Homo Sociologicus

Ralf Dahrendorf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000533842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Teoria sociale

First published in English as part of the Essays in the Theory of Society, this volume reissues the stand-alone Homo Sociologicus for which the author wrote a new introduction when it was originally published in 1973. The controversial book deals with the history, significance and limits of the category of social role and discusses the dilemma posed by homo sociologicus. The author shows that for society and sociology, socialization invariably means depersonalization, the yielding up of man's absolute individuality and liberty to the constraint and generality of social roles. This volume includes the essay, Sociology and Human Nature, written as a postscript to Homo Sociologicus.

1 Homo Sociologicus

On the History, Significance, and Limits of the Category of Social Role

Ordinarily, we do not much care that the table, the roast, and the wine of the scientist are paradoxically different from the table, the roast, and the wine of our everyday experience. If we want to put down a glass or write a letter, a table seems a suitable support. It is smooth, solid, and even, and a physicist would scarcely disturb us by observing that the table is “in reality” a most unsolid beehive of nuclear particles. Nor can the chemist spoil our enjoyment of the dinner by dissolving roast and wine into elements that we could hardly be tempted to consume as such. As long as we do not approach the paradox of the scientific table and the everyday table with philosophic intent, we solve it in a simple manner. We act as if the table of the physicist and our own table are two different things that have no relevant relation to each other. While we are quite prepared to concede to the physicist that his table is a most important and useful object for him, we are at the same time satisfied with our table precisely because it is not a multiply perforated beehive of moving particles.¹

The dilemma is less easily solved when we turn to the biological sciences, especially to the biology of man. There is something unsettling about viewing a glass model of a man in an exhibition, or standing before an X-ray machine oneself and being “made transparent,” or indeed carrying about the X-ray picture of one’s own insides in a large envelope. Does the doctor see something inside me that I don’t know about? Is this photograph me? The closer we come to ourselves, to man, the more disquieting becomes the difference between the object of naïve experience and its scientific reconstruction. It is clearly no accident that whereas the terms of physics play little part in our everyday language and those of chemistry little more except as they relate to the analysis of foodstuffs, many biological categories have become a part of our direct experience of the world; that whereas protons and electrons, electromagnetic fields and the speed of light, are still alien to everyday language and we only occasionally speak of “acids,” “fats,” “carbohydrates,” and “albumins,” we speak all the time of “organs” and their “functions,” of “nerves,” “muscles,” “veins,” and even “brain cells.”

1 In an unpublished paper on “Paradox and Discovery,” the Cambridge philosopher John Wisdom has discussed the paradox of the two tables at some length. For Wisdom, this paradox and others of its kind are the starting points of a well-considered metaphysics that inquires into the epistemological basis of statements without regard to their logical structure and empirical validity.

But whatever the biologist may reveal to us about ourselves, we still have the quasi-consolation that our body is not the “real” us, that biological concepts and theories cannot affect the integrity of our individuality. We must assimilate biological man to some extent, but it costs us relatively little to identify with him. I am not aware that biological categories have ever been invoked to dispute the physical uniqueness of each person. Nobody seems to feel that he has to defend his moustache, the shape of his nose, or the length of his arms against scientific references to hair growth, the nasal bones, or the humerus in order not to be robbed of his individuality and reduced to a mere illustration of general categories or principles. A charge of this kind is heard only when science extends the borders of its artificial world to take in man as an acting, thinking, feeling creature—when it becomes social science.

Social science has so far presented us with at least two new and highly problematical creatures whom we are unlikely ever to encounter in our everyday experience. One is the much-debated homo oeconomicus of modern economics: the consumer who carefully weighs utility and cost before every purchase and compares hundreds of prices before he makes his decision; the entrepreneur who has the latest information from all markets and stock exchanges and bases his every decision on this information; the perfectly informed, thoroughly rational man. In our everyday experience this is a strange creature, and yet the concept has proved almost as useful for the economist as the beehive-table for the physicist. By and large, the facts of economic life confirm the economist’s theories, and while his assumptions may appear strange and incredible, they enable him to make accurate predictions. And yet, can we still identify light-heartedly with homo oeconomicus? Can we, on the other hand, afford to ignore him as we do the table of the physicist?

