Crisis in Sociology

The Need for Darwin

Joseph Lopreato, Timothy Crippen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351320184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Crisis in Sociology presents a compelling portrait of sociology's current troubles and proposes a controversial remedy. In the authors' view, sociology's crisis has deep roots, traceable to the over-ambitious sweep of the discipline's founders. Generations of sociologists have failed to focus effectively on the tasks necessary to build a social science. The authors see sociology's most disabling flaw in the failure to discover even a single general law or principle. This makes it impossible to systematically organize empirical observations, guide inquiry by suggesting falsifiable hypotheses, or form the core of a genuinely cumulative body of knowledge. Absent such a theoretical tool, sociology can aspire to little more than an amorphous mass of hunches and disconnected facts. The condition engenders confusion and unproductive debate. It invites fragmentation and predation by applied social disciplines, such as business administration, criminal justice, social work, and urban studies. Even more dangerous are incursions by prestigious social sciences and by branches of evolutionary biology that constitute the frontier of the current revolution in behavioral science. Lopreato and Crippen argue that unless sociology takes into account central developments in evolutionary science, it will not survive as an academic discipline. Crisis in Sociology argues that participation in the "new social science, " exemplified by thriving new fields such as evolutionary psychology, will help to build a vigorous, scientific sociology. The authors analyze research on such subjects as sex roles, social stratification, and ethnic conflict, showing how otherwise disconnected features of the sociological landscape can in fact contribute to a theoretically coherent and cumulative body of knowledge.

Part 1

From Early Promise to Deepening Crisis

1

The Early Promise

Few cultural phenomena were more historically ordained than the rise of sociology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its emergence exemplified the enduring élan of the Renaissance and the profoundly creative momentum of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. The human mind had probed long unimaginable laws of nature that placed our earthly plot in a cosmic context. It was now ready to turn to a more daring, reflexive inquiry of its more immediate environment. The question echoed broadly: Is a “science of society” possible? Equally resonant was the answer: It is an unavoidable necessity to find out. Those who unfolded the sociological frontier were polymaths proudly familiar with the scientific questions of their times, carefully bred in the cultivating currents of the humane disciplines, vigorously fascinated by the momentous encounter between ancient institutions and the emerging paradigms that inescapably challenged them.

None were sociologists in any of today’s senses of the word. They may be best described as keen observers of the human condition who had been trained in philosophy, or literature, history, economics, jurisprudence, medicine, even engineering, among other specialties. They were all children of the Enlightenment and of the “evolutionary centuries,” and were thus endowed with a sense of History writ large—with the burning conviction that little of enduring significance made sense if divorced from the roots that Time had wrought. The scientific revolution, the phenomenology of the mind, as Hegel termed it, the discovery of countless new peoples and cultures, and the expanding ethnography of the animal kingdom had constricted the Earth and thereby broadened intellectual horizons. Whatever else we may say of our progenitors, they were relatively free of parochialism and rigid habits. They replaced the old neophobia with an urgent need to discover and master the new. Above all perhaps, they were euphoric in the art of crashing disciplinary boundaries. Little wonder, then, that for a while matters went well with sociology. The beginning was glorious, good enough to fairly quickly establish it as a respectable academic discipline.

Unfortunately, sociology soon went astray, and, as is widely noted both within and without the profession, it has long been a discipline adrift. Scholars write of “the impossible science” (Turner and Turner 1990), “tranined incompetence” (van den Berghe 1990), and “the decomposition of sociology” (Horowitz 1993), among many other maladies. An essay solicited to celebrate the centennial of the American Journal of Sociology raised serious questions about the discipline’s capacity to compete for scarce resources and respectability in the academic environment (Huber 1995). Symposia about “the crisis” produce few significant agreements on its causes but underscore its enormous scope (see, e.g., the June 1994 issue of Sociological Forum on “What’s Wrong With Sociology?” and the debate on I.L. Horowitz’s The Decomposition of Sociology in Sociological Imagination, nos. 34, 1996).

In this volume, we argue that the crisis in sociology became unavoidable when we strayed from the premise generally accepted by the Founders that there can be no scientific sociology without general laws. Moreover, sociology was born within the same intellectual milieu that produced Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and eventually population genetics and various evolutionary sciences that have developed toward the study of social, including human, behavior. For decades, this scientific revolution has unfolded at a rapid pace. Some human disciplines, for example, psychology and to a lesser extent anthropology, have entered the stream of this revolution. To survive as an academic discipline, sociology will have to do likewise—and very quickly, for cannibalization of our subject matter is proceeding at a most disturbing rate.

