The New Sociological Imagination

Steve Fuller

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781446228432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

C. Wright Mills? classic The Sociological Imagination has inspired generations of students to study Sociology. However, the book is nearly half a century old. What would a book address, aiming to attract and inform students in the 21st century? This is the task that Steve Fuller sets himself in this major new invitation to study Sociology. The book:

• Critically examines the history of the social sciences to discover what the key contributions of sociology have been and how relevant they remain.
• Demonstrates how biological and sociological themes have been intertwined from the beginning of both disciplines, from the 19th century to the present day.
• Covers virtually all of sociology?s classic theorists and themes.
• Provides a glossary of key thinkers and concepts.

This book sets the agenda for imagining sociology in the 21st century and will attract students and professionals alike.

PART ONE

DESPERATELY SEEKING SOCIOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

ONE

Tales of the Academic Undead

The Mysterious Disappearance of Society

We social scientists are the Academic undead who restlessly roam the earth dreaming of a world filled with ‘social facts’ that we mistake for the actual world we no longer quite inhabit. This hypothesis would certainly explain why we can’t see ourselves reflected in general histories of science. It would also account for why those of us most protective of the title ‘social scientist’ – sociologists – are also most likely to drag any current issue back to a pastiche of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim (and perhaps one or two others), whereby the understanding of European reality in the first decade of the dearly departed 20th century is treated not as a graveyard of defunct ideals but the matrix out of which all subsequent social understandings must emerge. Perhaps that is also why the ‘critical’ posture of social science typically feeds off the world as it is without saying much to its inhabitants about how it ought to be. A final sign of our Undead status might be the increasing success of humanists and natural scientists in forging a ‘third culture’ that reasserts a robust conception of human nature that is brandished at least as a crucifix, if not wielded as a dagger, in our recoiling faces (Brockman, 1995, www.edge.org).

Let’s hope I have described no more than the nightmare of one living social scientist. But suppose we really are the Academic Undead. It would not be hard to identify a moment when our fate was sealed. Indeed, it may have been first announced in supermarket newstands across the UK on 3 October 1987, when Women’s Own magazine published an interview with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It contained the following notorious passage:

I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

This assertion unleashed a torrent of social scientific, social theoretic, and socialistic critique, not least the characteristically earnest Fabian Society pamphlet (no. 536), ‘Does society exist?’ Authored by Brian Barry, an analytic philosopher who was then Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics (LSE), the pamphlet dutifully weighed the arguments on both sides of the issue before concluding that, contrary to Mrs Thatcher’s assertion, society does indeed exist. While Barry may have assuaged the fears of Labour Party operatives, little had he realized that Thatcher was anticipating what is nowadays, generally speaking, a rather respectable and self-styled ‘progressive’ view across the arts and sciences – not least in sociology, where the leading professor in the UK’s leading department, and disciplinary chair for two iterations of the national ‘Research Assessment Exercise’, entitled his vision for the 21st century, Sociology beyond Societies, in which ‘beyond’ is meant more subtractively than additively (Urry, 2000).

I call this emergent sensibility, associated with the new ‘third culture’ and toward which even sociologists are gradually moving, bioliberalism. Bioliberalism consists of a politically devolved eugenics policy that encourages the casualization of the human condition, by which I mean the tendency to make it easier for humans to come in and out of existence, especially in terms that do not presume the human condition to be an unmitigated good. Bioliberalism is the biggest threat to the social sciences, as both a disciplinary and a political project: that is, sociology and socialism. The two italicized concepts are more intertwined than many wish to admit. Indeed, were another reason needed to believe that social scientists constitute the Academic Undead, it would be the ease with which we dissociate the incontrovertible decline of socialism from the sustainability of sociology as a field that retains an intuitive appeal to students and operational purchase on researchers.

