In July 2009, the American Journal of Sociology published something peculiar: a review of Michael Young’s 1958 book The Rise of Meritocracy. The review’s appearance so long after its publication wasn’t its only oddity. The review had, the journal’s editor explains, “arrived at AJS by snail mail, with a date stamp of 2048 in the postmark,” having been submitted by one Barbara Celarent, a professor at the University of Atlantis.

Professor Celarent—whose name derives from several sources, including a medieval mnemonic poem for remembering valid syllogistic forms—was later revealed to be the alter ego (or on his telling, sometime collaborator) of Andrew Abbott, the venerable sociologist at the University of Chicago. Over the ensuing six years, thirty-five more reviews would be published under Celarent’s name, her chosen authors scattered across the global and modern history, including Thoreau (Walden, 1854), the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ (So Long a Letter, 1980), the Indian social reformer Pandita Ramabai (The High Caste Hindu Woman, 1887), and the midcentury French West Indian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (A Dying Colonialism, 1959).

Why do this? Celarent was invented, Abbott has explained, to aid his project of taking a broader view of social theory both in terms of time and space. But Abbott wasn’t simply informing his guild about titles due fresh attention. The Celarent project also issues a quiet challenge to readers to consider which books they’d choose for such a long-view review. It raises several intriguing questions about how we gauge the success or failure of a book. Perhaps the first question is the most interesting of all: What books would make your Celarent list? It’s a intriguing prompt to put to friends. If I had it my way, there’d be a Celarent column in all of the journals I read regularly, including this one.

One of the books on my own Celarent mental list has reappeared in a second edition thirty-four years after its initial publication: the political theorist Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. The new edition confirms the book’s status as a classic on the topic of technology’s social meanings. Yet that we are receiving a fresh edition of this book—largely unchanged from its 1986 text—is also troubling. As Winner points out in the new preface, he’s left the original chapters largely “as is” because their counsel remains applicable even if some of his examples (such as the “appropriate technology” movement of the seventies) are historical material now. Reading the book, one receives regular reminders of just how little progress has been made on the core issues that Winner addressed in the mid-eighties: the digital revolution, the environment, and what was already called the “energy crisis.” Winner hoped to invigorate the search for limits on technology in the first edition. The second edition underscores what we already know: We’re still searching for those limits over three decades later.

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