding are made, were my primary intellectual homes. The phrase ‘in the village everyone is famous’ applies to them. They were the little platoons of intellectual life, not the towering heights, or the precincts of the mandarins.” (Turner: xviii).

The centrality of Academia is one of the pivotal points of this book, already evoked in the book’s title, the ‘mad hazard’ of being an academic, which was in fact also experienced in Turner’s life, always on the verge of ‘doing something else’. This is an approach which is quite typical and fascinating of the generations who shaped this discipline, being the protagonists of the time of major success for sociological knowledge, and therefore it seems very clear that sociological research is bound to a sort of initial ‘natural’ curiosity about life, structure, social functioning, as the outcome of a tireless capacity of making sense but also understanding social inconsistencies in order to grasp the tendencies of political and economic change that each historical period brings in terms of social costs, wasted lives, false aspirations as well as successess. This is also the approach that is inherently theorizing from the observation of social life. Thereby naturally entering social problems from the door of life and its unpredictability. This approach has allowed Turner to grasp the major issues of democracy, elite theories, normativity and expertise from the point of view of a quasi-ongoing dialogue between rationalization and social reality, which is not accomplished only by academic constructions. There is a clear common thread in this biography, namely, the idea of the ‘other’, the necessary dialectical dimension which enhances society as such, and as a result, in every dimension of this autobiography what emerges strongly or subtly is always a dynamic view implying a relational reality, which is also the center of a sociological perspective. Consequently, this dynamic view is equally dominant in all the events of his time, and suggests the way in which a single life embeds social, political and historical events of its own time:

“I lived through Women’s Liberation, the sexual revolution, the demise of sociology, the transformation of academic life, the decline of national loyalty and civility, and the end of the traditional religious substrata of social life – all this happened during my life and affected me. My longtime helper, Eileen Kahl, has pointed out to me that I have omitted any discussion of the work that has occupied much of my time – mentoring – helping graduate students with dissertations, editing, and otherwise advising and encouraging.” (Turner: xvii).

Another theme that can be highlighted as a common thread guiding the narrative is the role of chance in every life, as Turner points out, which can become an opportunity, showing above all how one can take advantage of it. And this along with a certain stubborn desire to land geographically in a particular place, Miami, which Turner identifies as the beginning and origin of his family, a place where everything points back to good times and an ideal life. Somehow, this sense of place is a theme that often represents part of the mapping of shifting meanings in Turner’s life, even to the point of suggesting that while Pass-a-Grille is not Miami, it still embodies many of the characteristics of Miami in Turner’s memories of childhood.

“The event that most influenced my life occurred long before I was born: the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. My father’s life was changed by this event, and in a sense, I have spent my own life trying to live the life that he would have lived if it was not taken from him by the storm. The life I was born into, in Chicago, was very different, and lacked many of the things that a normal childhood, and a normal adolescence, would have contained.” (Turner: 1).

Thus, the question of place, which in turn is not divorced from historical events, becomes the starting point for a reflexivity of loss: the loss of a certain environment (which ultimately marked the life of Turner’s father), which can be seen as the event that also marked the life of Stephen Turner. As if the awareness of loss at an early age gave Turner the gift of finding his place in intellectual life, as a way of simultaneously recovering and averting possible material losses, in addition to the loss of important figures in his life and of both imagined and beloved places, and the loss of the original community in a lost Miami, replaced by an intellectual community and a sociological perspective. This, too, is a crucial aspect which emerges precisely from that historical period, not so far from our own present in terms of time, but also and above all in terms of atmosphere, expectations, desires and possibilities. A period in which Turner met and collected the teachings of brilliant minds, of which he was one, and engaged in theorizing and understanding major social transformations, building a discipline that could become the collective tool for understanding reality in its transformation, as well as trying to direct the transformation in its making. A collective transformation which was itself an instrument of collective belonging and effervescence. In which sociology was a tool for observing collective issues addressed collectively.

“These villages, the small communities in which friendships and mutual understanding are made, were my primary intellectual homes. The phrase ‘in the village everyone is famous’ applies to them. They were the little platoons of intellectual life, not the towering heights, or the precincts of the mandarins.

It is necessarily a story of loss. Most of what I will describe, inevitably, is lost worlds, lost social worlds, and lost intellectual worlds. My partially fulfilled dreams were of Miami, as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, and in a sense of what it was in the 1920s, as will become clear. This is where I was comfortable and wanted to be but could not be.” (Turner: xviii).

The connection with the family, the connections with spiritual and religious rhythm and rites, the presence of an immaterial community, such as the religious one sought by his grandparents, which are vivid in Turner’s remembering and then ultimately sought by Turner himself. Recalling most of the classical sociologists. And in the end, he seemingly ends up in the place where his grandfather retired in his final years in the 1930s. A silver lining in the clouds that appears to have governed Turner’s intellectual life through a desire to reunite with places of affection and his roots.

“His son, my grandfather Claude Stephens, was a Doughboy, an artilleryman, and could see his father working in the railroad yard from the troopship that carried him to France from Fort Dix. When my great-grandfather retired, he spent winters in St. Petersburg in the 1930s, and I am told they enjoyed sitting on the boardwalk. As far as I can tell, there was no boardwalk in St. Petersburg, but there was one in Pass-a-Grille, where I live, which was a short daytrip away by trolley and boat, so perhaps I returned to the spot. They died a decade before I was born.” (Turner: 4).

