Philip Abrams on sociology as history
The Coming 'Crisis of Western Sociology A. W. Gouldner (Heinemann £3.75) As usual sociology is in a mess. There has not been a decade in the past century in which the intellectual disarray of sociology has not been celebrated. What is new today is that the gloomiest accounts of the condi- tion of sociology now come from sociologists themselves. And yet every year more and more people choose to be sociologists. The first principle of the history of sociology would seem to be that the more sociologists you have the worse the state of the subject becomes. There was a brief golden age around 1960 when criticism seemed to be dying away, solid bodies of modest empirical work about workers' attitudes, political parties, scholarship boys and delinquent gangs seemed to be building up; above all sociologists found that all sorts of useful and well-funded official bodies seemed to be seri- ously interested in what they had to say— new institutes and research' councils sprang up, sociologists were invited to write appen- dices to the reports of Royal Commissions, to contribute professionally to poverty pro- grammes, development programmes, tele- vision programmes. The priestly and pro- phetic instincts were widely gratified.
It was a utopia of course. The critics are with us again and their arguments are as strong as ever. Professor Gouldner is not the first to bring us back to earth. But he does the job more imposingly, more thoroughly and with more positive effect than anyone else yet. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology is a big and ambitious book. For all its five hundred pages it is part of a still bigger and more ambitious project which the author sees as involving four volumes and culminating in a 'systematic and generalised sociological theory about social theories'. Meanwhile he has given us plenty to he going on with: a round-up of the familiar difficulties of sociology, an analytical history of sociology, a vigorous, perceptive demon- stration of the social meaning of the domin- ant mode of sociology, a well-argued, de- pressing study of the intellectual convergence of American and Soviet sociology (official functionalism and official marxism), and in addition the outlines of an alternative way of doing sociology, 'reflexive sociology', a sociology conscious of itself as a social activity, which he sees as the means to be adopted if sociology is to survive its coming crisis.
The book deserves and will receive much detailed criticism. The case for reflexive sociology as the answer to the idiocy of much contemporary research is not fully made. Part of the solution, yes, but not the whole of it. Making sociologists more aware of themselves as social beings will encourage but not really guarantee a better understand- ing of, say, what is done to children in schools, or the social relations of prostitutes, engineers or spies; there are technical and theoretical problems too. Again, Gouldner's history of sociology is a highly selective one; it contains good things, the account of_ the intellectual continuity of sociology and utili- tarianism for example; but a lot is left out, most of the work of Max Weber to begin, with. Many of the things he says about the work of Talcott Parsons are said crudely and could probably not be sustained by close reading of the texts. Functionalism has been more diverse and more permissive than he
allows. But when all these and other proper criticisms have been made this is an import- ant book and a good one. It focuses atten- tion on many aspects of the practice of sociology in a way that matters.
This is especially true of Gouldner's treat- ment of what he calls the 'background assumptions' of sociology. His main critical purpose is to bring to light, and to make sociologists and their readers aware of, the degree to which unexamined assumptions about the relationship of man to society, and about what in that relationship is problem- atic, stand behind, shape and give resonance to the overt theories, methods and postula- tions of sociology. His working out of this theme is powerful. He makes it clear that there are vital philosophical questions to be asked about the commonest terms of thought of sociology. The bland liberal ideology of social progress embedded in the analytical language of sociology is brutally unearthed. At.the very least sociologists will have to be more careful in their use of words like society, rationality, development, in future. It is the task of the sociology of knowledge to unmask structures of meaning that relate, coordinate and order the seeming chaos of conscious intellectual activity, and this is a job that Gouldner does well. What we find in the literature of contemporary sociology is an atomisation of research to a point where the connectedness of each piece of research, its sense as a tiny specification of an encom- passing view of reality is lost for each indi- vidual researcher. But if you take the whole array of frames of reference that sociologists claim they are using and try to find within it a relatedness either as a view of the world or as a practical enterprise, what will emerge, and in Gouldner's work it emerges quite forcibly, is that the bits and pieces are indeed held together by a latent, quite coherent ideology, an ideology of progress of the type any English philosopher from Smith to Hob- house would have felt at home with; and that they are not held together by very much else.
