Whatever Happened to Sociology

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Whatever Happened to Sociology?Peter L. Berger

Copyright (c) 2002 First Things 126 (October 2002): 27-29.From: http://www.uv.es/perezjos/Whatever%20Happened%20to%20Sociology.htm

The title question has been asked frequently in recent years, bothwithin and outside the field. I think that it can be answered rathereasily: sociology has fallen victim to two severe deformations. The firstbegan in the 1950s; I would label it as methodological fetishism. Thesecond was part of the cultural revolution that started in the late 1960s;it sought to transform sociology from a science into an instrument of

ideological advocacy. As a wider public became increasingly aware ofthese changes, sociology lost the prestigious status it once occupied inAmerican cultural life, lost its attraction to the brightest students, and,not so incidentally, lost a lot of its funding.

I am not a disinterested observer of these developments. As a youngsociologist, still full of enthusiasm for my chosen discipline, I wroteInvitation to Sociology. It was published in 1963, before the seconddeformation began and while the first one still seemed containable. Thelittle book is still in print and still gets students interested in sociology.My own view of the discipline has not changed fundamentally sincethen, and I do not regret what I wrote at the time. But whenever I amasked about the book (especially by students), I have to say that thepicture I painted of the discipline bears little relation to what goes on init today. The relation is a bit like that of the Marxian utopia to what usedto be called real existing socialism.

The 1950s were a sort of golden age for sociology, even as the firstdeformation was beginning to develop. There were three powerfulacademic centers from which eager young teachers fanned out acrossthe provincial hinterlands. At Harvard there was the imposing figure ofTalcott Parsons, putting together, book by book, the theoretical systemknown as structural functionalism and producing a growing body ofactive disciples. Parsons wrote terrible prose (it read like a badtranslation from German), but he dealt with the big questions that hadbeen the subject matter of sociology from its beginnings: What holds asociety together? What is the relation between beliefs and institutions?How does change come about? What is modernity? At ColumbiaUniversity there were two other figures, almost as impressiveRobertMerton, who taught what could be called a more moderate version ofstructural functionalism, and Paul Lazarsfeld, who helped develop

increasingly sophisticated quantitative methods but who never forgotthe big questions that these methods were supposed to help answer.


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And at the University of Chicago there was still the lively presence oftwo distinctively American traditions of sociologythe blend ofsociology with social psychology, called symbolic interactionism,which began with the work of George Herbert Mead (who had taught atChicago most of his life), and the so-called Chicago school of urbansociology, which had produced a whole library of insightful empiricalstudies of many aspects of American life. Columbia and Chicago alsosent out their young graduates across the country and, increasingly, toforeign universities; Europeans came to study sociology in Americaand European sociology for a while had the character of an Americanmissionary enterprise.

What I mean by methodological fetishism is the dominance ofmethods over content. In principle this could happen with any methodin the human sciences; in fact the methods have been invariably

quantitative. Statistics became the mother science for sociologists.Now, there can be no question but that statistical analysis has been auseful tool in many areas. We live in a society comprising millions ofpeople and statistics is designed precisely to make sense of such asociety without having to interview every one of its members. To saythis, however, is a long way from assenting to the widespreadimplication that nothing is worth studying that cannot be analyzedquantitatively.

In order for data to be analyzed statistically, they must be produced bymeans of a standardized questionnaire. This means, inevitably, thatpeople are asked to reply to a limited number of typically simplequestions. Sometimes this works; sometimes it does not. Take theexample of the sociology of religion. One can get useful data by askingpeople how often they have gone to church in the last four weeks(leave aside the fact that, as has been shown, they sometimes lieabout this). But then such questionnaires try to cover beliefs as well asbehavior, and there the meaning of the replies is much less clear. Evensuch a seemingly simple question as Do you believe in God? will beinterpreted by respondents in so many different ways that their repliesare hard to analyze, let alone capable of helping a researcher constructsomething like, say, an index of orthodoxy. This does not mean that theintentions behind these replies could not be clarified; it only means thatsurvey research is not a good way of doing so.

The reasons for this worship of quantitative methods are probablytwofold. As often happens in intellectual history, there is a mix of idealand material factors (the sociology of knowledge is the attempt to sortout such mixes). On the level of ideas, there is the enormous prestigeof the natural sciences, in which quantitative methods areindispensable, and little sociologists want to be as much as possible

like their big brothers in physics. On the level of material interests,many of those who fund social research (such as government


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agencies) want results that are within very small margins of error andcan therefore be presented as unassailably scientific arguments for thisor that course of action. This too pushes toward quantitative methods.In sociology as in many other areas of endeavor, he who pays thepiper calls the tune.

