The uses of classic books or papers

I would like to discuss separately a number of uses of the classics. It is quite possible, for example, that one would not extract hypotheses about Australian religion from Durkheim's Elementary Forms (c 1976), and yet might read it for some other purpose. Let me specify these functions with the catchwords: (1) touchstones, (2) developmental tasks, (3) intellectual small coinage, (4) fundamental ideas, (5) routine science, (6) rituals. Let me specify briefly what I mean by each before analyzing them separately.

By a ‘touchstone’ function I mean the sort of thing Claude Lévi-Strauss was talking about in his autobiography (1965) when he said he read a few pages of The 18th Brumaire (Marx, 1963) before sitting down to write something himself. The 18th Brumaire was an example of excellence, showing the way a sociological study ought to sound.

I used to advise students to think of ten books in sociology they would most like to have written, then to analyze those ten to figure out what virtues they would have to develop in order to do the kind of work they admired. Classics as models of good work is the original sense of Thomas Kuhn's much-abused notion of a ‘paradigm.’ A paradigm is a case of a beautiful and possible way of doing one's scientific work. A touchstone then is a concrete example of the virtues a scientific work might have, in a combination that shows what work should look like in order to contribute to the discipline.