W. Lloyd Warner - Criticisms

Criticisms

One of the most scathing critiques of Warner's methods came not from a fellow social scientist, but from popular novelist John Phillips Marquand. A Newburyport native with deep roots in the town, Marquand was annoyed by Warner's efforts to quantify and generalize people and experiences whose particularity served as the basis for several of his novels. In Point of No Return (1947), Marquand mercilessly lampooned Warner (the character Malcolm Bryant) and his work.

Marquand was generally scornful of academics, for instance his cruel portrayal of literature scholar Alan Southby in Wickford Point (1939), but his animus for Warner was personal. In Warner's deterministic vision of American culture, a small town boy like the Point of No Return protagonist Charles Gray would have had little hope of breaking free of the bonds of his provincial lower-upper-class status. That Marquand himself, like Charles Gray, was able to do so seemed a clear refutation of Bryant/Warner's fatalistic theorizing and facile status taxonomies.

Despite his impressive productivity and wide range of interests, Warner's work has long been out of fashion. An empiricist in an era when the social disciplines were increasingly theoretical, fascinated with economic and social inequality in a time when Americans were eager to deny its significance, and implicitly skeptical of the possibilities of legislating social change at a time when many social scientists were eager to be policymakers, Warner's focus on uncomfortable subjects made his work unfashionable. Warner's interest in communities — when the social science mainstream was stressing the importance of urbanization — and religion — when the fields' leaders were aggressively secularist — also helped to marginalize him. Recent work finds cause to celebrate Warner's work and his career. (See McCracken, Grant. 1988. Ever dearer in our thoughts: patina and the representation of status before and after the 18th century. Culture and Consumption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 41–42.)