Sociology and the Demystification of the Modern World (RLE Social Theory)

John Rex

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317650751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Professor Rex's controversial book concerns not only those who are professional sociologists but all thinking people who live in the modern world. One of the objects of sociology is to give 'power to the people', to make a contribution to the understanding of political problems. Rex writes from a deep conviction that sociology is a subject whose insights should be made available to the great mass of the people, so that they may liberate themselves from the mystification of social reality that is continually and routinely presented to them through the media, by those who exercise power and by those who have influence.

The book is dedicated to St Augustine and Franz Fanon, both of whom, Rex points out, were conscious of living in an age which was embarking on a new barbarism, but had the courage to use their intellects to help understand the possibility of a better future. Rex continues in this tradition, and his main preoccupations are reflected in the present book. It includes a discussion of the problem of social knowledge, an analysis of the basic problems of theory building, and, with the aid of concepts derived from Max Weber, an attempt to understand the major problems of the first, second and third worlds. The author also looks at social structures and moral perspectives, and discusses the vocation of a sociologist in a collapsing civilisation. The book is certain to stimulate debate, both in sociological and political fields and more generally, and is also a serious contribution to the discussion of the methodology and purposes of sociology.

part one The problem of social knowledge

1 Sociology, demystification and common sense

DOI: 10.4324/9781315763262-1

We are sociologists, most of us, because somehow and somewhere we detect that sociology has a morally significant role to play for our personal selves and the world in which we live. We know this and we keep on doing sociology because we have the sense of encountering a truer vision of reality with the aid of sociological concepts than by any other means, whether extra-scientific means or the means provided by any of the other human studies. Yet the precise way in which sociology has moral significance for us is difficult to define and most of the attempts which are made to describe it are cheapjack ones, symptoms of the pathetic inadequacy of routinised intellectual activity in our times, rather than useful attempts to make more conscious what it is that we do.

The most common views of the sociologist’s role are, in fact, almost complete opposites of one another. The first is that science can save us and that it is by the application of scientific rather than other forms of thinking to human affairs that happiness, world-mastery and liberation will be achieved. The second is that sociology which abstains from value-judgment and which seeks value-freedom is lost, so that a sociologist must be seen as having the capacity and the duty to declare not merely what must be but what should be, even though, by a strangely circular argument, it is supposed that the sociologist’s value-judgments should have the authority of science.

The first view is the view of that version of the European Enlightenment from which sociology pre-eminently sprang, namely the French version represented, above all, in the positivism of Comte. Now, in fact, it is hard for the modern student to read Comte at all because our age so completely lacks sympathy with his. Not merely do we question the ecstatic acceptance of the achievements of technology which he shared with Saint Simon, but we cannot accept that a science of human affairs can tell us what we should do, wherein personal happiness lies or how we should organise our society politically. Yet scientism of a Comtean kind is a suppressed assumption of the vast bulk of contemporary sociology. Either it seeks simply to describe the facts of a social situation as though they were simply external things to be manipulated, rather than the product of human choice and striving, or they suggest that all human affairs are in some way subject to the operation of social laws. Moreover, even where sociologists are themselves too sophisticated to accept these positions, they are conscious that this is the expectation which the world has of them, and that fulfilment of this expectation is a condition of their being permitted to practise their discipline with public support.

Though one might feel, therefore, that positivism in the Comtean tradition barely requires any further refutation, it is unfortunately the case that this particular battle has still to be fought. We must therefore insist that, while sociology is concerned to explore the constraints laid on our behaviour by other persons, by norms, and by ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ power, we are not simply concerned as sociologists to expose empirical regularities nor scientific and theoretical necessities in social life. We are faced with a much more complex subject matter which involves a dialectical interplay between human striving and social constraint. We need to do justice, that is to say, both to phenomenal and noumenal man.

