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The Forest and the Trees: Sociology as Life, Practice and Promise. Allan G. Johnson. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 1997. 216 pages. $18.95.
Ask yourself the following question: If sociology could teach everyone just one thing, if it could pass along just one central insight that would lead us toward everything else we could know about social life, what would it be? This is the hypothetical situation that Allan Johnson put himself in when he began writing The Forest and the Trees. It is a question that squarely situates Johnson in the classic tradition of C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination (1959), Peter Berger's Invitation to Sociology (1963), and, more recently, Charles Lemert's Social Things (1997). It is Johnson's attempt to answer the $64,000 question that we all confront when we step into the classroom: What is sociology really all about? Johnson's answer to this question is as follows: "We are always participating in something larger than ourselves, and if we want to understand social life and what happens to people in it, we have to understand what it is that we're participating in and how we participate in it" (p. 13). Thus, sociology is not just about understanding the forest, nor is it just about understanding the trees; rather, it is about understanding both the forest and the trees and how they relate to one another. Substitute social systems for "the forest" and individuals for "the trees," and you have the basic premise of Johnson's book. To understand social life, we (and, according to Johnson, we must remember that there are multiple "we's") must understand the reciprocal relationship between individuals and the social systems in which they participate.
What seems to be a fairly simple premise actually turns out to be considerably more complicated-and this is exactly Johnson's point. Using a rich melange of examples that endlessly flow into one...