Culture

uthors: Ralph Fevre and Angus Bancroft
Publisher: Palgrave
(3.5/5)

Dead White Men is sociology’s answer to Jostein Gaardner’s Sophie’s World, but it’s not quite as good. As in Sophie’s World, Fevre and Bancroft attempt to introduce the big ideas of their discipline (here sociology, rather than western philosophy) via a story about a girl: Mila is a first-year sociology undergraduate trying to keep her identity a secret. Her father has just been found guilty of fraud in a massively publicised trial, and she is anxious not to be recognised for fear of the social repercussions. Dead White Men chronicles Mila’s intellectual and personal journey as she comes to grips with (and has many conversations about) sociological theories and applies them to her own life, especially with respect to the secret she is harbouring. 
Dead White Men gets some thing right. I found it accessible, both as a novel and as an introduction to sociology; the prose is not eloquent, but it’s not distractingly bad (as one might reasonably expect from non-novelists) and the integration of the sociological theories into conversations is certainly an effective pedagogical tool. My only two complains about content are that firstly, the authors need to brush up on other fields (e.g., psychology) if they’re not going to totally mislead their readers with silly caricatures, and secondly, I finished the book unconvinced that sociology wasn’t just armchair social psychology (with some political philosophy thrown in). Of course, one might retort that I’d say that, wouldn’t I, since I’m a social psychologist. (But then my PHIL 105 students will point out that that’s just an ad hominem argument ...)
I learnt a lot from Dead White Men, but it’s hard for me to judge how good a job Fevre and Bancroft have done in simplifying their field’s major theories. And since the purpose of the book is educational rather than literary, I think they’ve done a good job. Of course, neither Gaarder nor Fevre and Bancroft have done for their field what Lewis Carroll did for logic in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but that’s another story.