My Gothic imagery is partly inspired by the Gulbenkian Commission on the future of the social sciences convened by the world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein (1996). It concluded that the very idea of the social sciences – especially ‘sociology’ as the name for the general science of society – has outlived its usefulness. According to the Commission, sociology had made sense over the previous 150 years, with the ascendancy of nation-states in the Europeanized world increasingly concerned with integrating diverse peoples in terms of a set of sub-systems, each fulfilling an essential social function, to which the standard-issue sociology textbook dutifully assigned a chapter: Family, Education, Economy, Health, State, etc. Talcott Parsons’ structural-functionalism marked the high watermark in this conception of sociology (Parsons, 1951).

However, the end of the Cold War has resulted in the decline of the ‘welfare-warfare state’, to recall Alvin Gouldner’s (1970) resonant phrase for the entity upheld by Parsons that defined clear ideological loyalties, secured the country’s physical borders and checked the flow of global capital. Unsurprisingly, as the 20th century came to a close, both empiricists and theorists drew increasing attention to the indeterminate and permeable boundaries of ‘society’, often in the spirit of heralding a ‘postmodern’ or ‘non-modern’ condition that replaces traditional hierarchical relations between ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ entities with a flat ontology of indefinitely extendable networks whose members need not even be human (Lyotard, 1983; Latour, 1993).

Of course, if sociology – or social science more generally – is currently in its death throes, then it must have come into being at some point. The parentage is certainly clear enough, even though the parents themselves were conjoined only in death. Although no one seriously questions the status of Durkheim and Weber as founding fathers, they were contemporaries in neighbouring countries who never took much interest in each other’s work. Their mutual ignorance cannot be explained by some trade embargo between French and German academics, since each found colleagues in the other’s country more interesting. The rather banal truth is that Weber and Durkheim simply thought they were doing different things. Theirs was a posthumous American-style shotgun wedding ministered by Parsons (1937).

To many Germans of Weber’s generation, ‘sociology’ – with which Durkheim happily identified – still smacked of Auguste Comte, who had coined the term to promote social science and socialism as two sides of the same project, as Karl Marx did, in his own way, for the following generation (though without Comte’s term or his obsessive concern to specify the programme’s endpoint). German social scientists had struggled hard to keep themselves from being reduced to policy-driven researchers and classroom propagandists – and the word ‘sociology’ only served to muddy dangerous political waters (Proctor, 1991: Part 2).

A century later, sociology may be academically institutionalized, yet the mirror image of this problem arises on two fronts: on the one hand, eager-to-please ‘evidence-based-policy’ researchers and, on the other, true believers in ‘identity politics’. For both, ‘sociology’ sounds pretentious, suggesting a rather grandiose conception of society above and beyond what (policy) clients or (student) constituents are willing to countenance. Yet, were they to view these matters from the grave, Durkheim and Weber could have finally agreed on the value of the term ‘sociology’ – if only to remind social researchers who closely identify with a specific clientele or a constituency that it is too easy to cater to market demand while the organized pursuit of social knowledge disintegrates, as interest in some aspects of social life attract attention at the expense of others of potentially equal import.

Durkheim’s and Weber’s contributions to the foundation of sociology appear Janus-faced because of the radically different visions of society they inferred from the respective fates of their countries in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, which they both experienced as youngsters (cf. Baehr, 2002a: 20–5). France, one of Europe’s oldest nation-states, had been humiliated in the war, which suggested its decline, even degeneration – as opposed to the vitality displayed by the recently unified Germany. Not surprisingly, then, Durkheim regarded ‘society’ as an organism whose ailments were explicable and treatable in medical terms, while Weber saw ‘society’ as an artificial configuration of individuals best understood through various legal and economic arrangements that enable them to do things they could not do on their own – such as turn Germany over the course of a generation into the powerhouse of Europe. Where Durkheim wanted norms that stabilized a potentially deteriorating situation, Weber sought norms that resolved power differences while expanding the parties’ capacities for action. Thus, Durkheim positioned himself as keeper of the means of societal reproduction by teaching the next generation of French teachers, while Weber periodically offered himself as a political player, culminating in a role in drafting Germany’s first republican constitution.

