The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain

J. Holmwood, J. Scott, J. Holmwood, J. Scott

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137318862
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Leading sociologistsoutline the historical development of the discipline in Britain and document its continuing influencein this essential and comprehensivereference work. Spanning the Scottish enlightenment of the 18th century to the present day this Handbook maps the discipline and the British contribution.

1

Introduction

John Holmwood and John Scott

Sociologists have always been fascinated by the history of the subject and have often been criticised for having a greater interest in the ‘dead white males’ of the past than they have in the real problems of the contemporary world. For many, this interest in history has a legitimating function, allowing sociology to be seen as no mere upstart but as a real discipline with a long history. It is for this reason that particular views of that history have been more influential than others. Sociologists have tended to look at French and German writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the left-wing leanings of many have given a particular interest in Marxist thought.

A key figure in establishing this view of the history of the subject was Talcott Parsons, whose Structure of Social Action presented a theoretical convergence of Weber, Durkheim, and the Italian theorist Pareto (an economist as well as sociologist and presented by Parsons alongside the English economist, Alfred Marshall) that, displacing other writers such as Marx and Spencer to precursor roles, produced the key ideas for a ‘post-classical’ sociology to be realised in his own synthesis. Almost forty years later, Giddens produced, in his Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, a version of history that cast Marx, Weber and Durkheim as the key figures, in an explicit displacement of Parsons’s own resolution. While writers such as Coser, in Masters of Sociological Thought, have broadened out this viewpoint, the focus on French and German theorists remains strong. The principal change from Parsons’s account has been the discussion of American sociologists – most notably those in the ‘Chicago’ tradition of Mead and Thomas that was seen as complementing the focus of Weber and Simmel on social action. Parsons himself now figures in many accounts as having established an American tradition of social thought that owes a great deal to Durkheim.

In all this writing there has been little consideration of British sociologists and their work. Sociologists in Britain were, however, central to the organisational development of the subject in international forums, and Britain was one of the first countries to professionalise the practice of sociology: A British university had appointed two university professors in sociology in 1907, some years before the appointment of either Durkheim (in 1913) or Weber (in 1918) to chairs in the subject. Despite the subject being slow to expand beyond these appointments, British sociologists made many contributions to the development of the subject that are virtually unknown today. The aim of this book is to recover these lost histories and to document the continuing influence of British sociology in all the key areas of the discipline.

Essentially, this volume does not so much reconstruct a history of British sociology, as offer multiple histories, with an emphasis on discontinuities as much as continuities. In doing so, it will challenge some of the previously established ‘truths’ about the discipline, whether that be its empiricist tenor and neglect of ‘theory’ set out by Perry Anderson in his criticism of British ‘national culture’ in the 1960s, or the idea that it is a narrative largely tied to the growth of the nation-state, culminating in (semi-)professionalisation during the post-war growth of the Welfare State, as suggested in Halsey’s recent history of the discipline.

The emphasis on multiple histories and discontinuities should also dispel any tendency toward a Whiggish account of the rise of sociology to a secure place in the disciplinary fabric of British academic organisation. Sociology is part of what it explains and the conditions giving rise to its emergence and development are not subject to automatic reproduction. While all histories involve a deal of path-dependence, we hope that the present collection will also point out directions opened up, but not taken, as well as moments of interruption and displacement.

The idea for the present collection was suggested by the volume on American Sociology edited by Craig Calhoun in celebration of the founding of the American Sociological Society (the forerunner of American Sociological Association). It anticipated the 60th anniversary of the British Sociological Association in 2011 and was designed as a (late) celebration of that occasion. However, if anything should reminds us of the contingency of the environment in which disciplinary formations must develop and find their niches it is that this coincided with the publication of government plans for the wholesale reorganisation of the financing of higher education. We look back, then, at the histories of our discipline while anticipating a future of new developments and, perhaps, radical discontinuities.

2

The Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Social Thought c.1725–1915¹

John Brewer

Introduction

Scotland may well be a nation in waiting but the greatest contribution it has made to the history and development of social science in Britain occurred just after its loss of nationhood in the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, and, as we shall discuss, was not unrelated to it, and this intellectual effervescence in the eighteenth century, known as the Scottish Enlightenment, first began with an Irishman, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), with pamphlets published in Dublin in 1725. Such cultural and political ambivalence only serves to encourage the tendency today to present the Enlightenment thinkers as part of the cultural heritage of an identifiable Scottish nation and evidence of its cultural viability, people who were thoroughly Scottish in their interests, concerns and identities, and part of Scotland’s ‘golden age’. The reawakened interest in Scottish social thought in the contemporary period – with a Centre for Scottish Thought and the Journal of Scottish Thought established at the University of Aberdeen in 2007 – reflects Scotland’s nation-in-waiting status. The cultural and political spaces which give interest to the history and development of Scottish thought in the present therefore intersect with the array of political and social structural factors that explain the emergence of this extraordinary period of scholarship in the eighteenth century to shape the focus of this chapter. This chapter therefore looks not only at the ‘spaces of production’ that influenced the growth of social thought in Scotland by its principal contributors, it examines the ‘spaces of reading’ in which much later these ideas were taken up, disseminated and incorporated into accounts of the history of social thought (see Livingstone, 2005, for the distinction between spaces of production and reading; see Brewer, 2013 for an application to understand some of the writings of C. Wright Mills).

