Gabel's "Micro/Macro" Bridge: The Schizophrenic Process Writ Large

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Sociological Theory. Joseph Gabel s theoretical synthesis of psychiatry, political sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and Marxism is examined, partly by evaluating the use he makes of ideas common to the works of Lukdcs, Mannheim, Minkowski, Binswanger, Dupreel, Lalo, Meyerson, and others. Gabel's major contention-that false consciousness and schizophrenia are mutually illuminating phenomena at analytic and empirical levels-is considered, principally by hermeneutic analysis of his key concepts: "de-dialecticization, " "reified consciousness, " "socio-pathological parallelism, " and so on. His work is contextualized among competing theories of ideological expressiveness and collectively significant cognitive distortions of reality.The sociology of scholarly knowledge cannot as yet fully explain why certain new ideas are widely resisted or ignored, for a time, regardless of their manifest power to illuminate, while others are deftly assimilated. This phenomenon becomes most noticeable when theoretical material is reappraised at some remove in time and place from its point of origin.Why, for instance, has this century's social thought witnessed moments of such sharply contrasting enthusiasms (e.g., for Spencer, Durkheim, Pareto, Weber, Freud, Mead, Sorokin, Mannheim, finally Marx, and those he inspired, like Lukacs, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School), during which each successive figure was hailed as the new and best guide to enlightenment, then allowed temporarily to rule as the favored stimulus for theoretical change and correlated research? (Though most of those named suffered translation into English, all finally received their due despite of it.) Two of the oddest cases that illustrate this fleeting centrality were the Hungarian friends, Lukacs and Mannheim. The former's major work finally arrived in English in 1971, 48 years after its German publication, and 35 years after is author had repudiated his most ingenious theorizing in favor of a circumspect Stalinism. His sometime companion, Mannheim, was luckier, for his early fortunes benefitted from the mighty sponsorship of Louis Wirth and the translation energy of Edward Shils (for details, see Kettler and Meja 1994). Yet his major work, Ideology and Utopia, now seems hesitant and theoretically unadventurous when compared with Lukacs'. Joseph Gabel, strongly influenced by both these theorists (Gabel, 1975; published a work in 1962 which remained unknown in this country until 1975, when its third edition appeared (under a British imprint) as False Consciousness. [A paperback version in 1978 did not add to Gabel's renown;...