Selznick Interviewed: Philip Selznick in Conversation with Roger Cotterrell
| Published date | 01 September 2004 |
| Author | Roger Cotterrell |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2004.00292.x |
| Date | 01 September 2004 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 31, NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2004
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 291±317
Selznick Interviewed:
1
Philip Selznick in Conversation with
Roger Cotterrell*
Philip Selznick enjoys world-wide respect as a sociologist and,
unusually among prominent contemporary sociological theorists, he
has made law a main focus of his work. A leading pioneer of Anglo-
American legal sociology since the 1950s, he has pursued a
distinctive scholarly approach, founded in Deweyan pragmatism,
that treats ideals and values as fundamental concerns of social
science, integral to its methods and aims. This orientation was first
developed in his work in the sociology of organizations and is central
to his sociology of law and to his writings since the 1980s on
communitarianism, which combine philosophical and sociological
analysis.
INTRODUCTION
Philip Selznick was instrumental in creating the Center for the Study of
Law and Society at the University of California at Berkeley in 1961, and
served as its Chair for eleven years. In January 2002 the Center invited me
to Berkeley for a week to interview him for a UCB oral history project,
primarily to produce for the University a record of key events, contexts,
and intellectual developments in his life and career. The more than eleven
hours of our taped conversations provided opportunities to discuss broadly
many topics of common interest. Among them were aspects of the history
of American sociology; the nature, development, and future of
sociological studies of law; the concept of community; the relations of
legal sociology and legal philosophy; and sociological approaches to the
study of values. UCB staff arranged the production of the 80,000 word
transcript, which I edited and from which the following adapted extracts
are taken. R.C.
291
ßRoger Cotterrell. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Department of Law, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road,
London E1 4NS, England
1 Selected by Jir
ÏõÂPr
Ï
ibaÂn
Ïfrom the series of oral history interviews conducted by Roger
Cotterrell between 28th and 30th January 2002.
EARLY INSPIRATIONS
COTTERRELL: In 1938 you began graduate studies at Columbia University
. . . I wonder whether initially this was a place to be while you got on with
your political activities, because you were very politically active around that
time.
SELZNICK: Yes. You could put it that way, but it wasn't just a place to be. I
thought it was a natural thing for me to do . . . to go on to graduate school.
COTTERRELL:
I think the reason I put it that way is because Webb says,
`When Philip Selznick entered Columbia in 1938, he had only a hazy idea of
where his graduate studies would lead him. He felt it was important to continue
his education, but he did not really think in terms of preparing for an academic
career.'
2
SELZNICK: I didn't, because I was so involved with the political scene that
the idea of leaving New York, being outside all of this, seemed hard to
accept, so I really wasn't sure what I was going to do with this, but it seemed
obvious that that's where I was. I think a lot had to do with the fact that it
was all continuous with the work that I had done in [my] honours programme
[at the City College of New York] on the culture and personality school. I
really learned a lot, and I read an enormous amount of anthropology. I
became very familiar with that.
COTTERRELL: So it was anthropology, more than sociology initially, in
terms of social science?
SELZNICK: Well, no I wouldn't say that exactly, because I was interested in
other things in sociology . .. like Max Weber on bureaucracy. The theme of
bureaucracy was, of course, very central to us in those days because . .. given
the nature of the Soviet Union and the kind of regime that was created there,
we had problems how to characterize that. One way of characterizing it was
to call it bureaucratic collectivism . . . In about 1938 or so, we became
familiar ± 1939 maybe ± we became familiar with Robert Michels's book on
Political Parties.
3
That had not been reprinted, but somebody or other had a
copy that he was passing around. We were quite impressed with it. This was
a powerful way of explaining what could happen to organizations. Michels
wrote basically about the socialist organization.
COTTERRELL: Yes, the SPD [German Social Democratic Party].
SELZNICK: Organizations that were committed to ideas, but they were
doing the kinds of things and implicating the organizational imperatives that
would lead to this self-perpetuating leadership.
. . . . . . . . .
292
2 D.G. Webb, `Philip Selznick and the New York Sociologists', paper presented to the
Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, Ottawa, Ontario, 9±11 June 1982,
18.
3 R. Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchial Tendencies of
Modern Democracy (1915).
ßRoger Cotterrell
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