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This paper addresses the status of the concept of tradition in social theory. Tradition, precisely defined, should be one of the ways sociologists understand the logic of social action, group identity, and collective memory (Coser 1992; Connerton 1989). To date, however, most social scientists are either dismissive or indiscriminate in their use of the notion. Those who disapprove of the concept tend to "treat tradition as a residual category"' (Shils 1981 p. 8) or they see it as a type of false consciousness susceptible to manipulation by dominant elites (Hobsbawm 1983). Scholars who embrace tradition, such as Edward Shils, often do so by broadening the concept into something indistinguishable from any cultural inheritance. A nuanced ideal-type theory is put forth here to enable us to identify and research the particular logic of a social tradition. This theory is extracted from a critical, and highly selective, reconstruction of the history of the concept of tradition.
It is a commonplace that sociological thought arose in association with the democratic and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those great thinkers whose interests and ideas provide the foundations for the sociological project were all working in response to the emergence of new social forces. Alexis de Tocqueville's description of, and deference to, the egalitarian trend in history; Karl Marx's theory of capitalist development and class struggle; Max Weber's anxiety over the economic and bureaucratic consequences of Western rationalization; and Emile Durkheim's thesis on the shift from mechanical to organic moral solidarity - each represents a different vision of the fundamental determinants of change ushering in a new social order. However, if democratic and industrial society provides the materials for the foreground of the sociological tableau, tradition and `traditional society' define the background. Sociology could not explicitly illuminate the new without yielding, if only implicitly, a vision of the old (1).
The backward looking concern of the sociological classics with `traditional society' is most pronounced in the work of Ferdinand Tonnies. His 1887 book, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (1988), had a profound impact on contemporary German sociologists, especially Weber. For Tonnies the direction of history is away from a traditional society organically united by custom and community toward a modern society impersonally connected by contracts and individualism. Gemeinschaft nurtured...