Reviews by Enoch Powell, Simon Raven, Tibor Szamuely, James Morris and Auberon Waugh
Philip Abrams on
Plain man's sociology
High vulgarization is a proper part of the history of a mature science. Lines of communication must be kept open between the ever more esoteric sources of knowledge and the ever less competent audience i for knowledge. But somewhere there s a nice distinction to be drawn between this necessary work and vulgarization plain and simple. I am not quite sure where, in this scheme of things, Ronald Fletcher's enormous project belongs.*
Mr Fletcher is general editor of a new series of books for students, 'Tutor Books.' He is editor of a series within the series, 'The Making of Sociology. He is also the author of the first two volumes* to be Published in the sociological sub-series and he intends to be author of at least two more. It is unlikely that The Spectator will allow to sociology the space needed to do justice to an enterprise on this scale SO Mr Fletcher must forgive me if my comments on his first fifteen hundred Pages are more selective than he would wish. He appears to have two objects : to demonstrate the underlying unity of sociology despite its apparent fragmentation into several dozen more or less autogenistic factions and tendencies; and to provide an encouraging guided tour through the mysteries of sociological theory for those students who prefer to pass their exams by reading easy expositions of diffi.cult texts rather than by spending much time with the texts themselves. This second purpose, I take it, is the One that justifies the books as a publishMg venture. Although it is obviously less important and interesting than the first, omething needs to be said about it — If only because publishing ventures of this sort are now two a penny. Any junior lecturer who cares to do so can pick up a contract to summarize one or other field of sociological knowledge for one or other series specially designed for the benefit of students. However, there are two possible views of Mr Fletcher's personal contribution to this industry : is it a valuable work of synthesis, or is it the worst kind of Pandering to the apparent instinct of many teachers and students of sociology to turn
* The Making of Sociology Volume I: Beginning and Foundation Volume II: Developments Ronald Fletcher (Michael Joseph £6 and £7) the subject into the ultimate soft option?
The latter view takes the form of the argument that students should not be spoon-fed. The fact that Mr Fletcher has produced a more balanced and palatable diet than any of the rival caterers in -his particular field makes matters worse rather than better. The time and interest of students are limited. If they are encouraged to read large books about what the great men really said they will not also read the generally smaller books that the great men actually wrote. At a time when the market is glutted with interpretive and expository aids it is better for a student to spend an uncomfortable week with The Rules of Sociological Method or The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capita/ism, to read a few good case studies and some intelligent philosophical discussion of the nature of explanation than to drift through a year in the cotton wool padding provided by books like The Making of Sociology. We will admit, the argument might go on, that Mr Fletcher's narrative is always interesting, that he writes with clarity and verve, that his summaries of other people's arguments are almost always neat and accurate — sometimes they are too neat to be accurate — that his tone is unfailingly hopeful and that his judgements are pretty much those of the prevailing sociological orthodoxy in this country; thus Durkheim and Weber are the sociologists and on the whole Weber's all-encompassing muddle is preferred to Durkheim's more restricted lucidity. Indeed, we will allow that if you want this sort of thing you will not find it better done. But — it is just this sort of thing that confirms our worst suspicions about sociology.
We have reached a point — I am still doing what I can for the view I am outlining — where the sheer mass of relevant material makes it very easy for the teacher to find himself acting as a screen between the student and the important problems of his discipline. In the social sciences, where on the whole we cannot claim with confident authority to possess standard formulas for the solution of important problems, this kind of protection, this blurring of the immediate edges of the issues of definition and explanation which face the sociologist the minute he turns from books to society, is a real disservice to the student. It may make for safe second-class degrees but it
is not clear that it has anything to do with the making of any sort of valuable sociological intellect. We don't owe our students intellectual comfort and it is not evident that sociology has ever progressed or is progressing now as a result of the work of men who felt comfortable about the serious matters of theory and methodology which are continually stated only to be dodged in Mr Fletcher's trim studies of the great men.
By organizing the work in terms of men instead of problems the author not only gives himself an excuse for never facing up to the problems, he also commits him-, self to a journey of great length in a vehicle of very low mileage. Certainly he is very comprehensive; no one who could possibly matter is ignored --although Hume, Ferguson, Tyler; Frazer 4tnd LePlay get shoved into an appendix in volume I and the same happens to Booth, Rowntree and the Chicago school'in volume II (which certainly makes it easier to assert the unity of sociology). But sociology has been made in terms of problems not men and Mr Fletcher's procedure does not help us towards any clear sense of what is problematic about the problems or of the relative effectiveness of different ways of attacking them. Rather his constant insistence that all the men he discusses were not only rowing the same boat but actually pulling together contrives systematically to obscure the extraordinary difficulties a sociologist has when he tries to do even so simple a thing as, say, identify. and explain poverty in contemporary Britain. A book like Denzin's The Research Act in Sociology**, which happened to be published at much the same time as The Making of Sociology and which is built around the fact of the discontinuity of problems, methods and theories in sociology, gets very much closer is an understanding of why sociology s something to work at, a worthwhile field of work, than Fletcher's expositions and summaries can hope to do — and in about one fifth of the space. So for that matter does even an irresponsible essay like Runciman's Sociology in its Placet which raises im
portant questions about what is intractable in the subject-matter of sociology and about what is insecure in its explanations. It is to these intractabilities and insecurities that the attention of students should be directed. Some awareness of them seems to be involved whenever good new sociological work is done.
