The Critical Dictionary of Sociology is unlike most other sociology or social science
dictionaries. Its authors, Raymond Boudon and François Bourricaud, are eminent
French sociologists. Both are typical of the cosmopolitan French intellectual class—
they are extremely widely read, are rich in what Pierre Bourdieu would call social
and cultural capital, are highly conversant with American versions of Anglo-
Saxon sociology, speak and write in several languages, and doubtless hold social
and political views which are perhaps a little right of centre. They are also the
authors of major sociological studies on issues as widespread as stratification,
sociological method, and the social theories of Talcott Parsons. So, when they
come to write a book like the Critical Dictionary their objectives are almost certainly
irreconcilable with those of the average compiler of the banal but worthy work
which it is the destiny of most works with the title ‘dictionary’ to be.
The title of the book of course discloses its authors’ objectives. But it is
‘Critical’ in a sense which has very little to do with how that prefix has been
commandeered and overworked by essentially left-wing social thinkers since the
resurgence of Marxist thought in the 1960s, and indeed it is used by Boudon and
Bourricaud in a sense which evokes earlier and more wide-ranging though not
unconnected references, whose force has been evident from the Enlightenment
right through to the present, the critical rationalism of the philosophes and their
Encyclopedie being one of its earliest forebears.
If the critical rationalism which underlies the Dictionary has a long and honourable
pedigree it is because it forms a mode of thought which is irreverent in the best
sense of that term: it has little respect for conventional wisdom or for intellectual
fads and fashions. The authors take a clear and uncompromising line on their
subject, and their choice of entries is as much a matter of personal delight in the
glorious variety of sociological concepts and theories as it is of a wish to settle
certain problems of their ‘erstwhile philosophical conscience’ as Marx would have
said. This gives the Dictionary a tough and acerbic edge. Each entry grapples directly
with an issue, whether theoretical, epistemological, philosophical, political, or
empirical, and provides a strong statement of what Boudon and Bourricaud think
about it. The discussions are considered but argumentative; they reveal as much
about the views of their authors as they do about the topic under review.