To state the point otherwise, sociological analysis is almost exclusively environmentalist, and thus produces discoveries and explanations that are at best ephemeral. To survive it must rediscover the brain, the circumstances of its evolution, and the evolution of its products. It needs to learn Darwinian lessons and contribute to their ever-expanding scope. Accordingly, part 2 of this book will provide some basic elements of modern Darwinian science. Part 3 will then endeavor to apply them to various crucial problems of sociological interest. But before that we must briefly visit the early promise of sociology and then proceed to define the crisis and its various causes.

Our Fathers Who Inherited the Enlightenment

Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte (especially 1830-1842, 1875-1877), our putative and very eccentric progenitor was, through his enormous debt to Henri de St. Simon (Comte 1854,1: 142), our direct link to the Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment had two passwords above all: Reason and Progress (Bury 1932). Together they implied many things. But first and foremost they urged thinkers to look forward, away from the old and decadent schemes. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton had cleared the mind of the prejudice of geocentrism. Was not the mind now ready to dispel the prejudice of temporecentrism, and with it the allied bias of anthropocentrism as well? Comte was one of the first to advocate the application of the scientific method to the study of society, and hence the quest for “invariable natural laws” analogous to “the doctrine of Gravitation” (Comte 1854,1: 5–6).

By the time of Comte, moreover, the evolutionary paradigm was insistently in the air. He avidly joined the pursuit and, in view of the search for general laws, he stated a “preponderant principle” of human evolution, underscoring the “progressive influence of reason over the general conduct of Man and society.” Specifically: “The scientific principle of the theory appears to me to consist in the great philosophical law of the succession of the three states:—the primitive theological state, the transient metaphysical, and the final positive state—through which the human mind has to pass, in every kind of speculation” (Comte 1854, II: 522; see also Comte 1830–1842,1: 14). This is a vague and rationalistic conception of a prime mover. But Comte’s Law is also tied to a Malthusian anchor, namely the natural increase of population; hence, it is to a degree reducible in the direction of the epoch-making Darwinian theory. Comte (1854, III: 305–8) specifically argued that increasing demographic density stimulates the “division of employments” and “better concerted energy against the expansion of individual divergences.” At the same time, it creates new problems and promotes new technologies by reinforcing “innovating instincts” at the expense of “conservative” ones.

But it is perhaps when we focus on his “positivism,” for which Comte is most widely known, that we make the most startling discovery. Contrary to the common equation of positivism with “raw empiricism” in sociology, Comte viewed empiricism as a “great hindrance” to scientific inquiry.” No real observation of…phenomena,” he argued (18301842, IV: 418, 454–55), “is possible which is not initially guided and finally interpreted by some theory.” Thus facts, even important historical ones, are useless if they consist of mere descriptions. They do not speak for themselves; the true value of facts appears only “in relation to social evolution,” that is, to fundamental laws about social change.

Similarly, Comte drew a basic distinction between “static” and “dynamic” aspects of sociological analysis. In general, the former referred to today’s sociologist’s predilection for social structure. Little or nothing, he argued, could be said about the form of evolution, or the continutity of “consecutive social states,” without a thorough knowledge of structure. But it was the dynamics that provided the movers of social evolution. “In this view, the object of science is to discover the laws which govern this continuity, and the aggregate of which determines the course of human development” (Comte 1854, II: 218–32). This was a promising start for a science of society. But only a century later, sad to say, sociologists were entangled in an acrimonious and sterile debate over whether the reigning “paradigm” of the time, “structural-functionalism” (e.g., Parsons 1951), was at all adequate to the study of social change. By then, the crisis in sociology was already a festering sore.

There are many other valuable aspects of Comte’s work, and there are still others that we can easily do without (see Harris 1968: chap. 3, and Turner et al. 1998: chaps. 2–3 for informative discussions). A major example of Comtean error is the idealist philosophy that, his positivism notwithstanding, inhered in the law of the three stages. Social systems, according to Comte (1830–1842,1: 48–49) are “governed or overthrown by ideas: all social mechanisms rest on opinions.” On this question, he was at least partly wrong, as K. Marx and modern evolutionary theory have firmly shown. But after all, Comte was a product of philosophy, and thus could hardly avoid this imperfection. It is the subsequent failure to correct it that constitutes the greater flaw.

