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First Things, 126 (October 2002), 27-29

Whatever Happened to Sociology?


Peter L. Berger

The title question has been asked frequently in recent years, both within and outside the
field. I think that it can be answered rather easily: sociology has fallen victim to two
severe deformations. The first began in the 1950s; I would label it as methodological
fetishism. The second 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 of these changes, sociology lost
the prestigious status it once occupied in American 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 young sociologist, still


full of enthusiasm for my chosen discipline, I wrote Invitation to Sociology. It was
published in 1963, before the second deformation began and while the first one still
seemed containable. The little book is still in print and still gets students interested in
sociology. My own view of the discipline has not changed fundamentally since then,
and I do not regret what I wrote at the time. But whenever I am asked about the book
(especially by students), I have to say that the picture I painted of the discipline bears
little relation to what goes on in it today. The relation is a bit like that of the Marxian
utopia to what used to be called “real existing socialism.”

The 1950s were a sort of golden age for sociology, even as the first deformation was
beginning to develop. There were three powerful academic centers from which eager
young teachers fanned out across the provincial hinterlands. At Harvard there was the
imposing figure of Talcott Parsons, putting together, book by book, the theoretical
system known as “structural functionalism” and producing a growing body of active
disciples. Parsons wrote terrible prose (it read like a bad translation from German), but
he dealt with the “big questions” that had been the subject matter of sociology from its
beginnings: What holds a society together? What is the relation between beliefs and
institutions? How does change come about? What is modernity? At Columbia
University there were two other figures, almost as impressive—Robert Merton, who
taught what could be called a more moderate version of “structural functionalism,” and
Paul Lazarsfeld, who helped develop increasingly sophisticated quantitative methods
but who never forgot the “big questions” that these methods were supposed to help
answer. And at the University of Chicago there was still the lively presence of two
distinctively American traditions of sociology—the blend of sociology with social
psychology, called “symbolic interactionism,” which began with the work of George
Herbert Mead (who had taught at Chicago most of his life), and the so-called “Chicago
school” of urban sociology, which had produced a whole library of insightful empirical
studies of many aspects of American life. Columbia and Chicago also sent out their
young graduates across the country and, increasingly, to foreign universities; Europeans
came to study sociology in America and European sociology for a while had the
character of an American missionary enterprise.

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What I mean by “methodological fetishism” is the dominance of methods over content.
In principle this could happen with any method in 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 a useful
tool in many areas. We live in a society comprising millions of people and statistics is
designed precisely to make sense of such a society without having to interview every
one of its members. To say this, however, is a long way from assenting to the
widespread implication that nothing is worth studying that cannot be analyzed
quantitatively.

In order for data to be analyzed statistically, they must be produced by means of a


standardized questionnaire. This means, inevitably, that people are asked to reply to a
limited number of typically simple questions. Sometimes this works; sometimes it does
not. Take the example of the sociology of religion. One can get useful data by asking
people how often they have gone to church in the last four weeks (leave aside the fact
that, as has been shown, they sometimes lie about this). But then such questionnaires try
to cover beliefs as well as behavior, and there the meaning of the replies is much less
clear. Even such a seemingly simple question as “Do you believe in God?” will be
interpreted by respondents in so many different ways that their replies are hard to
analyze, let alone capable of helping a researcher construct something like, say, an index
of orthodoxy. This does not mean that the intentions behind these replies could not be
clarified; it only means that survey research is not a good way of doing so.

The reasons for this worship of quantitative methods are probably twofold. As often
happens in intellectual history, there is a mix of “ideal” and “material” factors (the
sociology of knowledge is the attempt to sort out such mixes). On the level of ideas,
there is the enormous prestige of the natural sciences, in which quantitative methods are
indispensable, 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 agencies) want results that are within very small “margins
of error” and can therefore be presented as unassailably scientific arguments for this or
that course of action. This too pushes toward quantitative methods. In sociology as in
many other areas of endeavor, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Methodological fetishism has resulted in many sociologists using increasingly


sophisticated methods to study increasingly trivial topics. It has also meant that
sociological studies have become increasingly expensive. Earlier sociologists (such as
those of the “Chicago school”) would go into a community, check into a cheap hotel,
and spend the next months observing and talking to their neighbors. Latter-day
sociologists, as a joke has it, need a million-dollar grant to find their way to the nearest
house of ill repute. Inevitably, the “big questions” tend 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 find out how many people are making use of one of its programs,
and perhaps even what those people think about it), but they are unlikely to be of
interest to a wider public.