Twentieth-century barbarism involving the destruction of human life on an unprecedented scale in world wars and colonial wars, the practice of genocide and torture, the crude recurrence of financial and political corruption in public life, and the irresponsible destruction and consumption of natural resources to a point at which the survival of mankind for more than a few more generations cannot be guaranteed, has clearly demonstrated that the promise of a scientifically managed social order was not to be fulfilled. Not surprisingly, therefore the cry has been raised that, far from sociology abstaining from value-judgments in order that it should gain the benefit of insight into scientific necessity, it must at all costs make these value-judgments, because value-freedom means simply that the sociologist would be consigned to a mere technician’s role, working at the behest of politicians not subject to any moral restraint. Curiously, the view that sociology must in a rather simplistic sense be value-free, has been attributed by Gouldner in his famous ‘Anti-Minotaur’ essay (1973, p. 3) to Max Weber, whose own position was very much more complex than this (cf. Tenbruck, 1959 and Dawe in Sahay, 1971), but that need not concern us here. What is at stake is the assertion that sociologists should make value-judgments and not simply confirm the facts in a value-neutral way.

There is indeed a sense in which such a view is permissible and useful. This is the sense in which it is advanced by Myrdal in his famous appendix on ‘Facts and Valuations in Sociology’ (1944 and 1958) which is a logical extension of Weber’s own position (1949, p. 81). According to this view, sociology always looks at facts from a particular point of view or rather looks at the question of the necessity of an event with an implicit question, ‘necessary from what point of view ?’ But all that this does is to separate out the question of value-judgment from the question of scientific understanding, analysis and prediction, and the grounds for value-judgment are not seen as having some kind of scientific validity. What has surely to be resisted is that the sociologist or any natural or social scientist has some special claim to be able to impose his value-judgments on his analysis. This is a claim which has as little validity as its opposite, namely that a scientist should derive his value-judgments from the facts. In both cases the door is opened to political advocacy and propaganda, which sociology can and should avoid. In the one case, political judgments or even prejudices may be given a kind of spurious scientific validity. In the other, they claim no validity at all, other than that of direct moral intuition.

A more beguiling, and in some ways more dangerous, version of this doctrine is that which advocates policy-oriented research. According to this view sociologists should not live in an ivory tower making discoveries for their own benefit; they should earn their keep by addressing themselves to practical problems. Unfortunately this view gives no answer at all to the question of why particular situations are problematic, or from what point of view. Still worse, the point of view may be concealed and the pretence maintained that the problem is one to which all men of goodwill would wish to address themselves. Thus, in recent British studies of race relations, when colonial migration made race relations an explosive political issue, many sociologists addressed themselves to the issues which appeared problematic from the point of view of the government but claimed to be speaking from some shared abstract moral point of view. The work Colour and Citizenship (Rose, 1969), which some claimed to be a British version of Myrdal’s classic An American Dilemma, was a remarkable example of writing in this vein. Clearly, what a sociologist would have to do in this instance would be to discover and expose the policy aims of the government and other participant actors and to evaluate situations from the point of view of those various policy aims. In such a procedure, the actual policy aims might be found to be at variance with the most frequently confessed aims or, even more likely, the actions of government might be found to be at odds with its professed aims (Rex, 1973b). In this case, all too often the policy-oriented researcher might unwittingly be involved in a double-deceit. First, he might, by pretending that the governmental authorities had the highest ideal aims, simply be involved in doing public relations work on their behalf. Second, given the former pretence, he might feel impelled to attribute blame or causal significance to other less powerful individuals, whose choices were actually made in contexts set by the powerful. The assumptions of policy-oriented research may thus be stated somewhat as follows: the governing authorities are basically benevolent. Assuming this, we will approach problem areas to see what obstacles stand in the way of their achieving their goals.