Karl Marx

The preeminent social evolutionists who charted a course in some sense parallel to Darwin’s extraordinarily fecund breakthrough were Karl Marx and, even more so, Herbert Spencer, one of the great giants often belittled with relish by subsequent generations of sociologists. Marx was both ideologue and scientist. As scientist, he was not hindered by narrow vision, whatever his language. Better than anyone else before and since his time, he rejected, in terms at once cogent and dramatic, Auguste Comte’s, and G.W.F. Hegel’s, excessively idealistic philosophies; at the same time he reinforced Comte’s accent on the dynamics of social evolution.

Marx understood the Enlightenment’s inability to escape the pincers of the rising capitalist order. Evasion required recognition that philosophical ideas are unavoidably the ideas of dominant groups, such as ruling classes. That amounts to saying that philosophical ideas are the secular means employed by the few in the subordination and exploitation of the many. Hence Marx rejected philosophy, what he otherwise termed ideology, in favor of what may be termed popular history, better known as “historical materialism.” The substance of history, he argued, may be found in the productive actions of laborers, the true producers of wealth or “social power.” Accordingly, the fundamental problem of history, especially urgent in his own time, concerned the means whereby the dominance inherent in social power could be transferred from the talkers-exploiters to the actors-producers. The deed would be performed by various forces allegedly inherent in the maturation of capitalism, for example, alienation, pauperization, urbanization, proletarianization, and so forth. In a seeming paradox, however, it would also be accomplished by the force of theoretically practical ideas: the ideas of the communists who, having a scientific understanding of the “true historical process,” would clear away from the minds of the workers the “false consciousness” instilled by philosophical ideas. Freed from such deceit, the oppressed masses would mobilize as a “class for itself,” thereby triggering revolutionary transformation of power relations toward a classless society. As ideologue as well as scientist, Marx fought ideology with ideology as well as with science.

It may also be argued that, given his general axiom that the dominant ideas of an epoch are the ideas of the dominant class, there is a marked Sysiphic dimension in Marx’s thought. But Marx saw no inevitability in the axiom. It had been so. It need not be so forever. Accordingly, there is no irreperable fault in his attempt to descry the forces, even the “idealist” ones, that may rid the body social of exploitation and abuse, especially if in the process the effort also produces fundamental sociological lessons. In this he succeeded reasonably well. The following are some of these lessons: (1) the proper study of man is the study of change; (2) the proper means to the study of change is the study of competition and conflict; (3) if you would understand the forces of history, ask not what people think; ask rather what they do. In all these respects, most sociologists since Marx have lost their way; and yet, if paternity must be sought for our craft, Marx offers one of the more compelling candidacies.

“If in all ideology,” Marx and Engels (1845–1846:14) argued, “men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-processes as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” If we are to understand human behavior, we must start by observing what people do, first and foremost in their productive activities, rather than by listening to what they say. The human being is a homo faber, producer and seeker of resources necessary to “the production of material life itself.” Production is “the first historical act.” Inextricably associated with it as “a double relationship” is the fact, manifestly Darwinian, that “men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propogate their kind” (Marx and Engels 18451846: 14–22).

This position, stultified at every turn in today’s theoretical babble as well as its very antithesis, the excessive reliance on survey research, has survived to our own time as one of the cornerstones of evolutionary behavioral science. Moreover, like his contemporary Charles Darwin, a more genial and fortunate giant of the nineteenth century, Marx proceeded to seek the fundamental mechanism underlying the historical process. He found it in the recurrence of the class struggle.

Now, he might better have served subsequent generations of sociologists if he had also paid more attention to what other sociologists have considered an even more basic type of struggle, that is, ethnic conflict (e.g., Pareto 1902–1903), which, as we shall see, links up very productively with a powerful tool termed kin selection by evolutionary scientists. It can hardly be gainsaid, however, that the human conflicts over appropriation of scarce material resources often take the form of clashes between coalitions of participants—whether social classes, political parties, ethnic groups, or even nations. Conflict at the group level is a constant fact of human evolution, and Marx made it the cornerstone of his theoretical edifice.