Since men began to call one another sociologists those who have agreed to be labelled in this way have had to fight a battle on two fronts. From 1870 to about 1930 the principal intellectually effective objection to sociology concerned its historicism. Its inter- est in possible laws of historical development had produced a state of affairs where so many 'laws of tendency' (as Buckle called them) were on offer that the whole subject was collapsing into epistemological chaos. in 1935 Popper confronted us brutally with The Poverty ,of Historicism and in 1937 Parsons produced his great manifesto for a new sociology, The Structure of Social Action, opening as it does with a downright repudiation of historicism, 'Who now reads Herbert Spencer?' Since that time the prin- cipal intellectually effective criticism of sociology has been that it is a-historical. Parsons called for and apparently got a massive shift of attention from process to structure, from temporal to spatial categories of analysis. The history of this apparent transformation is well known. The fact of the matter is that modern sociology did in- deed become a-historical; not, however, be- cause historicism had been repudiated but because it had gone undereround, Expelled as grand theory it survived where it really mattered, as a latent ideology. Spencer lives, albeit largely unread,
Reflexive sociology, Gouldner maintains, would be historically sensitive sociology. But this is not a claim he develops in any detail. Actually sociology needs to be more than his- torically sensitive in any case; it needs to be historically articulate. Sociology's indiffer- ence to the fact that men act in time as well as in social structures is more than just another item on the well known shopping list of the problems of sociology. Arguably it is the root problem.
Classical sociology took shape in the midst of the most far-reaching, perplexing and perhaps threatening cultural and institutional changes that any single generation has ever experienced. An account of the past was des- perately needed if men were to make sense of the present let alone to chart the future. Sociologists seized hold of history in two ways: first in the form of a cluster of central ' organising ideas, a series of great conceptual antitheses designed more or less explicitly to separate out the past and the future from the extraordinary disorder of the present; second, in the form of a variety of laws of historical development. By means of a num- ber of bold conceptual antitheses the best social theorists of nineteenth-century Europe tried to grasp and identify the effects of eco- nomic and technological change on the insti- tutional fabric of society and on its charac- teristic modes of feeling. Status and contract, community and association, mechanical and organic solidarity, traditional and legal- rational authority, feudal and bourgeois re- lations of production—all these conceptual polarities were ways of trying to apprehend the direction of change associated with the rise of industrialism; exercises in abbreviated history which tended to surface in the idea of the 'logic. of industrialisation'. Each was presented as having an historical as well as a logical substance, however. Indeed, it was the historical substance which in almost every case was 'held to demonstrate the analytical validity of the conceptual device. 'Primitive' and 'modern' states of being having been thus identified laws of tendency linking the one to the other could reasonably be inferred. This would be done by logical rather than historical procedures of course.
One cannot but be struck today by the impressively unhistorical way in which socio- logists assembled their distinctive concep- tion of the past. The point of the enterprise after all was not to know the past but to postulate an abstract pattern of social organ- isation which could serve as a basis for the analysis of the present. It was almost but not quite fortuitous that this model came to be referred to, with unfortunately misplaced concreteness, as the past'. Once the flood of ethnographic data became available, and once it became clear that, as was the case for Engels no less than for more conven- tional social scientists, the Iroquois, the Picts and the Irish in Manchester were all analytic- ally the same thing, the essentially a-his- torical nature of the sociologists' past was evident enough. This did not at all reduce the theoretical importance of calling it the past of course. That was irreducible. It sprang from the primary concern of social scientists to set up a propositional theory of social development. As J. F. McLennan put it in a fine example of the type of socio- logical reasoning which Gouldner dismantles so well: 'The first thing to be done is to inform oursleves of the facts relating to the least developed races . . . their condition, as it maybe observed today, is truly the most ancient condition of man. It is the lowest and simplest . . . and . . . in the science of his- tory old means not old in chronology but in structure. That is most ancient which lies nearest the beginning of human progress considered as a development.' There are few more explicit statements of the logic of the social sciences in their handling of history— and few more revealing of their essential in- difference to anything that could be called, strictly, the historical past.
