Comments on The True, The Good, and The Beautiful

Notes on John Levi Martin's Genealogy of Social Thought

A review of John Levi Martin's monumental work of social theory, The True, the Good, and The Beautiful. The book presents an ambitious genealogy of Western thought's 'trinitarian' architectonics to diagnose a foundational flaw in sociology's development. This post offers a critical assessment, arguing that while the work is a tremendous and necessary contribution, its execution is hampered by a meandering narrative, inconsistent methodological choices, questionable interpretations of key thinkers, and significant conceptual omissions.

John Levi Martin is definitely among the most ambitious social theorists in the world today. His recently published The True, The Good, and The Beautiful is a testament to this ambition. Who else, outside of 90 year old Jurgen Habermas, is writing 900 pages devoted to close readings of obscure philosophers and theorists? For better or worse, you don’t see a lot of entries these days in the “Aristotle to AJS” genre.

The book’s main thesis is that sociology, as a discipline, took a wrong turn at its inception. It did so by prioritizing Immanuel Kant’s first two critiques, which dealt with the realms of the True (pure reason) and the Good (practical reason), while largely ignoring the third, which dealt with the Beautiful via the problem of judgment. Martin’s task is to trace the origin of this "trinitarian" mode of thinking, understand Kant's critiques as a pivotal turning point, and diagnose how the partial uptake of only two thirds of this framework left sociology on an unbalanced tripod.

Martin shows this by examining how the inability to incorporate aesthetics and judgment caused persistent problems in later sociological theories that tried to think architectonically. A recurrent theme is the linkage between this cognitive trinity and theories of political constitutions, such as the three branches of government, executive, legislative, and judiciary. The book then examines thinkers who tried to bring judgment back into the fold, like Hannah Arendt and Charles Sanders Peirce, as well as other major modern architectonic social theorists like Talcott Parsons and Jürgen Habermas, who struggled to do so.

I’m a Martin super-fan, and would wager that I’m among a handful of people who have actually read the whole book start to finish. Well, actually, I’m not sure that I have. I read some earlier versions and haven’t gone back to see how much the published version has changed. Even I have my limits!

Given the glacial pace of the academic journal review process (nobody has asked me, btw), I thought I’d use this forum to gather together my comments on the book. These were based on those earlier versions I read. I did a few spot checks and they seem to still resonate, but if you think Martin has now addressed them, let me know in comments.

What kind of a story is this?

All praise aside, this is a long book. As someone very interested in the topic, familiar with many of the thinkers, and a fan of the author, even I had a hard time getting through it and keeping the ideas straight and connected in my mind. Often, it felt like I was reading somebody else’s reading notes. The overall writing often did not seem to be driven by and organized around what the book promised, namely, an analysis of recurrent architectonic forms and operations. The utterly fascinating idea that one can discern an order and certain possible “moves in the game” across millennia by constructing and comparing tables summarizing theories of mind and society got swallowed up and did not seem to drive the narrative .

One way to state the issue is by way of a phrase Martin resorts to fairly often. After discussing some author, he tells the reader that before doing something else, we “must” turn to some other topic or author. A major question is about the force of these “musts.” It was very difficult for me to understand the sense of necessity behind them .

I could think of a few possibilities, none of which are clearly driving the bus. One I would call dialectical. We elucidate the emergence of a “shape of thought,” work out its simplest form, test its limits, find where it collapses. Then we add the most minimal assumptions necessary to shore it up, see how far those can take us. Repeat, until we have a rich and developed system of ideas, defined by their capacity to have solved prior problems. This would come closer to the structuralist ambition that seems to animate the book. There’s a chapter showing the consolidation of the trinity, another with Weber pushing it to its limits, and then Peirce overcoming it. In this form, the “must” has a very strong meaning determined by the inner logic of thinking through the “shapes of thought” themselves, driven by their inability to stabilize themselves.

However, this is often hard to square with the actual historical process, and in many cases it seems that Martin’s “musts” are driven by some effort to cover all aspects of a historical debate or an individual author’s development, including (what seem to be now) minor or at least largely forgotten figures (or texts for an individual author). It is always hard to combine a historicist and a structuralist logic, and this is no different. There are times when the narrative seems to be driven by an effort to recover a historical sequence, but then it will abruptly jump back and forth in time in a way that makes it seem some structuralist logic is at work.