Methodological fetishism has resulted in many sociologists usingincreasingly sophisticated methods to study increasingly trivial topics. Ithas also meant that sociological studies have become increasinglyexpensive. Earlier sociologists (such as those of the Chicago school)would go into a community, check into a cheap hotel, and spend thenext months observing and talking to their neighbors. Latter-daysociologists, as a joke has it, need a million-dollar grant to find theirway to the nearest house of ill repute. Inevitably, the big questionstend to get lost in this version of sociology. Its results can still be useful

to this or that institution (say, a government agency that wants to findout how many people are making use of one of its programs, andperhaps even what those people think about it), but they are unlikely tobe of interest to a wider public.

The ideologization of sociology has been even more devastating.However trivial or simplistic have been the results of methodologicalfetishism, at least they have been produced by objective investigationsthat merit the name of science. The ideologues who have been in theascendancy for the last thirty years have deformed science into aninstrument of agitation and propaganda (the Communists used to callthis agitprop), invariably for causes on the left of the ideologicalspectrum. The core scientific principle of objectivity has been ignored inpractice and denied validity in theory. Thus a large number ofsociologists have become active combatants in the culture wars,almost always on one side of the battle lines. And this, of course. hasalienated everyone who does not share the beliefs and values of thisideological camp.

The ideological amalgam that is transported by this propagandacampaign is, broadly speaking, of Marxist provenance. But theadherents of Marxism proper have considerably shrunk in numbers. (Inthe wake of the demise of real existing socialism, those who remainhave a certain heroic quality, like adherents of flat-earth theory in thewake of the Copernican revolution.) The ideology is not so muchMarxist as marxisantin its antagonism to capitalism and to bourgeoisculture, in its denial of scientific objectivity, in its view of the combatantrole of intellectuals, and, last but not least, in its fanaticism. In recentyears this version of sociology has intoned the mantra of class, race,and gender.

The first term of the mantra is still the most visibly marxisant, except forits substitution of the working class by other categories of alleged


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victims, such as, notably, the people of developing societies asdescribed by theories of neo-imperialism. The anticapitalism of theideology is also expressed by way of environmental concerns and,most recently, in opposition to globalization. Race and gender, ofcourse, refer to a variety of victimological categoriesracial and ethnicminorities, women, gays and lesbians (recently expanded to includetransvestites and transsexualsone wonders whether there areenough of those to make up a credible group of victims). Theideological amalgam here draws from the theorists of multiculturismand feminism. Unlike the doctrines of orthodox Marxism, someelements in the amalgam are in tension with each other. For instance,how do multiculturalists and feminists negotiate a topic like Islamicmodesty? But logical inconsistency has only rarely been an obstacleto ideological dominance (the Leninists were an exception in theirinsistence on relentless conformity). And, as has been amply

documented, this particular ideology, with its stultifying mantra, hasbecome dominant not only in much of sociology but in many of theother human sciences. Along with methodological fetishism, thisideological propaganda has been a crucial factor in the decline ofsociology, and not only in America.

I dont want to exaggerate. Here and there one can still findsociologists doing excellent work. Since I mentioned the sociology ofreligion, let me refer here to the work of Nancy Ammerman, JoseCasanova, James Davison Hunter, and Robert Wuthnow. And thereare still sociologists who, in one way or another, address the bigquestions, such as Irving Louis Horowitz and Orlando Patterson inAmerica, or Anthony Giddens and the recently deceased NiklasLuhmann in Europe. But the contributions of these sociologists, none ofwhom have created anything resembling a school of thought, onlyserve to underline the overall depressing condition of this discipline. Itwould take an enormous and sustained effort to reverse this condition.Im relieved to observe that I am both too old and too occupiedelsewhere to participate in such an effort.

Sociology originated in the attempt to understand the profoundtransformations brought about by the processes of modernity. Its basicquestion, to paraphrase the question asked in the Passover ritual, wasWhy does this age differ from every other age? In its classical period,roughly between 1890 and 1930, sociology flourished principally inthree countriesFrance, Germany, and the United States. In eachcountry the basic question took somewhat different forms, due todiffering intellectual and political milieus. Sociology produced suchintellectual giants as mile Durkheim and Max Weber, and powerfulschools of thought derived from their work. Given the structure ofmodern academic life, sociology became a distinct discipline and a

profession. However, one could argue that, unlike other disciplines(such as political science or economics), sociology does not concern


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itself with a delineated field of human life. It is a perspective rather thana field (a perspective which, incidentally, I tried to describe in Invitationto Sociology). This perspective (sometimes misunderstood, oftencorrectly applied) has greatly influenced virtually all of the other socialsciences as well as the humanities. Perhaps, then, sociology hasfulfilled its purpose and its eventual demise should be seen as lessthan an intellectual catastrophe.

Peter L. Berger is Director of the recently founded Institute on Religionand World Affairs at Boston University.

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Whatever Happened to Sociology