WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?
Monday, November 30, 2009
This began as many of these pages do in another discussion group I belong to; in this case with a discussion of the 2000 American Sociology Association convention. One of the speakers was Ralph Nader. He was perhaps the least political of those invited; it was clear that sociology is not a scientific discipline in the same sense as any other.
A number of academics joined in chorus to say that the simples thing to do with sociology was to abolish it: it has no place in the modern university. Others pointed out that it has a perfectly good place, as a sinkhole for students unable to get an education elsewhere: for those who can't even manage to get a degree in the Department of Education there is always sociology, which has no content, and which will pretty well guarantee you a degree with decent grades in exchange for your learning the proper politically correct attitudes.
Then the following was posted. I print it here by permission of the author:
WHAT TO DO ABOUT SOCIOLOGY
Hi--
Far be it from me to suggest the abolition of sociology departments. After all, I'm the chairman of one.
But even a chairman would need an inhuman capacity for denial to fail to see that:
1. The overwhelming amount of current sociology is simply nonsense--tendentious nonsense at that.
2. Nearly all of the sociology that is not tendentious nonsense is so obvious that one wonders why anyone would see the need to demonstrate it.
3. "1" and "2" are the result of the false analogy of sociology to the physical and natural sciences. In the physical and natural sciences there is an enormous amount of work that can be done by the "average" physicist, chemist. biologist, etc.
This is not true in sociology. The reasons are many. Just a few of these: people-in-general don't spend there time observing that which is observed by the physicist, chemist, biologist. etc. People _do_, minute by minute, observe social interaction and the like. And people are, by and large, wonderful observers and don't need sociologists' help in observing what they observe. (I hasten to add that I am _not_ distinguishing sociology from the sciences mentioned in the logic that must guide its analyses. Logic is logic, and attempts to excuse sociology from logic's requirements on the grounds of some putative "different logic" are wrong-headed to the point of idiocy. To be sure, sociology faces practical problems far less difficult in the physical and natural sciences: self-fulfilling prophesy, the impossibility of getting people to act as one would like for experimental purity, a seemingly infinite-dimensional manifold of variables, etc. But these do not in any way qualitatively differentiate sociology from the physical and natural sciences.)
4. People may often be wrong in their assumption about the _causes_ of what they observe. But analysis of such causes would be beyond the means of most sociologists even if the sociologists were not blinded by ideology.
5. Thus, one would be hard put to deny the desirability of replacing sociology departments as they are now constituted with a small department of social theory that taught the great social theorists and, perhaps, an introductory course in sociology. (Such a course _can_ be marvelous, though it rarely is. It's justification is that there is value in observing life from a sociological viewpoint. Just as one cannot understand the concept of "team" from an atomistic study of individuals--even though this may be possible in principle--one cannot begin to understand society if one doesn't have some idea of the meaning of social norms, stratification, cross-cultural universals, etc.)
Other than this, sociology courses should be devoted to important thinkers about society: Plato, Vico, Smith, Marx, and the like. While, of course, such thinkers' analyses would be assessed in terms of logic, plausibility, concordance with observation, and the like, one wouldn't expect the possibility of the sort of "varification" required in the physical and natural sciences.
6. The irony of all this is that sociology so construed _would_ be critical of society and would expose rationalizations implicit in all value systems. It would do so because it would--like the physical and natural sciences at their best--be the opposite of tendentious and would be biased by neither accepted social beliefs or ideological ones.
7. I am now holding my breath until the changes I suggest are made. So it's just possible that you may not be hearing from me for...,um, ever.
Best,
Steve (Goldberg)
Steven Goldberg
Chairman, Department of Sociology
City College, City University of New York
I find it hard to fault that. I would add a few more names, like Vilfredo Pareto and Machiavelli to the list, and perhaps I would, like Plato inscribe above the door "No admission here without mathematics," but those are fine points; the goal is clearly right.
You will note that Dr. Goldberg is at what was at one time one of the finest undergraduate institutions in the world.
Dr. Goldberg has also said:
Bad as is any attempt to substitute political agenda for empirical curiosity, at least the political Marxists of the thirties accepted the necessity of logic and plausibility in their analyses. They may have based their work on assumptions incongruent with the reality of human nature, but they did attempt to defend the analyses based on them.
Today there is no spirit whatsoever of a need for rigor or even common sense. Agreement is more akin to the beliefs that bind the members of a religion, though religion (to a great extent) has the sense to merely believe the untestible. Sociologists believe the refutable and already refuted.
When I was in grad school, sociology was criticized as demonstrating that which is obviously true. Today it can be, and should be, criticized as "demonstrating" that which is obviously false.
Best,
Steve (Goldberg)
Which is a chilling thought. But having made the diagnosis he also gave us the prescription. The question is whether academia will listen.