The ideologization of sociology has been even more devastating. However trivial or
simplistic have been the results of methodological fetishism, at least they have been
produced by objective investigations that merit the name of science. The ideologues
who have been in the ascendancy for the last thirty years have deformed science into an

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instrument of agitation and propaganda (the Communists used to call this “agitprop”),
invariably for causes on the left of the ideological spectrum. The core scientific
principle of objectivity has been ignored in practice and denied validity in theory. Thus
a large number of sociologists have become active combatants in the “culture wars,”
almost always on one side of the battle lines. And this, of course. has alienated everyone
who does not share the beliefs and values of this ideological camp.

The ideological amalgam that is transported by this propaganda campaign is, broadly
speaking, of Marxist provenance. But the adherents of Marxism proper have
considerably shrunk in numbers. (In the wake of the demise of “real existing socialism,”
those who remain have a certain heroic quality, like adherents of flat-earth theory in the
wake of the Copernican revolution.) The ideology is not so much Marxist as marxisant
—in its antagonism to capitalism and to bourgeois culture, in its denial of scientific
objectivity, in its view of the combatant role of intellectuals, and, last but not least, in its
fanaticism. In recent years 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 for its substitution
of the working class by other categories of alleged victims, such as, notably, the people
of developing societies as described by theories of neo-imperialism. The anticapitalism
of the ideology is also expressed by way of environmental concerns and, most recently,
in opposition to globalization. “Race” and “gender,” of course, refer to a variety of
victimological categories—racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians
(recently expanded to include transvestites and transsexuals—one wonders whether
there are enough of those to make up a credible group of victims). The ideological
amalgam here draws from the theorists of multiculturism and feminism. Unlike the
doctrines of orthodox Marxism, some elements in the amalgam are in tension with each
other. For instance, how do multiculturalists and feminists negotiate a topic like
“Islamic modesty”? But logical inconsistency has only rarely been an obstacle to
ideological dominance (the Leninists were an exception in their insistence on relentless
conformity). And, as has been amply documented, this particular ideology, with its
stultifying mantra, has become dominant not only in much of sociology but in many of
the other human sciences. Along with methodological fetishism, this ideological
propaganda has been a crucial factor in the decline of sociology, and not only in
America.

I don’t want to exaggerate. Here and there one can still find sociologists doing excellent
work. Since I mentioned the sociology of religion, let me refer here to the work of
Nancy Ammerman, Jose Casanova, James Davison Hunter, and Robert Wuthnow. And
there are still sociologists who, in one way or another, address the “big questions,” such
as Irving Louis Horowitz and Orlando Patterson in America, or Anthony Giddens and
the recently deceased Niklas Luhmann in Europe. But the contributions of these
sociologists, none of whom have created anything resembling a school of thought, only
serve to underline the overall depressing condition of this discipline. It would take an
enormous and sustained effort to reverse this condition. I’m relieved to observe that I
am both too old and too occupied elsewhere to participate in such an effort.

Sociology originated in the attempt to understand the profound transformations brought


about by the processes of modernity. Its basic question, to paraphrase the question asked
in the Passover ritual, was “Why does this age differ from every other age?” In its

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classical period, roughly between 1890 and 1930, sociology flourished principally in
three countries—France, Germany, and the United States. In each country the basic
question took somewhat different forms, due to differing intellectual and political
milieus. Sociology produced such intellectual giants as Émile Durkheim and Max
Weber, and powerful schools of thought derived from their work. Given the structure of
modern 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 itself with a delineated field of human life. It is
a perspective rather than a field (a perspective which, incidentally, I tried to describe in
Invitation to Sociology). This perspective (sometimes misunderstood, often correctly
applied) has greatly influenced virtually all of the other social sciences as well as the
humanities. Perhaps, then, sociology has fulfilled its purpose and its eventual demise
should be seen as less than an intellectual catastrophe.

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

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