Now of course it would be perfectly possible to rescue The Making of Sociology from hostile comment by arguing on something like the following lines. Sociology is not the history of ideas. The historical treatment of any science if attempted in the kind of depth which puts the student in touch with any significant quantity of original sources is an extraordinary waste of time — assuming that the student is supposed to be learning the science and not its history. It is not at all clear that undergraduate students of sociology need to read the founding fathers any longer. At some stage in one's career it becomes a matter of professional credibility to have done so. But the founding fathers were for the most part deeply puzzled men, confused by the experience of industrialization and unattached to any coherent philosophical tradition. Reading them can only be an unsatisfactory experience. Of course we have learnt from them. But because we have learnt from them they have less and less to teach us. There are plenty of sociologists writing now who understand the facticity of society better than Durkheim. And there are a fair number who can handle the problem of the meaning of social action better than Weber. It would be ridiculous for it to be otherwise. What then, is their place in a sociological education?
Mr Fletcher's answer is to offer a course which, by way of a series of critical analyses of the work of successive founding fathers moves towards a statement of an achieved sociological conspectus — the theoretical and methodological groundplan of sociology as it now is. Presumably if the student could get all this inside him in his first year he would then be well equipped to go on either to a first hand study of the work of particular early sociologists — should anything so bookish take his fancy — or to work on the substantive problems of contemporary sociology with a fair, and economically acquired, understanding of how similar problems had been attacked by men tailing themselves sociologists in the past. Of course, the argument might continue, a work like The Making of Sociology will come between many students and the sociological sources. Were the sources more impressive this might be something to worry about. But the sources are not all that impressive and what they have contributed to our present ability to think effectively about society can be abstracted, summarized and related to other contributions by the teacher without any necessary loss of rigour. Why should every student have to discover for himself that Durkheim's distinction between normal and pathological social facts is internally muddled, that Marx had no clear and operationally cogent idea of the relationship between basis and superstructure, that Weber contradicts himself about the nature of power? It all takes a long time and when it has been done one is not necessarily any closer to knowing what one should think oneself about any of these matters, For this purpose all that is needed is a sense of how to relate oneself to the historically-derived frame of reference of present sociological theory, and, more important, to see the past selectively, as providing a set of resources for work in the present not as something to which one retreats whenever life gets difficult here and now. However closely we read and re-read Economy and Society, or Capital, or The Division of Labour in Society there comes a point when these works will not help us get closer to an understanding of the social relationships of policemen and criminals in 1971 — and it comes pretty quickly. A work like The Making of Sociology is certainly long — perhaps a work of reference to have somewhere in the departmental library rather than a book one uses as a whole in teaching — but it covers the ground in a fraction of the time it would take to read all the original works that it discusses, and it has a sense of direction, it gets the reader through all that nineteenth-century material with a clear idea of what it all adds up to.
But this is where one has to come clean. There is a certain tough-minded vigour about this view which makes me want to accept it. And there is a certain diligence and optimism about Mr Fletcher's books which makes me want to welcome them. But it really won't do. The case for treating sociological theory like this, especially for presenting it to students like this, depends entirely on whether the convergence and conspectus of theories which Mr Fletcher constantly asserts really exists. If it does, then of course the thing to do is to discover it as quickly as possible, get it firmly fixed in one's mind and then leave the founding fathers equally firmly behind. In other words, the case for Mr Fletcher's second purpose, helping students in this particular way, depends on whether there is any hope of achieving his first purpose, demonstrating the underlying unity of sociology. And here I am unconvinced.
'On page 634 of the first volume there is a fold-out chart which claims to provide a 'summary indication of nineteenth century agreements' in sociology. The columns of the chart are headed Comte (and Mill), Spencer, Marx, Ward, Summer and Giddings. To put Comte and Mill in the same box would hardly have amused Mill. To find a parallel between Marx and Spencer in any but the most superficial senses (they both believed themselves to be working scientifically) trivializes almost everything that both men attempted and falsifies the whole structure of nineteenthcentury social thought. But this is the sort of thing that occurs again and again.
Spurious points of similarity — the sense in which everyone was a positivist in the mid-nineteenth century — are enormously emphasized. Fundamental disagreements about the nature and method of the social sciences are blurred, glossed over, eased out of sight. And yet most of these disagreements remain unresolved, problematic and divisive. Sparing students the messiness of the sources would not matter too much if you could also spare them the continuing problems. But this is just what cannot be done. As soon as one turns to any substantive sociological work the sociological conspectus is shattered. It becomes clear that the status and nature of sociological knowledge are deeply and necessarily problematic and that there are therefore hard methodological choices to be made. And it is in this situation that the nineteenth-century writers still have something to say. They did work at following through the logic of their own choices — which is one of the reasons they cannot be absorbed into any non-trivial unity now. The sources must be read. Large expository books will only prolong the agony.
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