S.D. Clark Lecture 2025: Fields, Autonomy, and the State

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Abstract: With his last book, The True, the Good and the Beautiful: On the Rise and Fall and Rise of the Kantian Architectonic of Action, just out, Professor Martin will focus in this lecture on what he hopes is his next book. Tying field theory to the theory of differentiation has proven extremely generative in the social sciences and the humanities. However, we have confused the nature of the field with talk of autonomy. This clarification allows us to see the core of field theory being a new template for understanding self-organization--a template integrally bound up with the slow development of the modern state. Fields, far from being autonomous, are a specific form of state project whereby modern states domesticate areas of social life that resist direct rule.

John Levi Martin is currently the Florence Borchert Bartling Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago; previously, he held positions at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and at Rutgers University. He is a rarity of the modern academic discipline: a generalist. He has published three books in recent years addressing the goals vs. practice of theory, methods, and statistics in sociology and beyond. He just published The True, the Good and the Beautiful, a book on the development of architectonics for the theory of action, and their relation to constitutional thought. He is also the author of Social Structures, and The Explanation of Social Action, each given an Outstanding Book award by the Theory section of the American Sociological Association in 2010 and 2012 respectively. His most recent invited presentations and keynotes at universities include talks at Cornell, Heidelberg, Copenhagen, Zhejiang, Duke, Wisconsin, UCLA, NYU, Stanford, McGill, Mannheim, Humboldt, St. Petersburg State, Ohio State, and Columbia. He is currently the editor of the American Journal of Sociology.