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Three categories-founders, classics, canons-have been vitally important in helping to frame sociology's precarious identity, defining discipline's sense of its past and implications for its current activity. Today that identity is being challenged as never before. Within academy, a number of positions-feminist, postmodernist, poststructuralist, postcolonial-converge in questioning status of the These currents, in turn, reflect wider social questioning about meaning and uses of knowledge in technologically advanced societies. In Founders, Classics, Canons, Peter Baehr scrutinizes nature of this challenge. He provides a model of processes through which texts are elevated to status, and defends continuing importance of sociology's traditions for a university education in social sciences. The concept of classic is, as Baehr notes, a complex one. Essentially it assumes a scale of judgment that deems certain texts as exemplary in eminence. But what is nature of this eminence? Baehr analyzes various responses to this question. Most notable are those that focus on functions classics perform for scholarly community that employs them; rhetorical force classics are said to possess; and processes of reception that result in status. The concept of is often equated with two other notions: founders and canon. The former has a well-established pedigree within discipline, but widespread usage of latter in sociology is much more recent and polemical in tone. Baehr offers arguments against these two ways of interpreting, defending and attacking sociology's great texts and authors. He demonstrates why, in logical and historical terms, discourses and traditions cannot actually be founded and why term founder has little explanatory content. Equally, he takes issue with notion of and argues that analogy between theological canon and sociological texts, though seductive, is mistaken. While questioning uses to which concepts of founder, classic, and canon have been put, Baehr's purpose is not dismissive. On contrary, he seeks to understand value and meaning they have for people who employ them in cultural battle to affirm or excoriate liberal university tradition. In examining tactics of this battle, this volume offers a model of how social theory can be critical rather than radical.