The Rhetoric of the Canon: Functional, Historicist, and Humanist Justifications

Toward a Historical Sociology of Canonization: Comparing the Development of Sociological Theory in the English-, German-, and French-Language Contexts since the 1950s

“…Humanism does not justify the inclusion of a small number of classics primarily on the basis of their historical significance or their functional value in terms of integrating the field, though both of these might be the case. Humanism, instead, maintains that nobody establishes a vital connection with an author or idea on the basis of their integrative For the humanist, it is the intrinsic quality and power of the text that in the end draws readers to it [Silver et al 2022]. The shift toward contextualism and pluralism indicates a growing lack of confidence in this power, along with a decreasing conviction in the quest for some synthesis that unifies the great diversity of proliferating concepts and paradigms.…”

“…In addition to that, we could broaden our scope and add textbooks from Italian-, Spanish-, Chinese-, or Japanese-language contexts to analyze the extent to which an international discipline has come to exist or whether regional patterns have prevailed. In a qualitative direction, richer analysis of how textbooks articulate who and what they teach would deepen our understanding of the justifications authors provide in maintaining or changing their approach to the canon [Silver et al 2022]. Techniques of computational text analysis of digitized text (e.g., word embeddings, topic modeling) can examine in a precise and reproducible way the patterns that are implicit in the full texts, avoiding the need for coding.…”