The paradox of our relation to a second “man” of social science, psychological man (as Philip Rieff called him), is more threatening still. The godfather of psychological man was Sigmund Freud, and with Freud this new creature soon acquired considerable prominence both inside and outside scientific psychology. Psychological man is the man who even if he always does good may always want to do evil—the man of invisible motives who has not become the more familiar for our having made him into a kind of party game. You hate me? That merely means that “in reality” you love me. Nowhere is the impossibility of separating the scientific from the everyday object as overwhelming as in the case of psychological man; nowhere, therefore, is it more obviously necessary, if not to reconcile the two worlds, at least to make their separate existence comprehensible and thus bearable.

In general, economists and psychologists have not been prepared to face the contradiction between their artificial human being and the real one; their critics have usually belonged only marginally to the profession. Perhaps their attitude is right, for we have apparently grown so accustomed to homo oeconomicus and psychological man that a protest against these concepts is rarely heard. But our acceptance of the “men” of economics and psychology does not make the dilemma they stand for any less real. Moreover, with the rapid development of social science two new scientific “men” are coming into being: the men of sociology and political science. At a time when the discussion about their elder brothers has hardly died down, it is being revived to cast doubt on the right to existence of homo sociologicus and homo politicus, or even to prevent their birth at the last moment. Just as a shadow follows the person who casts it, so the protest against the incompatibility of the worlds of common sense and of science (always alive behind the appearance of calm) follows the paths of human inquiry.

Perhaps it is appropriate today to cease our vain and debilitating effort to run away from the shadow, and to turn and face the threat. How does the human being of our everyday experience relate to the glass men of social science? Must we and can we defend our artificial, abstract creatures against real human beings? Are we facing here a paradox analogous to that of the two tables, or is the dilemma of the social scientist’s abstraction something different?

Noble and impressive though the definition of sociology as the “science of man” may be, such vague phrases tell us little about the specific subject matter of the discipline. Even the unreconstructed optimist will not claim that sociology enables him to solve the riddle of man for good. Sociology certainly is a science of man, but it is not the only such science, nor can it reasonably aspire to tackle the problem of man in all its depth and breadth. Man in his entirety not only is safely removed from the attack of any single discipline, but may possibly remain forever a nebulous shape in the background of scientific endeavor. Every discipline, if it is to make its statements precise and testable, must reduce its huge subject matter to certain elements from which may be systematically constructed, if not a portrait of the reality of experience, then a structure in whose tissue a segment of reality may be caught.

The problems of sociology all refer us to one fact that is as accessible to our experience as the natural facts of our environment. This is the fact of society, of which we are reminded so often and so intensely that there are good reasons to call it the vexatious fact of society. Mere random probability can hardly explain our behavior toward others and toward ourselves. We obey laws, go to the polls, marry, attend schools and universities, have an occupation, and are members of a church; we look after our children, lift our hats to our superiors, defer to our elders, speak to different people in different tongues, feel that we belong here and are strangers there. We cannot walk a step or speak a sentence without there intervening between us and the world a third element, one that ties us to the world and at the same time mediates between these two concrete abstractions: society.

If there is any explanation for the late birth of a science of society, we may look for it in the omnipresence of the subject matter of that science, which includes even its own description and analysis. Sociology is concerned with man in the face of the vexatious fact of society. Man, every man, encounters this fact, indeed is this fact; for society, while it may be conceived independently of particular individuals, would nevertheless be a meaningless fiction without particular individuals.² Therefore, for the elements of a science that has as its subject matter man in society, we have to look in the area where man and the fact of society intersect.

There have been many attempts in the history of sociology to find such elements. More than twenty years ago, Talcott Parsons (following Florian Znaniecki) enumerated and discussed four such approaches (30: 30). None of the four, however, satisfies the demands of sociological analysis. It sounds trivial to require that the elements of sociological analysis be sought in the area where the individual and society intersect. Nevertheless, two of Parsons’s four approaches did not satisfy this requirement. Among American sociologists especially, it was popular early in our century to seek the unit of sociological analysis in the social group. Society—so Charles Cooley argued, for example—is not composed of individuals, but of groups; the sociologist is not concerned with Mr. Smith, but with the Smith family, with company X, party Y, and church Z. Now it is clearly true that the individual encounters society in social groups; this happens in a very real sense indeed. But possibly this encounter is too real. In the group the individual disappears; if the group is taken as the element of analysis, there is no way left for the sociologist to find the individual as a social animal. If, on the other hand —as often happens to this day—we take as our elementary unit the personality, even the social personality, of the individual, it becomes difficult to account for the fact of society. Speaking of groups means removing the focus of analysis entirely to grounds outside the individual; speaking of social personalities involves complete concentration on the individual himself. The problem is to find an elementary category in which both the individual and society can be accommodated.