Then in addition to the potential dissonance of history and structure, there is scholarship, which could also drive this kind of story. To take another book, one in the “caveman to NATO” genre, this is what makes Mann’s The Sources of Social Power so successful. For example, when Mann writes about the transition from nomadism to agricultural settlement and proto-states, the fascination comes in part from the historical material, in part from the role this plays in the broader macro-historical argument about the growth of social power, but also in taking the reader through the scholarly debates about how to interpret the evidence (same for debates about the class structure of the French revolutionaries). The local narrative is in this way driven by bringing readers into a contested intellectual terrain they might not have known about, and allowing its puzzles and problems to move the broader narrative forward, with Mann as synthesizer, participant, and judge.

Martin’s text however does not really explicitly dialogue with or intervene in the scholarly/intellectual debates about these thinkers/periods, though once in a while Martin will state a disagreement or note that he is following some author. But by and large the text is exclusively concerned with debates among the figures it studies, not debates about how to understand the figures or their debates. To my mind, bringing in this dimension would have helped a lot, since it would also be driven by the interpretative process around these texts, which is often just as important as the texts themselves.

This feeling that the narrative thread is hard to follow is compounded by the book's visual presentation. The quality of the tables and figures is not great. As a reader, you're given almost no assistance in interpreting them. There are cryptic markings everywhere. My reading notes are full of comments to myself like: “What the heck does the giant arrow pointing upward mean? And the thick lines?”. “More strange blue lines!”. “What does this weird shaded curvy arrow mean?”. “Strange dashed red arrows, a curvy blue line…need some captions”. Martin will often ask the reader to make difficult comparisons on their own, for instance, with statements like “The reader may compare the two diagrams,” a reference to a figure from hundreds of pages earlier. Since the structuralist version of the narrative depends on various “transformations” among these tables, not placing them side by side, above and below, bound by some simple set of rules across them, seems like a serious theoretical issue.

Perhaps nowhere is the lost narrative thread more apparent than in the book’s conclusion. After more than 800 pages, a reader desperately needs a synthesis that helps them see how this massive work all hangs together. The conclusion starts well, reviewing the main arguments, but then the reader is taken on a dizzying tour that includes a brief reflection on the contemporary resurgence of racialist primordialism, a quick pass through semi-conservative practice theories, and sketchy reflections on the role of Lutheranism and Catholicism in theories of action. It ends with a very undeveloped, but certainly intriguing, gesture that we might switch from seeing to hearing as the core source of our metaphors for knowing, without reflecting on what this means or how it might alter the entire architectonic project that preceded it. It felt like loading too much too quickly right at the end, undermining the chance to synthesize the book's core contributions

Structuralist or Evolutionary?

This brings me to a fundamental question I was left with: what kind of a genealogical argument is this, structuralist or evolutionary? At times, the book gestures toward a structuralist interpretation, in a broadly Levi-Straussian mode, where what should be central is the “transformation logic” itself that carries us through the various architectonics. From this view, the proof of the pudding would be in the logical connections among the architectonics, which should flow as if from themselves.

But there are plenty of indications that Martin is thinking less in strict structuralist terms and more in evolutionary ones. Here the model is a paleontologist who has gathered a sample of fossil remains and tries to arrange them in some kind of series, with gaps being “missing links” . The text even uses this language, referring to thinkers as “specimens” or hailing a discovery as “one version of a transitional form so highly sought by evolutionary theorists”. Is it one, the other, or both? Without a clear answer, it feels like reading archaeological field notes, valuable but not yet worked up into a final analysis .

This question of the project’s fundamental logic extends to the criteria Martin uses to evaluate the various architectonics he considers. He clearly thinks some are better or worse than others, and often “balance” seems to be the main criterion. However, what “balance” means is not always clear, nor is how it interacts with other potential criteria.

This ambiguity raises a question about the guiding metaphor of the entire project. Is architecture or engineering the more appropriate metaphor for these systems of thought? To be sure, architects think about balance and support, but this is truly the engineer’s core job . The architect is arguably just as concerned with the interactions a space enables, its relation to the user, and its dialogue with the surrounding environment. Martin’s analysis tends to revert more to engineering-style thinking than to architectural thinking, and there might be something at stake in this truncation of the architectural metaphor that is worth reflecting on.

The Rules of the Game: Selection and Consistency

This methodological ambiguity extends to the criteria for including and interpreting thinkers. The book’s very form creates a selection effect, prioritizing those who present their ideas in the types of tabular representations Martin favors, or whose ideas readily lend themselves to that form of presentation. But what about thinkers like Oakeshott, who had a lot to say about judgment but would never try to represent those ideas in a rigid architectonic, because it would reek of the very rationalism he opposed? Is it possible that those who thought most about judgment would be the least likely to play this game?.