These alternative visions of society have been played out in the subsequent history of sociology. Epistemologically, Durkheim and Weber represent a ‘top down’ versus a ‘bottom up’ view of society, as might be expected of analysts who enter the scene of social action at different moments in the history of their respective countries – on the one hand, in medias res, and on the other, ab initio. The 1970s witnessed the scholastic entrenchment of the Durkheim–Weber divide in ontological terms as ‘structure’ versus ‘agency’ (Giddens, 1979). An academically domesticated Karl Marx was inserted somewhat desperately into the breach as a possible basis for synthesis, given the ‘agentic’ (a.k.a. humanistic) bias of the early Marx and the ‘structuralist’ (a.k.a. economistic) bias of the later Marx (Bhaskar, 1979). (For a critique of this unfortunately enduring turn in social theory that props up Wallerstein’s gloomy prognosis for the future of social science as a whole, see Fuller (1998a, b).)

Perhaps a death rattle from sociology’s pedagogical trenches may be heard in courses relating to something called ‘deviance’, which retain their traditional popularity, though the word nowadays appears in scare quotes and researchers wince at the ‘social problems’ perspective from which the field arose. After all, deviance presupposes a strong sense of ‘normativity’, which after Michel Foucault has acquired a negative connotation that Durkheim would not have recognized. Instead of a Durkheimian focus on the sense of inclusiveness fostered by the public recognition of deviance from a common normative structure, the emphasis has now shifted to the deviants so excluded. Moreover, Foucault’s historically based observations have been confirmed for the past quarter-century by micro-sociological studies, mostly by symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists. They have pointed to the ultimate unenforceability – or rather, arbitrary enforcement – of the norm-deviance binary. Thus, while sociology remains the preferred training ground for para-legal and para-medical professionals, students come out wanting to empower those traditionally dispossessed by the legal and medical systems.

Of course, this turn against systemic normativity has been ‘progressive’ in the obvious sense of conferring a renewed sense of agency on victims and patients, the criminal and the disabled (Rose, 1999). However, it has been a short-term benefit that needs to be measured against a long-term cost. This academic ‘rage against the system’ has come to be seen as an end in itself rather than a means to a larger end. Foucault and his fellow-travellers have had little feel for the dialectical character of history, according to which all putative ends are really means to some further ends. (This is what that recovering Hegelian and born again pragmatist, John Dewey, meant by ‘instrumentalism’, which was unfortunately lost on his more positivistic admirers.) Thus, the Foucaultians fixate on the second moment of a dialectic – the ‘antithesis’ – not realizing that it too is supposed to be superseded by a more comprehensive normative sensibility.

At risk, if not lost, in the Foucaultian demotion of dialectics is a rather deep Enlightenment idea – itself a secularization of the Christian salvation story – that was carried forward in the 19th and 20th centuries by followers of Hegel and especially Marx. It is that a norm that at first governs the practice of only a few can be extended to the many, overturning the default (‘natural’) tendencies of all concerned, thereby remaking the world for the greater benefit of everyone. In the past, the minority had dominated the majority by stabilizing their differences, typically by both legal and ideological means. Such was the nature of aristocracy. The Enlightenment proposed a more dynamic and even self-destructive sense of domination that has inspired the full range of left-leaning politics from liberal policies of expanding the electoral franchise to more explicitly socialist policies for redistributing wealth in a productive society. It is as joint recipients of this legacy that the fates of social science and socialism have been sealed together.

