Neil Smelser Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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You would up focusing on what you call the macroscopic social structural level. Tell us a little about what that means. You're looking at the big social structures in society. Help us understand what you do as a sociologist.
I should only mention by example the kinds of social structures that interested me most in my historical work. That was the social structure of industry: the roles, the level of differentiation, division of labor, the location and specialization of production; the family: roles in the family, which is a social structure; and then primary education. In a way, you can look at that historical work as linking those three structures, changes in the industrial experience of children that put a lot of pressure on the family or changed the family profoundly if they didn't have children earning money, and it also opened up the pressure to get those children in school rather than be idle at home or on the streets. What I did was try to analyze the context by which structural change in these institutions took place, and that's the macro level. I mean, you're not dealing with the person, you're dealing with the larger systems.
So, in a way, your intellectual odyssey is struggling with one problem which then suggests the next problem, and you go on from there.
It works out that way. It's not a plan. But when you work on something persistently new things come into view and some of those new things are attractive to you intellectually and you can take up at least a portion of those in your next project.
What are the temperament and skills required for what a sociologist does and for what you do as a sociologist?
I'd say the most important personal characteristic is the capacity to objectify. Practically all the subject matter of sociology is also the subject of ideology and strong personal feelings. Think about religion, think about family, think about work, even. These are subjects loaded with meaning and loaded with ideology, and practically everybody has their own theory about them, usually derived from our own experience. What you have to do as a sociologist is to move away from these biographical 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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