Marx’s work is a huge mine of ideas, not all of which are relevant to our purpose. The crux of his general theory lies in the sub-mechanisms of the class struggle, and the heart of the matter may, with some obvious loss of ideological verbiage, be represented as follows: The greater the greediness of the more successful competitors for resources (the greater the stress between the “forces of production” and “the relations of production”), the greater the probability of widespread dissatisfaction (class consciousness) among the more assiduous producers, who, through a “revolutionary process,” transfer the power of appropriation from one ruling coalition to another that at the time best utilizes the popular discontent. Dominant classes, in short, tend toward what may be termed crises of entropy, and fall prey to reenergizing classes rising from the very decay of the old order.

So viewed, Marx’s (1867) historical materialism speaks a fundamental human truth. It also hints by analogy at a criticism of Darwin’s allegedly “gradualist” conception of biological evolution. As we shall see in part 2, according to the “new evolutionary timetable” (e.g., Stanley 1981), the evolution of populations reveals extended time segments of relatively inactive selection pressures (little or no evolution) that are periodically “punctuated” by relatively rapid evolution or speciation. Marx’s mechanism may thus be construed as the sociological analogue of “punctuation” in the new evolutionary timetable (Lopreato and Green 1990).

Of course, by present-day standards, Marx’s evolutionism was only embryonic, and contained serious errors as well, such as his conception of a classless, and hence relatively conflict-free, future society. But it was a promising step in the right direction. Marx himself viewed his inquiry into human history as a quest for the general mechanisms responsible for the transformation of society. Moreover, his vision was so indebted to Darwin’s The Origin of Species, which Marx read in 1860, that he reported as follows to Friedrich Engels: “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history” (Marx and Engels 1935). Engels was even more sanguine about his friend’s evolutionist accomplishments. “Just as Darwin,” Engels (1883:681) declared at Marx’s burial, “discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.” With some little license, the alleged law may be interpreted in terms of Darwin’s “struggle for existence” in view of the primacy attributed by Marx to the role played by the production and distribution of economic resources in human relations. In short, rightly or wrongly, Marx viewed the class struggle as the typical human struggle for existence, and hence the uniquely human mechanism of evolution. It is, therefore, mystifying to read some of the most hostile attacks on Darwinian theory precisely among self-proclaimed Marxist sociologists.

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer was more thoroughly an evolutionist, and Darwin himself even claimed, wrongly, in a revised edition of The Origin of Species, that Spencer’s concept of “the survival of the fittest” was “a more felicitous” expression for Darwin’s concept of natural selection. The heart of Spencer’s work is also harder to capture in a few paragraphs. The quick, and weak, way of representing his evolutionism begins with the theorized effect of population growth on evolution. As population (“mass”) increases, there is also an increase in “the primary trait of evolution,” that is, structural “integration.” Population increase and integration are accompanied by “the secondary trait, differentiation” (Spencer 1876–1886,1:471). This is the “law of evolution,” which he defined as the “transformation of the homogenous into the heterogeneous,” and is allegedly reducible to “a universal cause”: “Every active force produces more than one change—every cause produces more than one effect.”

The concern with change is very old in social thought. Few thinkers, however, have expressed more urgency about its centrality in human affairs than have Marx and Spencer. The lesson is of the essence, and constitutes a crucial promise of early sociology. Unfortunately, much of it has been lost. As J.D.Y. Peel (1972: vii-ix) notes in his excellent introduction to a Spencerian anthology, the theoretical constructions of sociologists “are dominated by the social forms of their own age.” In fact, Peel may be a bit too generous, for the typical sociological focus is narrower than the term “age” would suggest. Certainly, as a group, sociologists suffer from a grievous scarcity of diachronic vision. Too often it seems that we are unaware of the very fact of time and of the roots that in time develop below the surface of human events.

A somewhat fuller glimpse of Spencer’s evolutionism is possible by retrieving Spencer’s Malthusian thesis that the increase of population entails a constant pressure on the means of subsistence. This excess of demand over supply stimulates the demand for “skill, intelligence, and self-control.” These environmental pressures stimulate self-interested parties to design ever-more effective strategies for survival and success. It is this quest to satisfy selfish needs that, further, is alleged to be the fundamental source of human sociality: “Living together arose, because, on the average, it proved more advantageous to each than living apart” (Spencer 1892–1893,1: 134).

Up to a point, therefore, population incre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables and Figure
• Preface
• Part 1: From Early Promise to Deepening Crisis
• Part 2: Elements of Evolutionary Theory
• Part 3: Select Adaptations and Applications
• References
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects