Beyond the problem of meaning: Robert Wuthnow's historical sociology of culture.

The article presents a contextual analysis of the book Communities of Discourse by Robert Wuthnow. The revival of historical sociology in the last twenty years has focused on class, state, revolution and political mobilization, family and demography. New attention to cultural factors--a central part of earlier historical sociology--is overdue. Wuthnow's book is a major effort to meet this need. It reflects also the rapid growth of the sociology of culture. Especially in the U.S., however, sociology of culture suffers from a strange disciplinary deformation. For some reason, many sociologists think they must repress the interpretation of meaning in order to be rigorous. Sociologists of culture, therefore, often try to study cultural phenomena without attention to the substance or content of culture. Wuthnow is no exception. Simply in terms of scale, Wuthnow's book is major achievement. It reveals a prodigious amount of scholarly labor, not only in amassing historical detail, but in thinking through an analytic scheme broad enough to encompass the diversity of three great movements of cultural production: Reformation, Enlightenment, and European socialism. Wuthnow's book also offers numerous insights into specific historical developments and more general relationships between ideology and social structure. It is, thus, not a book to be dismissed or disregarded.