As Thatcher put it as late as 1987, âYou know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are familiesâ. There was a strong continuity of mistrust since the nineteenth century towards a discipline that would âempowerâ society in any way thus making it âform menâs minds and control their behaviourâ (Lukes 1973). 1 There seemed to be nothing more pernicious and unacceptable than this fuzzy theory.
This, so to say, justified the British âlacunaâ in the domain: Sociology seemed like a product unsuitable to the British mindset and to the country owing to a strong belief in society where the individual was considered an illusion, and Marxism opposed (Goldman 1987; Anderson 1992). This is the typical explanation.
For a long time indeed, British sociology has been considered a âfailureâ in that it would not have been able to compete with other countries in the field of ideas for being too âconservativeâ (Soffer 1982). But for British writers, on the contrary this showed how the discipline , supposed to be a science of society, was unnecessary and obnoxious proving on the contrary that âeverything was alrightâ in Britain (Goldman 1987). Politics was open, universities were closed to this strange mixture of Latin and Greek (Abrams 1968). Who needed a sociology was probably a country that required a crutch to progress owing to an intellectual handicap.
This book argues, by taking a comparative and transnational approach, in fact that the country one had in mind when arguing this was a long-standing rival, where that science thrived. Another cause for this long distrust of sociology originally came from the fact that it was⊠French!
This unfortunate association between a strange science (sociology ) that seemed unfathomable to Britain in the first place and its French origins was too much to bear and accept in academia, especially at Oxbridge . This is what American observers had noted for a long time (Palmer 1927; Harper 1933), but this aspect had been downplayed because histories of British sociology (and also of French sociology , on the other hand such as [Heilbron 2015]) have always considered it a domestic phenomenon and limited its investigations to native ideasâwhich could not make entire sense. The history was partial and biased. At the same time, it is easy to understand why taking inspiration from a foreign, rival country was hard to swallowâjust like it was hard for the French, who prided themselves, with Ămile Durkheim , of inventing the discipline , that the British could be genuine competitors.
As a result of this long-time rivalry, there was a battle for society between budding British sociologists and well-established French sociologues that took place during the interwar years. This period saw the most exciting developments for the discipline in Britain , while the old French hegemony over sociologie slowly waned, and yet one had not the slightest idea of what had happened between 1919 and 1940. It remained for a long time the most nebulous era for sociology despite several efforts (Abrams 1968; Halsey 2004; Evans 1986).
This was the period when the battle for society, the second one after 1890 (see Chapter 2) that was initially won by Emile Durkheim against Herbert Spencer , was discretely won by the British. This book argues that, opposed to what had always been thought and said, the interwar years were far from a no-go zone for British sociologists ; on the contrary it was a time of great methodological innovations (see Chapter 5 on the social survey ), institutional advances (see Chapter 3) and new ideas (see Chapter 4) that put British sociologists at the forefront of the battle for society with the French especially. All major concepts of post-war US sociology originated from interwar British sociology , and it is time to recall this fatherhood.
What did this have to do with the French? The thing is that sociologie was invented by one man, Ămile Durkheim , whose ideas would split the sociological movement in Britain in two. This book is not a history of the Durkheimian movement which has largely been written already (Besnard 1983), however it brings a novel perspective on its development by taking a comparative approach. It also renews the perspective on British sociology by showing how important the opposition to France in the battle for society was in the interwar years, but it is neither a book about social theory itself like (Scott 2018).
Durkheimianism , as his movement of ideas was called, is defined in Chapter 2. However, it is useful to recall that, as the back cover of (Lukes 1973) rather provokingly states, Durkheimâs theory in the 1890s more or less said that âsociety forms menâs minds and controls their behaviourâ. This hypothesis determines Durkheim theory and means that individuals are neither free nor fully responsible for their own acts because âitâs societyâs faultâ. This still resonated with Thatcherâs controversial comment of 1987. Durkheimianism reflected the French assumption that the State (or Society) was absolutist, as opposed to English traditions of Liberalism and Idealism . Society was a reality for one, an illusion for the other.
Durkheimâs assertion that âMorality is socialâ also meant that morality was relative for the French, not based on individual psychology (and thus universal as the British sociologist Edvard Westermarck (1932) had explained) and was thus imposed by Society and not natural (as the Hobbes/Rousseau controversy had showed). According to Durkheim, people were constrained to be moral, they were not it naturally. 2 Durkheimâs sociology was based on the French philosophical assumption on society and opposed the Victorian, ethical ideal prevailing in Britain .
Finally, âWhen told that the facts contradicted his theories, [Durkheim] used to reply: âthe facts are wrongââ (Lukes 1973, 33). Durkheim also embodied the stereotype about the French rationalist/intellectualist bias. As such, he exemplified the Cartesian belief that theory was preceding over facts. It appears that this opposed the English empiricist tradition in philosophy following, especially, Locke. Durkheimianism was equated to an ideology and a blindness to reality for the British.
As a result, Durkheim epitomised the contradictions between the French and British traditionsâand was therefore subject to a conscious and voluntary ignorance, if not opposition, in the UK, until Lukesâ illuminating essay in 1973 (Lukes 1973). Sociologie was seen, from the beginning, as a despised French science unsuitable to Britain , all the more since it was associated with the laissez-faire excesses of Herbert Spencer .
But this book argues that it is time to dispel this myth: Sociology was not all Durkheimian, and it has never been wholly or only French, it was always British at the same time. Chapter 3 shows how under âa bunch of Scottish amateursâ, sociology was adapted on British grounds from a French, non-Durkheimian inspiration owing to the ideas of the engineer FrĂ©dĂ©ric Leplay . Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford established a successful, but academically despised because French-inspired and amateurishly conducted, Edinburgh School of Sociology.
It is a mistake nowadays to still see it as foreign, or worse as French. As Chapter 4 shows, a native British tradition also evolved in the work of Leonard Hobhouse , Morris Ginsberg and all the golden generation of esteemed thinkers at the interwar London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE ) who contributed to the British sociological tradition under the name social services, socia...