It should also be added that these defects may be found in radical research as well as in that which has powerful and respectable sponsors. Unfortunately, however, one response of sociologists to policy-oriented research has been to set against it radical research on behalf of the powerless, e.g. the working class, the blacks, and the students. We can only say of this that it has the most mischievous consequences. It should surely be understood by now that there is a great variety of goals amongst those who claim to speak for the working class, the blacks, and the students, and any intelligent member of the radical movements which have these social bases would do well to look as open-mindedly and critically at these goals as we have suggested a sociologist should do in looking at the goals of government. This by no means suggests that the use of sociology should lead the radical to abstain from action. It does suggest that he should act with care and precision and not engage in Utopian fantasies about what his action is likely to achieve, because it is taken collectively on behalf of ‘the forces of progress’.

Karl Mannheim (1954) saw these problems well enough, but he tended to the extreme view that there really was no way out for social science other than to rely upon the political intuition of a free-floating intelligentsia. We would not take that view. We argue here that a truly reflexive sociology is possible, and that a critical sociologist can evolve a method for describing social structures and analysing their function for various social participants, including the uncritical sociologists who describe them from undisclosed policy points of view. We may, of course, be fully reflexive and recognise that our own critical position is not free of taint, but we can and shall argue that a truly critical sociology, which looks at facts about social relations and structures and at policy goals which sustain them, has relatively speaking a greater validity than other theories, because it puts more of its propositions to some kind of empirical test.

Disenchantment with positivist science which claimed to talk about neutral facts ‘out there’ in the external world has led some sociologists in recent times to go back to Thomas’s injunction to see social facts in terms of the participant actors’ definition of the situation (Thomas and Znaniecki, 1958), but this has led to the unjustifiable assumption that what are called ‘members’ meanings’, descriptions and definitions have as great a validity as any meaning, description or definition which a sociologist might give (see Garfinkel, 1967). In our view, a sociologist who hypothesises that a certain social structure or pattern of social relations is affecting human behaviour may point to a number of areas in which falsifiers of his propositions might be sought, and it is this capacity which gives him the right to claim that his descriptions have greater validity than those either of ‘members’ actually participating in the social relations described or of other participants for whom such social relations are part of the environment which he seeks to describe. In other words, we accept that there is some validity in the Marxist notion of false consciousness, even though we may disagree with the way in which the Marxist arrives at his conclusion about falsity (see Rex, 1973a, p. 220).

It is understandable that members’ meanings should have been rediscovered and celebrated in recent years. It is because the questions ‘who is wicked?’, ‘who is criminal?’, ‘who is mad?’, have too often been settled in terms of meaning systems imposed by the powers-that-be, and sociologists, questioning these meanings, have gone on radically to show that even taken-for-granted answers to questions like ‘who is a woman ?’ can be argued about (Garfinkel, 1967). But the opposition here is assumed to be between sociologists working for the powers-that-be against ‘ordinary people’ in ‘everyday life’. In fact, what is not recognised is that the members’ meanings which we confront may be manufactured by the powerful and that the sociologists’ new look at the situation in terms of artificially constructed and controlled concepts might be more rightly understood as emancipating than these members’ meanings can possibly be. This brings us to our central thesis about sociology and de-mystification and de-ideologising.

Our thesis is this. (1) Men today live in a world in which survival depends upon understanding the social structures within which they live or might have to live out their lives. In particular it implies understanding what it means to live (a) in a basically capitalist society in which profit-seeking corporations have a high measure of freedom in decision-making within an arena partially controlled by moral and political forces, (b) in a centrally planned society of a communist type where the most important tensions are to be found in the political structure, and (c) in formerly colonial societies which start from a base-line of relatively unfree labour institutions and alien political domination, and which are seeking, subject to severe institutional and non-institutional restraints, to overcome the poverty of at least some of their members. (We do not claim these as adequate descriptive sentences to indicate the structural problems of the three worlds. We may offer rather more satisfactory and detailed descriptions in later chapters. What we are seeking to do at this moment is to indicate the broad nature of what sociology can do.)

(2)These structural facts about the politics of the modern world are the major structural facts within which we live our private lives. The tendency in dealing with private misfortune is for applied social science disciplines to arise which refer these misfortunes to personality factors or to their immediate social contexts. We would not wish to deny the importance of such disciplines, but we do wish to emphasise the importance to private troubles of the great public issues.

