Sociology in Ireland

A Short History

B. Fanning

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137450357
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137450364
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book provides a short introduction to the emergence and development of sociology in Ireland until the present day. The institutionalization of the discipline came relatively late as it remained under the control of the Catholic Church. However, since the 1970s sociology has witnessed periods of considerable growth and professionalization.

1

Introduction: Sociology in Ireland

Abstract: The history of sociology in Ireland has been shaped both by dealing with Irish conditions and the aspirations of a discipline whose theories and conceptualizations usually transcend national boundaries.

Keywords: academic discipline; Catholicism; founding of sociology; liberalism; nationalism

Fanning, Bryan and Andreas Hess. Sociology in Ireland: A Short History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137450364.0002.

In this book we chart the emergence and development of sociology in Ireland from the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Such an approach is confronted with a number of problems: first of all, how do we distinguish sociology in Ireland from any other sociological tradition and context? And second, how do we define ‘sociology’ as a discipline? If we only mean the institutionalised discipline, our short history would be very brief indeed. To understand what came later, we must have an understanding of what was there before. This is why our approach also discusses some of sociology’s forerunners and discursive precursors. During the nineteenth century, these included political economy and statistical inquiries and in the decades after Independence, Catholic social thought. Throughout our text, we define sociology as both a discipline applied in Ireland and, for a long time only, to Irish conditions. We argue that for a number of reasons Irish sociology came to be institutionalised first as a kind of national sociology that was exclusive in more than one sense. We distinguish this from a more inclusive understanding of ‘sociology in Ireland’, which we take to mean the discipline in the wider sense as practised in Ireland and not necessarily focused on the study of Irish society and its conditions alone.

In the course of the nineteenth century, three ideological currents can be identified. Liberalism, as a political idea, emerged within the politics of Catholic emancipation before the Famine and within economics as political economy.¹ Catholic power emerged during a lengthy process for repeal of the Penal Laws, which culminated in the Emancipation Act of 1828. Until then, Catholics had been excluded from owning land and property and entering the professions. Particularly after the Famine, the Catholic Church exerted considerable influence over public morality, education, and intellectual life. Cultural nationalism also emerged in the wake of the Famine as a political and intellectual force, beginning with the Young Irelanders. Half-a-century later, the Gaelic League fostered an Irish language revival that together with Catholicism defined post-independence nation building. Within cultural nationalist circles, the decolonising project often intersected with opposition to liberal political economy. In particular, cultural nationalists opposed the utilitarian case for the abandonment of the Irish language made by the liberal Catholic leader Daniel O’Connell. In their opposition to liberal utilitarianism and to liberalism as an ideology of colonial domination, some cultural nationalists found common cause with Catholic anti-modernists.

These three traditions, liberalism, Catholic thought, and cultural nationalism, provided the main critique of social change and the ideological bases for the nation-building projects that shaped post-independence Ireland. In sociological terms, the post-independence nation-building project of the independent Irish state might be understood as a preoccupation with intergenerational social reproduction of Catholicism and of the Gaelic language. Nineteenth-century social modernisation, ideologies, and politics cast a long shadow over any attempt to study the social, political, and cultural conditions of Ireland. Conflicts emerged between political liberalism – which was the engine of Catholic Emancipation and of the Home Rule movement – and revolutionary nationalism. Alliances emerged between cultural nationalism and Catholic conservatism. Sociological imaginations came to be fostered within a tradition of liberal political economy. However, sociology came to be initially institutionalised within an education system dominated by Catholicism.

Sociology in Ireland was also built on analyses by visiting scholars. These included linguists interested in preserving the Gaelic language, whose scholarship examined communities where Gaelic was still spoken, and who facilitated the publication of written accounts of life in such communities in Gaelic and in translation into English. From the 1930s onward, social anthropologists from the United States came to conduct fieldwork in Ireland. Their work inspired subsequent emerging rural sociology.

Until 1922, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. This was a unique arrangement that differed considerably from how Britain ruled the rest of its Empire. Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the only ‘colony’ which sent representatives to the Westminster Parliament. At the turn of the twentieth century, the island’s political representatives, together with the Liberal Party, often had a say in who was to form the UK Government. At the same time, the popular wish to be independent of Britain and to be fully able to be self-governing remained strong. The Easter Rising of 1916 and the positions and decisions that were taken by the British and the emerging, now radicalised Irish nationalist movement in its wake, led first to a guerrilla-like war with the British, then to negotiations with Britain, and finally to the declaration of an independent Irish-free state. The agreement was followed by a Civil War, whose outcome cemented the split between a larger southern part that later became the Republic of Ireland and a smaller Northern Ireland (NI), which remained part of the United Kingdom.

