Following the Book: Towards a Pragmatic Sociology of the Book

Abstract

This article offers an outline of a pragmatic sociology of the book. Whilst ubiquitous, books have received relatively little attention from sociologists. I propose to remedy this situation by drawing upon the ideas of GH Mead, namely his neo-Hegelian theory of the subject-object relationship. Mead's chief insight is that objects such as books are first social and only then physical entities. They have agency not because of their thing-ness, so to speak, but because of their sociality. After reviewing the existing literature on the book, I discuss Mead's most relevant contributions. In the proposal for a pragmatic sociology of the book that follows, I combine pragmatism's focus upon the materiality of meaning-production with genealogy's concern with power and violence. I conclude with an illustration of the approach: the simultaneous decanonization of Tocqueville's Democracy in America among sociologists today and its canonization in political science.