Watching a graduate student slide a laminated card across a seminar table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as if they’re exchanging a rookie shortstop for an experienced closer, has a subtly ridiculous quality. This card’s face isn’t a baseball player, though. Max Weber is here. or Karl Marx. Or, if you’re especially unlucky in the trade, Herbert Marcuse’s infamously unimpressed gaze.
For a few years now, theory trading cards—small, tangible cards with important concepts and portraits of prominent social thinkers—have been floating around sociology classrooms. At first, the majority of academics disregarded them as a novelty—the kind of thing a well-intentioned lecturer brings up once and never brings up again. Then an unforeseen event occurred. They appeared in a reader for a Harvard course. Suddenly, no one was referring to them as unimportant.
The specific irony in this situation is difficult to ignore. Through what is essentially a collectible card game, Harvard, an institution with deep, almost romantic ties to German intellectual tradition—Angela Merkel, the fourth postwar German chancellor to do so, gave the 2019 commencement address, and the university has been awarding honorary degrees to German leaders since Konrad Adenauer in 1955—is now assisting students in metabolizing that very tradition. Depending on which faculty lounge you’re in, it seems like the institution would find this either horrifying or subtly appropriate.
When you sit with it, the appeal isn’t wholly unexpected. The theory of sociology is infamously hard to remember. The thinkers are numerous, the ideas are complex, and the majority of them wrote in German. To put it kindly, it is ambitious to expect a twenty-two-year-old to differentiate between Luhmann’s systems theory and Habermas’s communicative rationality on a Tuesday morning. The cards appear to provide students with a tangible anchor, which is where things start to get really interesting. Something to clutch, turn over, and debate. Something that serves as a conversation starter disguised as a study aid, much like a baseball card.
According to a piece from theorycards.org.uk, one writer was initially openly skeptical and acknowledged their doubts before witnessing the format truly take off in sociology lectures. Reluctant conversion like that is significant. Scholars usually don’t give up on skepticism lightly.
It’s possible that what’s happening here is older than it appears. Baseball analyst Bill James once noted that poor statistics are a better option than none at all. Pedagogy appears to follow a similar logic. Ignoring dead German thinkers is not an alternative to interacting with them. It’s misinterpreting them, which social science has always done at great risk. According to Andrew Gelman of Columbia, flawed social science reasoning is pervasive and causes quiet, actual harm. Make students look at Weber’s picture long enough to truly recall his arguments if trading cards slow that process down. That seems like a fair trade.
Additionally, the format flattens hierarchy in a way that is uncommon in lecture halls. A card is just that—a card. The relative obscurity of Weber and a lesser-known Frankfurt School figure is no longer reflected in the page order or font size, and they are seated side by side in the same deck. Students exchange them, discuss them, and give them little personal interpretations. Learning might be more effective when it feels more like a game you choose to play than a transaction.
It’s genuinely unclear if this becomes a permanent feature of theory instruction or fades into a nostalgic anecdote of early 2020s pedagogy. However, dead German thinkers are currently treated in some seminar rooms with the same casual reverence that was previously reserved for batting averages. Stranger things have been successful.