The political, social and, inevitably, cultural splits of the island have been reflected in the way the social sciences emerged and developed in the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The Republic of Ireland became, for its inhabitants, the fundamental unit of social and political organisation. The ideological conceptions of nationhood that were poured into its creation resulted in a political entity that some Irish nationalists opposed because as a container, it left out six northern counties. From such a perspective, the Irish nation and the Irish nation-state are not coterminous. The Civil War, after the War of Independence, did not settle the question even if what became the Republic of Ireland became a distinct political container and a specific unit that warranted sociological analysis. The sociological imagination that developed after independence was to some considerable extent caged by national borders. Methodological nationalism is a term coined by Hermino Martins to refer to how statistics and social science research based on these came to focus on ‘national communities’ as the natural unit of social analysis (1974: 274). Social science tended to equate society with the nation-state, or worse conflate national interests with the purposes of social science (Smith, 1983: 26). It has often been presumed that the boundaries of the nation-state delimit and define the unit of analysis. Such presumptions have reflected and reinforced the identification that many scholars maintain with their own nation-states. The extent to which this occurred in the Republic of Ireland for several decades after independence suggests that Irish sociology was, in effect, a national sociology.

Although methodological nationalism remains prevalent, especially when sociology is applied to the study of social problems, the discipline has in recent decades become more internationalised. For example, several of the Chairs of Sociology in Irish universities have been held by scholars who are neither Irish nor purport to undertake research solely on Irish society. Some 30 per cent of the staff currently employed at sociology departments are foreign born or were educated outside of Ireland. Add to those the social scientists of Irish descent or nationality who do not study Irish questions it makes no sense to speak of an Irish sociology in the strong sense of the term. Instead – and this is what we would like to suggest for the purpose of our brief historical account – it is more accurate to speak of ‘sociology in Ireland’, a sociology that certainly includes a considerable number of people who are occupied by Irish themes and issues, but that also includes those who do either comparative work in which Ireland figures (but just as one component), and those who do research or have epistemological interests that transcend Irish themes and borders.

We want our readers to understand how sociologists addressed the social conditions in which they were embedded. Yet, it is inconceivable that any social science worthy of the name − and that includes, of course, sociology – could emerge and maintain itself in total insularity. In any case, it is only through comparison, that it is possible to show that something is unique or exceptional or carries other distinctive marks and characteristics. And even if the focus of research is not explicitly and not always comparative, sociology draws on theoretical concepts and theories that, as Max Weber emphasised, have an implicit comparative dimension (Weber, 1993). At the same time, we must acknowledge that social sciences are hardly free-floating intellectual endeavours but tend to reflect particular social and political conditions. To make sense of such a constellation we must follow a thin, back-and-forth argument and oscillate between addressing the particular conditions (the peculiarities of a given social constellation, in our case Ireland) and the tendencially more ‘universal’ theoretical and conceptual framework (theories and concepts that were developed to account for wider circumstances and conditions). In other words, we need to reflect on both the unique conditions and themes that gave rise to the development of the social sciences in Ireland, including sociology and those frameworks, theories, and concepts that have come to constitute the larger sociological experience and which tend to transcend borders. Sociology can never succeed as an isolationist undertaking – even if Ireland remains, geographically speaking, an island. What is remarkable, though, is the extent to which sociology in Ireland attempted for so long to remain insular. In particular, Catholic Sociology followed a distinctive national, if not to say nationalist path, in how it framed its sociological discourses and how it became institutionalised, and it was not until the 1970s that sociology in Ireland began to connect with external sociological traditions and paradigms.

It is not always easy to disentangle relationships between the discursive and institutional dimensions of sociology. The following chapter, on ‘forerunners’, addresses the history of what in the widest sense can be termed sociological topics and interests during the nineteenth century and earlier. These writings contributed considerably to an understanding of Irish society but contributed very little to the subsequent institutional development of the discipline. However, it would be a mistake to write off this early discursive history, as this contributed to framing subsequent debates.

We have included in our history the kinds of social and political thoughts that came closest to sociological thinking, insofar as it tried to make sense of the social and political conditions of the island, even if there was not necessarily a conscious attempt to contribute to the emergence of a discipline that was later called sociology. We will also pay some attention to statistical enquiries that have contributed to a sociological understanding of Ireland’s past although, hopefully, avoiding the danger of prolepsis or anachronism, that is, of projecting sociological interpretations onto the past, which could not have been articulated in such terms at the time.

In making sense of this history, we found Peter Baehr’s and Mike O’Brien’s distinction between discursive and institutional founders in sociology helpful (Baehr and O’Brien, 1994: 4ff). Baehr and O’Brien distinguish between so-called discursive founders, who provided the major ideological framework, some founding ideas and concepts of how society operates, what holds it together, and what major drifts and currents can be detected; on the other hand, we can also encounter institutional founders, who have, as the label suggests, helped to set up an institution, a department, a journal, or a degree that has come to define the discipline in one way or another. Of course, discursive and institutional founders can overlap, but they do not necessarily have to.