(3)It is necessary to describe the major social structures of the three worlds and to understand their internal workings as though they were stable, but concentration for analytic purposes on structures is by no means inconsistent with a study of change and revolution. It is necessary, therefore, for us, as sociologists, to study revolutionary forces within the established social structures of the first and second world and, even when they have not succeeded, to consider the degree to which the claim to have upheld a legitimate order by the powers-that-be is being successfully maintained. It is equally necessary to show the way in which the three worlds impinge on each other and the way in which the third world seeks its emancipation from the other two. In short, on the dynamic side, the sociologist must study the potentiality for class war in the first world, the struggle against bureaucracy in the second, the process of denial of moral legitimacy as it occurs in both of these and, last but not least, the revolution of the poor and wretched of the earth.

(4)Of course the justification of our assertion that there are problems with which sociologists should or can be concerned depends upon arguing our way through many epistemological difficulties. This, however, we shall do. What we have to note here is that the members’ meanings of those who act as ideologists for the powers-that-be are on the whole designed to present the world to us in a particular light. Sociologists, on the other hand, have trivialised the world. What we are pleading for and campaigning for here is that sociologists should take on these ideologists in intellectual argument about the important issues and, by exposing their ideological distortions, reveal some of the loci of power and the sources of pain and suffering which they conceal. We do not, however, seek to replace one ideology by another. Rather, by removing the comforting myths which conceal reality, we seek to show the world to be an uncomfortable place which can only become comfortable through the control, by ordinary men and women, of the agencies which now control them.

(5)To counter the ideologists it will often be necessary to take what will be called by many a nihilist view (Deakin et al., 1970). We should be prepared to describe structures of social relations without assuming that they must be preserved or that they must be changed. Chaos, anomie, and social breakdown must be entertained as likely possibilities, along with order and revolution. It is consistent with this that at times we may ask questions about what is necessary from the point of view of this or that collectivity, but we do not take the point of view of any group as valid in its own right. Our nihilism is essential to the demystification of the world. It thus goes without saying that it is a nihilism with a profound moral purpose. By destroying, even for a moment, the sacredness of the world view of priests and lay ideologists it opens up the possibility of true moral judgment which is not itself a sociological matter.

(6)The justification of this position depends upon our being able to show that a truly nihilistic sociology is possible. On this we would say:

1. that, of course, the possibility is only a relative one since statements about social structure and social relations are inevitably ‘indexical’ in Garfinkel’s use of the term (or, to use a more usual language, closely related to, and discovered in the context of, everyday speech) but that none the less it is possible to derive a common language about social relations which can be agreed not only among sociologists but amongst laymen in many different worlds. This is what Simmel and Weber sought to do and it is what we shall be doing here;
2. that, while it is not possible on some levels entirely to eliminate value-judgments which will be written into language itself and hence into cognition, it is none the less not the case that once we have agreed on what is the given subject matter of sociological study, we cannot proceed to further phases of analysis in a thoroughly objective way;
3. that it is possible for sociologists not to be confined to a secondhand view of the social world as perceived only in and through actors’ definitions of the situation or members’ meanings. They can, with the aid of a sociological language, look at social relations ‘from the outside’, as all actors themselves sometimes do, but in a controlled and disciplined way, so that there are set procedures for resolving disagreements about what is the case (see Rex 1973a, p. 220).

These are points which we will seek to prove in subsequent chapters, but we shall seek to prove them in simple and straight forward language, because the business of arguing about them has become inhibited by the technical jargon which sociologists, and particularly philosophically-oriented and epistemologically sophisticated sociologists, have introduced into their subject. Indeed it is not too much to say that the layman who seeks to understand and command the modern world is subject to a double...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Part one The problem of social knowledge
• Part two Basic problems of theory building
• Part three First, second and third worlds
• Part four Social structures and moral perspectives
• Bibliography
• Index