One effect of the procedure was quickly and aptly remarked by Bagehot: If we wanted', he wrote in 1861, `to describe one of the most marked results, perhaps the most marked result, of late thought, we should say that by it everything is made an an- tiquity.' Another result was to produce a sociology built implicitly or explicitly around a typology of societies—primitive, pre- industrial, industrial, post-industrial—pre- sumably standing in historical relation to one another and yet derived from thoroughly dubious historical evidence. When the qual- ity and adequacy of the evidence came to be challenged the overt attempt to formulate laws of historical process was abandoned ('Who now reads Herbert Spencer?'), but the rest of the apparatus, the ideal types, the conceptual polarities, the categories of analysis and description were not abandoned at all. Instead they remained, detached from any sort of historical theory but essentially historicist in their meaning, as the distinctive tools of modern sociological thought. Every so often the enterprise as a whole reappears, as it did unashamedly last summer at the Seventh World Congress of. Sociology, the Plenary sessions of which were devoted to Predicting the future development of indus- trialism with a panache which Spencer him- self might have envied.
Whether subterranean or rampant, how- ever, the point of this particular abuse of history is the same. It'serves to set up as an object of research an a-historical thing called the social structure of the present. Its dis- tinctive achievement is to relate research to the idea of structure rather than to the idea of process, to postulated 'objects', rather than to actual subjects, to the formal properties of action rather than to the experience of the actor. This is objectionable not because the idea of structure has no heuristic use but because the particular conceptions of struc- ture employed by sociologists are so rooted in an Unobserved ideology of social develop- ment (bureaucracy is modern, magic is primi- tive) that the actual. historical dimension of social experience is systematically ignored (bureaucracy is feeble, magic is ubiquitous). It is for this sort of reason that sociology needs to be historically articulate as well as historically sensitive. It needs to be articulate in two ways: first and quite simply it needs to pay much more attention to the fact that actions occur in time (that what is described as a social structure can also be described as a temporal sequence of events); second, it needs to find a great deal more room in its Conceptual universe for the idea that events are man-made—for the actor as well as the action.
There is of course a vocabulary problem here. The language of sociology refers almost exclusively to states of being. Our Concepts barely encompass the idea of active doing and becoming. The world is repre- sented as an array of structures and posi- tions. Change is treated as a matter of transi- tions from one state of being to another. Paced with activity we are at a loss for words. Just as one of the great tasks of early sociology was to hammer out a vocabulary to describe social relationships after the in- dustrial revolution, so one of the great tasks of sociology now is to find a conceptual vocabulary for the analysis of action, for a sociology of the individual. The need to work up a new actor-oriented language of process, to take the point of view of the individual and describe the world by way of a vocabu- lary of becoming instead of a vocabulary of being, to think of society in terms of choices, purposes, careers and life-cycles rather than in terms of statuses, conditions and positions, is old and familiar. Not to go too far away we find it asserted by Fichte, by Feuerbach, by the young Marx, by Martin Buber and George Herbert Mead. Mead and the type of sociological psychology he inspired are perhaps its most active expression today. 'For the individual', Mead reminds us, 'the world is always a task to be accomplished. It is not simply there by chance, as something that just happens. It is there because one realises it as a field for one's endeavours. It is a world, a real thing, just to the extent that one constructs it, that one organises it for one's action.' Doing' and 'becoming' are Mead's important verbs, not `having' and `being.' His whole work can be seen as an effort to substitute the idea of acting in time for that of being in space (social structure) as the sociologist's primary definition of reality.
We are not in fact wholly without indica- tions of what a sociology building on these assumptions, a sociology of becoming, would be like. In this respect The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology is a one-sided work and curiously ignores much that has been done by some of Gouldner's own closest col- leagues. In all sorts of particular contexts particular social scientists, including his- torians, have begun in the last ten years to fill out the alternative conceptions of sociO- logy adumbrated by Mead about fifty years ago. We have studies of becoming criminal, becoming radical, becoming adult, becoming negro which build on terms of analysis fundamentally at odds with those of the main sociological tradition. It was indeed quite difficult for the authors of some of these studies to get themselves recognised as sociologists. Gradually but with increasing force the new approach is surfacing, estab- lishing its own legitimacy. The problems and therefore the subject matter of sociology are steadily being redefined in a way that is sub- jective and temporal rather than objective and spatial, historical therefore rather than historicist. To this extent the coming crisis of sociology is already upon us—and it is already possible to see beyond it to some- thing new.
Philip Abrams is Professor of Sociology at the University of Durham and author of works on Locke and English sociology
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