As to institutional founders, Baehr and O’Brien use the example of Albion Small who set up the world’s first sociology department and the sociology programme at the University of Chicago but did very little to contribute to the discursive development of sociology (ibid.). On the other side, we have a figure like Karl Marx who had absolutely no interest in developing or contributing to sociology as a discipline; yet, Marx is still regarded as somebody who has contributed considerably to our understanding of how society works and what holds it together (even though opinions are divided as to how much of that is still valid). Between these extremes of purely discursive and purely institutional founders, there is of course a another category: figures like Emile Durkheim or Max Weber, who contributed both institutionally by establishing associations, professional journals, or even departments, and discursively by developing major theories and concepts that help us to understand society.

In distinguishing between sociology in Ireland and sociology of Ireland, we in effect pose the following question: is the development of the discipline better explained by wider Irish history and conditions or with reference to the international development of the discipline? The answer is something of both. As Baehr and O’Brien have noted, in most cases, the founding of an academic discipline has been a political act in the sense of establishing paradigms and promoting these (1974: 24ff). We will see that this is also the case in the Irish context; yet, in many ways, Ireland also differs in the way political and religious influences came to bear on the emerging discipline. After independence, two of the three main currents of nineteenth century Irish thought found themselves no longer in opposition to the state, and what had been Ireland’s third nineteenth-century intellectual current, liberalism (discursively and institutionally represented by the discipline of political economy) was crowded out. Catholic sociology grew to prominence after independence as part of the institutionalisation of the Church in education and other domains.

The situation was further compounded by other factors. Ireland is an island on the fringes of Europe, next to a bigger island, which continued to play both a positive and a negative role as an intellectual point of reference. The shadow of colonialism, both real and perceived, impacted considerably on how sociology in the Republic developed something of a ‘national’ or even ‘nationalist’ tradition. Its nativist tendencies were often manifested, although not always and under all conditions, in religious terms. The small size of the country, with just a handful of universities and a sociological output that equalled those conditions, makes it difficult to talk about traditions, canons, and classics the way Baehr, O’Brien and others do when referring to the sociological traditions of countries like Germany, France, Italy, or North America. These were not just larger in terms of populations but were also marked by a richer and larger pool of cultural, political, and social currents. What we encounter in Ireland then is far more complex than Baehr’s and Brian’s ‘normal’ model of sociological discourse and institution-building suggests.

Chapter 3 examines the period of Catholic hegemony that ran from about 1912 to 1970, a period and influence which affected the gradual institutionalisation of sociology. By the 1960s, Ireland had begun to open up under pressures that came from both within and from without: from within in terms of the slow disintegration of the moral monopoly of the Catholic Church and the numerous political scandals that rocked the Republic, which in turn led to widespread distrust of Irish citizens vis-a-vis both state and church; from without through beginning to live up to the norms and practices that membership in the EU entails. The net result was that the traditional forces and political cultures did not entirely disappear but metamorphosed into a new amalgam that drew on international debates, but that in many ways also still paid its dues to Irish conditions, just now in a more contextualised way.

Looking at the history of sociology in modern Ireland, which of course also reflects wider changes in Irish society, we can observe a constant oscillation between continuity and rupture. However, we are somewhat reluctant to see this as a kind of Irish Sonderweg or Irish exceptionalism. What remains noticeable, though, is a relatively late willingness to connect to the outside world – culturally and intellectually. In comparison with other smaller traditions and cultures in Europe, sociology in Ireland remained at least until the early 1990s, institutionally and discursively speaking, marked by considerable intellectual insularity. This does not mean that internationalisation or a tendency towards more universalised forms of discourse were not present. Prominent conceptual threads within Irish sociology have variously included functionalism, modernisation theory, an emphasis on the role of ideology and hegemony and, more lately, discourse, cultural capital, and habitus. Rather, it meant that the twin ideological forces of Catholicism and Nationalism still persisted, if in less overt and powerful fashion.²

Such developments were complicated by other factors. We agree with Andrew Abbott’s observation that sociology is the least defined discipline of the social sciences (Abbott, 2001, 3). Throughout the development of sociology in Ireland, disciplinary boundaries were often not clearly delineated. Abbott emphasises that sociology has always been open to acquiring new topics and areas and that ‘no form of knowledge about society is alien to it’ (6). This might explain why ‘the discipline is rather like a caravansary on the Silk Road, filled with all sorts of people and beset by bandit gangs of positivists, feminists, interactionists, and Marxists, and even by some larger, far-off states like Economics and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Sociology in Ireland
• 2  Forerunners
• 3  Catholic Sociology and Traditional Society
• 4  Institutional Growth
• 5  Uncertain Future
• References
• Index