Theory and Practice

The third theme is that of the close connection between practice and theory and the peculiarity of sociological science: “that its intellectual content was driven largely by the resources available to people and intellectual life” (Turner: 141) which shows how sociological work is first and foremost a way of making sense of reality for scholars themselves, as an answer to their need for knowledge and understanding, and only then can it become shared knowledge. And I would like to add that this peculiarity has been absent from most of sociology’s goals for some time now, making sociology an inconsequential science, since it no longer aims at understanding, but merely at showing how this science itself has reached a certain status. And its role is no longer perceived as explaining the deep entanglements of our complex modern society, as it was at the beginning, but has a certain urge to be recognized, aspiring to be part of the disciplines that matter, instead of having its discipline count as capable of explaining and demystifying the deceptions of contemporaneity.

As a very first consideration, I would like to say that my gratitude for having read this book is a sort of necessary step as it develops into such a vibrant way to enter Stephen’s life. His intimate intellectual life. In this book there are intimate thoughts alongside motivations for choices and refusals.

…‘what I took pleasure in and what produced pain’ and says something about the people I was related to, my teachers and mentors, my friends and colleagues, and the larger world I enjoyed.

“There is a benefit from working on the same past thinkers for decades: one’s views can deepen, change, expand with the assimilation of new knowledge, and one can come to a deeper, perhaps empathic, sense of the thought. Shils used to say that one never exhausts a great text. But one certainly can exhaust one’s ability to get something out of it, at least temporarily. The ability to return at one’s own impetus and with greater knowledge is something one lacks in the heat of immediate exchanges. Engaging with these issues involved a mix of the two: the issues were all there in the classic social theorists.” (Turner: 198).

And then the practical life that comes to the rescue of intellectual life when he “…was getting the right kind of invitations. And this gave me the freedom to grope my way through these issues…” (Turner: 198).

Or the consideration about himself, his choices, the motivations underlying them, always intertwined with life experiences, including his family, of everyday life.

“But I had no such coherent vision. Instead I had some commitments, or intuitions, that I would have been glad to abandon, if I had to. And these were not necessarily consistent. I thought Weber was right on most of the issues of methodology, but that there was something to Durkheim, though not what Durkheim said it was, and similarly for Levi-Strauss, who seemed to lose the thread in his later works. Yet I had no great synthesis to offer, and instead was inclined to construct something consistent by putting pieces together. But first I needed the pieces.” (Turner: 198).

Finally, the Mad Hazard of academic life presents constraints and freedoms at the same time, depending on which side you want to express, and even sociology has changed its approach to normativity to integrate itself completely into academic rules, instead of respecting its scientific approach to human affairs and its validity. But as is well known, the neoliberal approach spares no one, not even the university, much less sociology, which is attacked from various angles for its critical approach and for being a hybrid discipline: much too empirical to fit into philosophical speculation and too critical to be just an applied science at the service of powerful interests. The perfect victim for sacrifice on the altar of precision and technological development:

“The window through which one can speak is a small one. One is compelled to write in the acceptable style of the academic world at the time one is writing, and in this case it was a matter of finding relatively free openings. This was why I snuck the discussion of relativism into the collection of essays published as Brains/Practices/ Relativism, as a previously unpublished chapter: Relativism as Explanation.” (Turner: 202).

The genesis of an idea, to become a book or the aim it was chasing: “This was the aim of Explaining the Normative, which grew out of my struggles over the decade with the issue.” (Turner: 203).

And this is the confirmation here that, to understand the thought of a social thinker or scholar, we cannot limit ourselves to reading only their scientific production, but a huge number of details which give us the possibility to really grasp deeply the sense of his theorizing as a grand depiction of experience.

Life is a part of intellectual life and when the two are authentic they are necessarily connected. And one cannot be fully grasped without the other.

There are a number of interesting details left along the essay that openly reveal the simple choices behind the grand designs, sometimes also driven by some inner characteristics, as in the chapter on politics and law, where he simply informs the reader, as he probably realizes with a retrospective glance, that “I realized I was too shy for politics. (Turner: 207).

And finally, a thought of gratitude for all that is, all that has been, and quite simply, the way it was:

“I am grateful for being able to spend half my life in Pass-a-Grille, for its sunrises and sunsets, and for the chance to raise a family and live in a household full of life, especially feline life, and almost always with children. In this and many other things I was lucky.” (Turner: 218).

In Conclusion

This book deals with the evolution of an intellectual life that only later on, and almost accidentally, became a career, as Dahms states in the Foreword. But it is also the evolution of an intellectual consciousness in the social sciences, in the ethics of conceptual and practical construction, surrounded by such mentors as Edward Shils and Richard Rorty, in addition to an endless list of names that includes the most brilliant minds in American and non-American sociology of the last 30 years. Aware of having lived in the happiest period of the discipline, despite the hegemonic difficulties also mentioned in the book, Turner leads the reader into a world of sociological debates and personal choices, all part of the same world of transition. The outcome of which we are now experiencing. Intellectual life and everyday life are necessarily related to each other, and in sociological research this relationship also took on another meaning in this researcher’s development: namely, that he reveals himself not only through an ideal process of introspection, but through a more significant effort of stationing himself in society, defining and investigating his position and situation in society and in Academia. It is from this position that all the criteria of selection that accompany the social observation and research are generated and define the intellectual standpoint itself. Thus, if we agree that sociology is an attempt to give a new interpretation and meaning to facts, this also implies that the social scientist’s approach is radically original, and radical originality can only be found in the elaboration of ‘facts’ through a twofold process: 1) a constant process of self-analysis and of making the subjective values and underlying assumptions explicit; and 2) systematic research motivated by a dialogical relationship with the object of the research.

In Weberian terms, Stephen Turner’s autobiography can be seen as the ‘big picture’, or the statement of values, through which all experiences, whether bad or good, become the small pieces of the big picture of this interweaving of practical life and intellectual life, always in a constant relationship with each other and making sense of each other, alongside the revelation of Turner’s personal equation.