2 The relation between what I have called here the “vexatious fact of society” and Durkheim’s “social facts,” facts that force us into their spell, is evident. In the beginning of the first chapter of his Règles of 1895, Durkheim described “social facts” as follows: “If I fulfill my obligations as brother, husband, or citizen, if I honor my contracts, I perform duties that are defined without reference to myself and my actions in law and custom. Even if these duties are in accord with my own sentiments and I feel subjectively their reality, such reality is objective, for I have not created it; I have merely inherited it as a result of my education.” In this passage Durkheim comes close to the category of role discussed in this essay.

Most modern sociologists have thought they could satisfy the need for an elementary analytical category by using as their basis either (with Leopold von Wiese) the concept of “social relations,” or (with Max Weber) that of “social action.” It is not difficult to see, however, that both of these concepts leave our problem unsolved. Speaking of “social relations” or “social action” is hardly less general than speaking of “man” or “society.” We still do not know the elements of which “social relations” and “social action” are composed, the categories, that is, with which to describe the relations between men in society or the socially determined action of men.

It is no accident, therefore, that the contemporary proponents of “social relations” and “social action” introduce in the course of their analyses, or even in their conceptual considerations, further categories that come nearer to being the elementary analytical units that sociology needs. Von Wiese and Parsons refer in related ways on the one hand to “social formations” or “social systems” as structural units of society, and on the other to “offices” or “roles” as the individual’s crystallized modes of participation in the social process. Neither pair of categories can in any way be derived from the general concepts “social relations” and “social action”; one is tempted to suggest that their authors have introduced them almost against their will. And while this may be rather less than conclusive proof of sociology’s need for such categories, it is at least plausible evidence; and it seems worth reflecting on why the authors found it necessary to introduce them.

At the point where individual and society intersect stands homo sociologicus, man as the bearer of socially predetermined roles. To a sociologist the individual is his social roles, but these roles, for their part, are the vexatious fact of society. In solving its problems, sociology necessarily takes social roles as its elements of analysis; its subject matter is the structure of social roles. But by reconstructing man as homo sociologicus in this manner, sociology creates for itself once again the moral and philosophical problem of how the artificial man of its theoretical analysis relates to the real man of our everyday experience. If sociology is not to fall victim to an uncritical scientism, the attempt to sketch in some dimensions of the category of social role must not lose sight of the moral problem created by the artificiality of its model. If, on the other hand, philosophical criticism is to go beyond irrelevant generalities, it presupposes a thorough understanding of the uses and abuses of the category of social role.³

II

The attempt to reduce man to homo sociologicus for the sake of solving certain problems is neither as arbitrary nor as recent as one might think. Like homo oeconomicus and psychological man, man as the bearer of social roles is not primarily a description of reality, but a scientific construct. Yet however much scientific activity may resemble a game, it would be wrong to regard it as irrelevant to the reality of experience. The paradoxes of the physicist’s table and the everyday table, the sociologist’s man and the man on the street, are by no means the end and aim of science; rather they are an entirely unsought and troublesome consequence of the scientist’s effort to investigate otherwise inaccessible segments of the world. In an important sense, the atom and the social role, though inventions, are not merely inventions. They are categories that at many times and places, and under various names, have suggested themselves with an inexplicable necessity to scientists bent on understanding nature, or man in society. Once invented, they are not merely meaningful, i.e. operationally useful, but also plausible. In a certain sense, they are self-evident categories.

3 Reflection about the elements of sociological analysis is at any point reflection about sense and nonsense, about the uses and abuses of sociology as a science. However, it takes us beyond the mere exchange of pre-existing opinions. Even though we do not make the defense or critique of sociology our explicit aim, the terms of this essay should enable us to put an end once and for all to the still lingering dispute over the limits and possibilities of a science of society.

Remarkably enough, both the atom and the role were given their present names when the concepts were first invented, and both names have remained the same through the centuries. With respect to the atom, the explanation is evident; the word ároµov speaks for itself,⁴ and the concept as now used refers consciously to its first use by Democritus. The development of the concept of social role is more complicated and more instructive. It can be shown that in trying to describe the point of contact between the individual and society many writers—poets, scholars, philosophers—have introduced identical or at least related concepts. T...