However, in the intervening period between the eighteenth-century genesis of the Scottish Enlightenment and the use of these ideas in the twenty-first century as part of a political project to underscore Scottish independence, there was a marked decline in Scottish social thought and interest in its history, which itself requires explanation. The Scottish diaspora is part of this account, for political and economic migration from a nation without nationhood led to cultural and intellectual migration as well. The intellectual diaspora, even if only moving as far as London, is part of the history and development of Scottish social thought, for some of the migrants became well known in other countries and helped contribute to social science ideas from elsewhere, notably Robert MacIver (1882–1970), who left Scotland in 1915 (which explains the rough dates used to mark the time period discussed in this chapter).

In the period after 1915 however, other Scots, as part of the migratory legacy, took an interest in the history of Scottish social thought and advocated enthusiastically its place in the development of social science, but they are not considered here as making original contributions to it. Notable amongst these in England were the Glaswegian Donald MacRae (1921–1998) at the London School of Economics (LSE), of whom it was said the Gael never diminished inside him, and Duncan Forbes (1922–1994) at Clare College Cambridge, whom John Dunn, his former student and a major historian of ideas himself, once described as a Highlander in exile. The popularisation of Scottish social thought, including by Scottish intellectual migrants, is another concern of this chapter. While the chapter therefore primarily addresses the nature and content of Scottish social thought between 1725 and 1915, it also discusses the take-up of these ideas later in the twentieth century.

The question remains, however, whether there are any common features to Scottish social thought since the eighteenth century. This enables us to determine whether there is anything particularly Scottish about Scottish social thought in the period. This is more than a minor intellectual curiosity, for inasmuch as Scottish social thought is treated today as the cultural expression of a nation in waiting, the Scottishness of these ideas is important to support the political uses to which Scottish social thought it being put as part of the case for independence. These themes are taken up at the conclusion of this chapter. We must begin the narrative, however, where all accounts of Scottish social thought rightly have to, with the eighteenth-century thinkers who shaped the Scottish Enlightenment (although the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ was not a term in use at the time and did not become common parlance until well into the twentieth century).

The Rise of Scottish Social Thought: The Eighteenth-Century Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment was not geographically restricted to the southern belt of Scotland. Hutcheson was an Ulster-Scot from Saintfield in County Down in what is now Northern Ireland, and while he studied at Glasgow University his first academic teaching post was in Dublin, where he stayed for ten years (see Brown, 2002). Beginning in 1725, he published, while there, four treatises in social science that reflected both his view of the innate sociability and benevolence of society and his interest in the social nature of moral good and virtue (see the Bibliography at the end of this chapter for the list of the principal books written by the main figures in Scottish social thought). That he should hold these views in the midst of sectarian Ireland, where they seemed to live in contradiction with experience, is a measure of the strength of his commitment (or the cause of it, for he rebelled against the conservative views of his father and grandfather). These anonymously published pamphlets placed Hutcheson firmly at the head of a tradition that his student, Adam Smith (1723–1790) came best to represent, defined by a concern with the social nature of moral sentiments (which ended up giving Hutcheson’s views a general currency that undercut the effect of the Irish experience). Hutcheson moved back to Glasgow University in 1729.

The Scotland-wide nature of the Enlightenment is reflected best in three of its leading thinkers: Thomas Reid (1710–1796), who was born in Aberdeenshire and based in King’s College Aberdeen for much of his career, as far then from the southern belt as it was possible to be while remaining in ‘polite society’; David Hume (1711–1776), who changed his surname from Home in order to facilitate its pronunciation in English and who lived for much of his life in England and the near continent and was considered too much an atheist to obtain positions in Scottish universities; and Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), who was born a Highlander in northern Perthshire (on the romanticised exaggeration of his Highlander origins for understanding his identity and his sociological writings see Brewer, 2007a, 2008), although he worked at Edinburgh University most of his life and retired to Peebles on the English borders. It is also worth recalling that Adam Smith studied in Balliol College Oxford after Glasgow University. Most of them took up personal tutorships to the children of the aristocracy to augment meagre teaching monies and toured Europe extensively with their charges; Ferguson travelled to the American colonies as secretary to the commission on the war of independence. They were widely immersed in European culture and aware of the continent’s main intellectual debates.