When, in the late 1970s, Foucaultian historiography and affiliated micro-sociologies were first regarded as joined in common cause against the Parsonian structural-functionalist sociology establishment, it was common to read the post-structuralist ‘deconstruct’ to mean the Marxist ‘demystify’. In this context, the promiscuous use of words like ‘critical’ and ‘reflexive’ papered over what turned out to have been a profound difference in orientation. Originally, Foucault and friends were read as glorified troubleshooters who pinpointed how the Enlightenment had so far fallen short of its potential, which presumably could be remedied by better crafted legislation and administration. However, the Foucaultians truly came into their own in the 1980s, as faith in the welfare state, and socialist politics more generally, faded. Now their views were more likely to be seen in tandem with the emerging neo-liberal sensibility championed by that Thatcherite guru of political economy, Friedrich von Hayek. An important semantic marker of this transition is the regression from Kantian autonomy to Aristotelian agency to characterize the aspiration to self-determination by deviant groups. Whereas ‘autonomy’ implies the resistance and transcendence of natural tendencies (e.g. the temptation to sin, the submission to tradition), ‘agency’ implies the simple permission to express natural tendencies previously repressed (e.g. by the state).

Before Hayek accepted the chair at the LSE in 1932 from which he would sow the seeds of the neo-liberal counter-revolution, his mentor Ludwig von Mises had been the centre of an alternative Vienna Circle to the more famous one associated with the logical positivists and frequented by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper (Hacohen, 2000: Chapter 5; Ebenstein, 2001: Chapter 5). These two Vienna Circles seeded the metascientific views of, respectively, the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ perspectives in contemporary social science. Taking the latter first, the logical positivists were known in their heyday as the ‘Red Vienna Circle’ because its membership featured such card-carrying socialists as Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, who held that societies could be modelled and regulated like closed physical systems, based on a few operationally defined, interacting variables (Reisch, 2005). The general equilibrium approach common to Parsonian structural-functionalism and Keynesian welfare economics drew epistemic sustenance from this perspective and, through Viennese émigrés like Paul Lazarsfeld, professionalized US social science in the Cold War era, mainly by the development of sophisticated quantitative methodology for relating individual and collective perceptions (Platt, 1996: Chapter 3). Thus, sociology became the science of and for the welfare state, the political rubric under which ‘society’ travelled. Perhaps the last original thinker in this tradition was James Coleman.

In contrast, the members of the Mises Circle wanted to turn the clock back to the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment, that is, when ‘civil society’ was still an object of natural history (as opposed to social engineering) and before nation-building became an expectation of statecraft. Eschewing all mathematical techniques, especially statistics, Mises’ Vienna Circle held that no state planner could ever aggregate, let alone supersede, the collective experience of agents in a free market. They were highly critical of the Weimar Republic’s tendency to see democratization in terms of mass mobilization, which in turn imputed a spurious cognitive superiority to organized groups over the phenomenology of situated individuals (cf. Peukert, 1993: Chapter 8).

Hayek aside, perhaps the most influential of this group was the international finance lawyer and amateur sociologist Alfred Schutz, whose own work came to be incorporated into the discipline’s mainstream via the generalized invisible hand model of social order that continues to travel under the name of the ‘social construction of reality’ (Schutz, 1964; Berger and Luckmann, 1967). Indeed, the most faithful recent follower of this Viennese tradition has made the long – perhaps even unwitting – pilgrimage back from studying the distributed character of biomedical research to that of the financial markets where it all began (cf. Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger, 2002). Originally Schutz asserted what he called the ‘social distribution of knowledge’ in reaction to what he took to be the artificial collectivization of sentiment made possible by the emergence of tabloid newspapers and broadcast radio in the 1920s (Prendergast, 1986). Schutz was extending a point already found in Weber’s later political writings, which would have the public recognize that the complexity of the modern world requires the ‘professionalization’ of politics, a consequence of which is that ordinary citizens would learn more but know less about how to operate in the political arena (Baehr, 1998: Chapters 3–4).

The balance sheet on Schutz’s impact on the social sciences thus turns out to be rather mixed. On the one hand, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Schutz’s critique of the pseudo-immediacy of mass communications ...