This selection problem is tied to a number of inconsistencies. Martin states in a footnote, for example, that he is concerned only with interpretations about which there is broad consensus among specialists. This is an extremely strong claim and, I think, a false one. His interpretations of Kant on judgment, Plato on the soul, or Rickert and Simmel are far from settled among specialists.

Similarly, he says he will only invoke fundamental structures when his authors explicitly do so , yet he later admits to finding gender as a structuring principle in Durkheim's work based not on anything Durkheim said, but on what his teacher said, and then follows the “necessary” architectonic consequences. He even attaches the triad of the true, the good, and the beautiful to Kant’s architectonic, after arguing that Kant himself did not think of his critiques on this model. When a theorist he likes, such as Arendt, does injustice to her sources, it’s called a “creative attribution,” but when one he dislikes, like Parsons, does it, it’s a “gross distortion”. This selective application of his own rules is puzzling.

The claim of specialist consensus is particularly fragile regarding Kant himself. The book’s argument often rests on reading Kant as a faculties theorist, yet whether Kant’s transcendental logic is primary in a way that undermines the psychology remains a central, vigorous debate among specialists. Furthermore, the account seems to sidestep crucial post-Kantian problems that disturb the neat architectonic presentation. For example, the scholarship of Robert Pippin, a major omission in the book, explicitly argues that the problem of the mind’s “spontaneity” fundamentally disrupts Kant’s architectonic efforts, an issue that deserves more serious consideration here. These debates can hardly be waived off as going against an overwhelming specialist consensus; these are the specialists.

The inconsistency is also apparent in the treatment of Georg Simmel. The literature often treats Simmel as a deliberately anti-architectonic thinker, for whom the essayistic and fragmentary form of writing is essential to his ideas. Yet Martin finds in a corner of his philosophical writing the seeds of a key architectonic. If Martin can successfully excavate a hidden structure from a thinker so resistant to them, why not apply the same effort to other essayistic writers he excludes, like Henri Bergson or Alfred North Whitehead? The reading also overlooks Simmel’s own direct attempt to adapt Kantian categories to sociology in his essay "How is Society Possible," which features three a prioris, after all. This selective excavation makes the criteria for inclusion feel arbitrary.

The ambiguity in method is also reflected in the book’s specific definition of genealogy. Martin defines a genealogical account as one that "looks selectively at those who proved to be important for our current thought". But this is only one version of genealogy. As Walter Benjamin argued in his work on the German Trauerspiel, one can construct a powerful genealogy based not on the victors but on the "detritus of history". The book would have been stronger had it engaged with these alternative models and offered an explicit argument as to why one version was chosen over others.

Debating the Details

Beyond these structural issues, my critical reactions often stemmed from a central tension in the narrative: who are the agents in this story? Is it the ideational architecture itself, or the thinkers building it? The book is uneven in this regard. The chapter on Weber, for instance, is a compelling page-turner precisely because it seems driven by Weber’s own concerns as he understood them. In other sections, however, the individual authors feel overwhelmed by the structure, which can make the chapters feel tedious. This is because reading these authors through the trinity of true, good, and beautiful sometimes means pushing against the grain of what they themselves understood their projects to be about.

I also had a number of more specific critical reactions to the interpretations of key figures. The reading of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew is a case in point. Martin notes that here we get a new and significant mapping of the trinity of true, beautiful, and good. I was struck by the uncritical acceptance of a statement coming from the voice of “Him” as key evidence for what Diderot thought about the trinity.

“Him” is not an admirable figure; he (this is the Hegelian interpretation at least) exemplifies an initially attractive but doomed idea of freedom as romantic irony, whereby the free person sees that life is a series of social masks and develops the ability to take on any one of them without ever identifying fully with them. The statement about the trinity comes at the end of one of his long self-parodying speeches, right before he basically loses it and puts on a crazy scene, pantomiming various artists, reaching to the skies and yelling “isn’t it beautiful!” and drawing a big crowd of onlookers.

I don’t know what all that means, but it seems to me unlikely that one can just take the statement about the trinity straight, without asking why Diderot put it in the mouth of this character, and had him say it at this time. That is, the question needs to be not just what logic this trinity maps, but what Diderot is telling us about the type of character who speaks about the trinity in this way, keeping in mind that the answer will probably involve a claim that the character exemplifies some deep pathology. One can’t just take this statement straight without asking why Diderot put it in the mouth of this pathological character. The literary form is the true expression of Diderot’s thought, and it must be interpreted in that light.

The treatment of Weber also felt unduly reductive at times. The claim that his intellectual tensions arise from a mommy-daddy complex, a conflict between his stern real-politik father and his sentimental pietist mother, seems to miss the more Levi-Straussian point: that this family dynamic is itself part and parcel of a wider cultural configuration that leads one down a certain intellectual path

Finally, for all his avowed wish to offer a sympathetic reading of Talcott Parsons, the treatment often comes off as downright uncharitable. Take the discussion of Parsons’s essay on the “expressive revolution.” Martin quotes Parsons on the limits of group sex as a basis for solidarity mainly to make fun of him, concluding that Parsons is just asking us to set aside “fun” for “achievement”. This is a cheap shot that misses the entire point of the essay. Parsons was seriously engaging with the 60s counter-culture and trying to understand how its ethos of “love” could be scaled up into a symbolic medium, much like barter becomes money or force becomes authority. It’s a shame, because that very essay contains an example of Parsons struggling to turn the Christian trinity into a four-fold distinction, a perfect illustration of the book’s central thesis about architectonic tensions that gets lost, and all in favor of scoring some zingers.

This pattern of misreading culminates in the characterization of Parsons's theory of socialization as a dump truck backing up to a child’s open skull and pouring in all of culture. This is a memorable but unfair caricature. Parsons's own work, including The Social System, is clear that socialization is a lifelong process full of tension and strain and that full integration is merely a useful heuristic against which the reality of deviance and strain can be analyzed as sources of innovation . It feels as though Parsons is set up with a "heavenly" version of his theories so that a cynical, and ultimately inaccurate, version can be forced upon the reader.

The interpretive issues are not confined to modern thinkers. In the discussion of Plato, for instance, it seems odd to ignore what he wrote about beauty and eros in the Phaedrus and Symposium, given the overarching goal of recovering aesthetic theory and beauty in general sociological theory. These dialogues present eros as a crucial mediator, and there is a large literature on how this relates to the arguments of the Republic. My reading notes from that section have a simple question: "how can eros be not a part of this story at all?". This omission is significant because the theme of desire and mediation reappears throughout the intellectual history Martin traces.

Omissions

I know how annoying it can be to be asked about authors one did not include, especially in a work of this scope. But some omissions seem important not for accidental reasons, but because they point to crucial analytical paths not taken.

I found the treatment of Hegel to be much too thin. The book barely touches the Phenomenology, the Science of Logic, or especially the Lectures on Fine Art. This last one is key. A central move in post-Kantian thought, which Martin’s narrative largely misses, was the switch from beauty and aesthetics to the "work of art" itself. Thinkers like Hegel, and later Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, turned away from the judging appreciator and the creative genius to focus on the artwork as the site where the problem of the “mindedness of matter” is worked out. This is precisely the turf Peirce gets to at the end of Martin’s chapter on Peirce’s version of absolute idealism, where aesthetics seems trivial and the relationship between the universal and particular comes to the fore. Following this path would require a serious engagement with Hegel, Heidegger, and the scholarship around them. If one is looking for alternatives to the Kantian “after the beautiful,” this has to be a bigger part of the story.

Another major missing stream is the one that runs from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek. This tradition represents a concerted effort to take on the problem of judgment, especially regarding value, and to develop a theory of society based on emergent order that unfolds quite differently from the traditions surveyed in the book. Hayek, in particular, comes directly out of similar conversations Weber was enmeshed in, and his focus on prices as aggregators of collective judgment is absolutely pivotal to his social theory. Given the book is about the architectonics of social science, not just sociology, this feels like a significant oversight. Hayek even wrote a model constitution!

It is also strange that the work of Hans Joas is almost entirely absent. The Creativity of Action is a direct result of grappling with the exact questions about the position of judgment in sociological action theory. His more recent work on “affirmative genealogy” directly confronts the problem of history and normativity at the core of Martin’s study. Here we have one of our most important living social theorists doing something very close to what Martin thinks we should be doing, and it would be helpful to learn how he fits into this story

Finally, the analysis misses an opportunity to consider the role of political orientation or "thought styles" in the use of architectonics. Karl Mannheim, in his thesis on Conservative Thought, strongly associated the prioritization of "judgment" with conservatism, which was formed in opposition to the subsumptive, rationalistic style of progressive thought. Mannheim’s work suggests it might not be accidental that thinkers like the progressive Frankfurt School theorists had difficulty with judgment, while conservatives like Oakeshott featured it, precisely at the expense of systematic architectonics. Including this contrast between progressive and conservative thought styles could have added another important structuring principle to the analysis.

In the end, I hope these comments are read in the spirit they are intended: as a sympathetic effort to critically work through a project with the potential to be a truly tremendous contribution, to sociology and far beyond. Thank you to John for writing it, and for the opportunity to read and think with it.