Some of the Enlightenment figures were independently wealthy, such as Henry Home (who chose not to change his name to facilitate pronunciation as Hume), who as a leading Scottish judge became Lord Kames (1696–1782), and James Burnett, who made the same judicial transition to Lord Monboddo (1714–1796), who was educated at King’s College Aberdeen and spent his early legal career in Holland. Monboddo developed a tradition of riding on horseback to London once a year to visit Hampton Court and he was one of the Hanoverian Kings’ favourites. The others were sons of the Manse or of lawyers and public servants, members of ‘polite society’ but leaning to genteel impoverishment not prosperity. Ferguson’s letters reveal that despite his intellectual success he was never released from the fear of impoverishment and was constantly seeking favours and positions for his sons (the Ferguson letters are collated in Merolle, 1995; for an analysis of them see Brewer, 2008); a small pension was the summit of his financial ambitions for retirement and one of his enduring epistolary concerns (along with his obituary, which he wrote and rewrote several times).

All this is relevant to demonstrate that they brought to their scholarship both cultural diversity and a variety of life experiences that made Scotland mean to them something quite different (see Camic, 1983 for an analysis of some of the socio-cultural factors lying behind the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment). Nor were they consciously aware of themselves as constituting a group, and it took Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), a second generation representative and former student of Adam Ferguson to name the tradition as ‘conjectural history’. Stewart meant by this their analysis of the distinct stages of social structural and historical development (see Brewer, 1989), although stadial theory is a poor measure of the breadth of their work and he had his former teacher primarily in mind when inventing it, despite using it first to characterise Smith’s work (see Hopfl, 1978). Some members of the group were at loggerheads for some of the time – Ferguson and Hume disagreed over Hume’s atheism (on Ferguson’s religiosity see Brewer, 2008), Smith and Ferguson thought the other pinched their ideas about the division of labour (on which see Hamowy, 1968; Hill, 2007), Reid and Hume had opposed views on the role of scepticism in philosophy (on which see de Bary, 2002), and Monboddo’s eccentric pre-anthropological ideas (that orang-utans were human and that humans had first had tails) put him at odds with the others, although in some respects Monboddo anticipated Darwin (MacRea, 1959), and he contributed greatly to the study of ancient languages.

Nonetheless, they were part of each other’s ‘polite society’ in the universities, in the coffee houses and clubs that marked their daily round, and in the philosophical societies that brought them together with industrialists, scientists, agricultural improvers, the literati, theologians, the legal profession and the like. Notable amongst these clubs were the ‘Select Society’ (on which see Emerson, 1973), the ‘Poker Club’, and the precursor to the Royal Society of Edinburgh known as the Edinburgh Philosophical Society. The Burns Encyclopedia has Robert Burns (1759–1796) attending Monboddo’s house where they held ‘learned suppers’, convened at an early hour, where leading intellectuals, scientists, industrialists, improvers and poets were entertained with tables ‘strewn with roses, after the practice of Horace at his home in the Sabine Hills and the wine flasks were garlanded, after the manner of Anacreon at the Court of Polycrates of Samos’ (see http://www.robertburns.org/encyclopedia/BurnettJamesLordMonboddo1714-99.146.shtml), which makes real the subsequent proposition that Edinburgh was the Athens of the North (although Horace was a Roman not Greek lyricist poet). Even geographically remote Aberdeen under Reid’s instigation had its ‘Wise Club’ (see Robinson, 2006).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyrights
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Social Thought c.1725–1915
• 3 Poverty Studies and Social Research
• 4 Absent or Forgotten? Recovering British Social Theory
• 5 Evolutionism and British Sociology
• 6 Religion and British Sociology: The Power and Necessity of the Spiritual
• 7 Sociology and Social Work: In Praise of Limestone?
• 8 The First Sociology ‘Departments’
• 9 British Sociology in the Inter-War Years
• 10 Building a Textbook Tradition: Sociology in Britain, 1900–68
• 11 The International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction and British Sociology
• 12 Feminism in Sociology, Feminism as Sociology
• 13 Exiles in British Sociology
• 14 British Sociology in the Metropole and the Colonies, 1940s–60s
• 15 Between Science and the Humanities: Sociology as a Third Culture?
• 16 The History of British Sociology from the Perspective of its Archived Qualitative Sources: Ruminations and Reflections
• 17 The Sociology of Community
• 18 Sociology of Race, Racism and Ethnicity: Trends, Debates and Research Agendas
• 19 Research Methodology in Sociology
• 20 The Sociological Study of Religion: Arrival, Survival, Revival
• 21 Criminology, Deviance and Sociology
• 22 The Sociology of Work: From Industrial Sociology to Work, Employment and the Economy
• 23 Sociology, Cultural Studies and the Cultural Turn
• 24 ‘Class’ in Britain
• 25 Sociology of the Body and the Relation between Sociology and Biology
• 26 Sociology’s Past and Futures: The Impact of External Structure,Policy and Financing
• Index