© Immanuel Wallerstein 1998. (Iwaller@binghamton.edu)
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I. The Heritage
What can we mean by the culture of sociology? I shall start by two comments. First, what we normally mean by a "culture" is a set of shared premises and practices, shared to be sure not by all members of the community all of the time but by most members most of the time; shared openly, but what is even more important shared subconsciously, such that the premises are seldom subject to discussion. Such a set of premises must necessarily be quite simple, and even banal. To the extent that the assertions are sophisticated, subtle, learned, they would be unlikely to be shared by too many, and therefore to be able to create a worldwide community of scholars. I will suggest that there exists precisely such a set of simple premises shared by most sociologists, but not necessarily at all by persons who call themselves historians or economists.
Secondly, I think the shared premises are revealed - revealed, not defined - by who it is that we present as our formative thinkers. The standard list these days for sociologists around the world is Durkheim, Marx, and Weber. The first thing to note about this list is that if one posed the question of formative thinkers to historians, economists, anthropologists, or geographers, one would surely come up with a different list. Our list does not contain Michelet or Gibbon, Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes, John Stuart Mill or Machiavelli, Kant or Hegel, Malinowski or Boas.
So the question becomes, where did our list come from? After all, if Durkheim did call himself a sociologist, Weber did so only in the very last period of his life, and even then ambiguously,[1] and Marx of course never did so. Furthermore, although I have met sociologists who call themselves Durkheimians, and others who call themselves Marxists, and still others who call themselves Weberians, I have never yet met any who said that they were Durkheimian-Marxist-Weberians. So in what sense can these three be said to be founding figures of the field? Yet book after book, and in particular textbook after textbook, says so.[2]
It was not always thus. This grouping is in fact largely the doing of Talcott Parsons and his formative work of the culture of sociology, The Structure of Social Action. Of course, as you will recall, Parsons intended that we canonize the trio of Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto. Somehow, he was never able to persuade others of the importance of Pareto, who remains largely ignored. And Marx was added to the list, despite Parsons's best efforts to keep him off it. Nonetheless, I attribute the creation of the list essentially to Parsons. And that of course makes the list very recent. It is basically a post-1945 creation.
In 1937, when Parsons wrote, Durkheim was less central to French social science than he had been twenty years earlier and would be again after 1945.[3] And he was not a figure of reference in other major national sociological communities. It is interesting in this regard to look at the Introduction that George E. G. Catlin wrote to the first English edition of The Rules of Sociological Method. In 1938, writing for a U.S. audience, Catlin pleaded for Durkheim's importance by classifying him in the same league as Charles Booth, Flexner, and W.I. Thomas, and said that, although his ideas were anticipated by Wundt, Espinas, Tönnies, and Simmel, he was nonetheless important (Catlin, 1964, xi-xii). This is not exactly the way Durkheim would be presented today. In 1937, Weber was not taught in German universities, and to be fair even in 1932 he was not the commanding figure he is today in German sociology. Nor had he yet been translated into English or French. As for Marx, he was scarcely ever even mentioned in most respectable academic circles.
R. W. Connell has shown in a recent survey what I had long suspected, that the pre-1945 textbooks may have mentioned these three authors, but only alongside a long list of others. Connell calls this "an encyclopedic, rather than a canonical, view of the new science by its practitioners" (1997, 1514). It is the canon that defines the culture, and this canon had its heyday between 1945 and 1970, a very special period - one dominated by U.S. sociological practitioners, one during which structural-functionalism was by far the leading perspective within the sociological community.
The canon must begin with Durkheim, the most self-consciously "sociological" of the three, the founder of a journal called l'Année Sociologique, whose centenary we celebrate in 1998 as we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the International Sociological Association. Durkheim responded to the first and most obvious of questions about which any student of social reality doing empirical work must wonder. How is it that individuals hold particular sets of values, and not others? And how is it that persons with "similar backgrounds" are more likely to hold the same set of values than persons of dissimilar backgrounds? We know the answer so well that it no longer seems to us a question.
Let us review nonetheless Durkheim's answer. He restates his basic arguments very clearly in the "Preface to the Second Edition" of The Rules of Sociological Method, written in 1901. It was meant as a reply to the critics of the first edition, and in it he seeks to clarify what he is saying, since he feels he had been misunderstood. He declares three propositions. The first is that "social facts must be treated as things," a statement he insists is "at the very base of our method." He asserts that he is not thereby reducing social reality to some physical substratum but simply claiming for the social world "a degree of reality at least equal to that everyone accords" to the physical world. "The thing [he says] stands in opposition to the idea, just as what is known from the outside stands in opposition to what is known from the inside" (Durkheim, 1982, 35-36). The second proposition is that "social phenomena [are] external to individuals."[4] And, finally, Durkheim insists that social constraint is not the same as physical constraint, because it is not inherent but imposed from the outside.[5] Durkheim further takes note that, for a social fact to exist, there must be individual interactions which result in "beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity; sociology can then be defined as the science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning" (Durkheim, 1982, 45). Thus we are clearly talking of a social reality that is socially constructed, and it is this socially-constructed reality that sociologists are to study - the science of institutions. Durkheim even anticipates our current concern with agency, because it is just at this point that he adds a footnote, arguing the limits of "permitted variation."[6]
These three declarations taken together constitute the argument for Durkheim's "basic principle, that of the objective reality of social facts. It is...upon this principle that in the end everything rests, and everything comes back to it" (Durkheim, 1982, 45). I do not propose here to discuss my own views on these formulations of Durkheim. I do wish to suggest that his effort to carve out a domain for sociology, the domain of what he calls "social facts," a domain that is distinctive from the domains both of biology and of psychology, is indeed a basic premise of the culture of sociology. If you then say to me that there are persons among us who call themselves social psychologists, or symbolic interactionists, or methodological individualists, or phenomenologists, or indeed post-modernists, I say to you that these persons have nonetheless decided to pursue their scholarly endeavors under the label of sociology, and not of psychology, or biology, or philosophy. There must have been some intellectual reason for this. I suggest it is their tacit acceptance of the Durkheimian principle of the reality of social facts, however much they would like to operationalize this principle in ways quite different from those which Durkheim proposed.
In the Preface to the first edition, Durkheim discusses how he wishes to be labeled. The correct way, he says, is to not to call him either a "materialist" or an "idealist" but a "rationalist" (Durkheim, 1982, 32-33). While that term in turn has been the subject of many centuries of philosophical debate and discord, it is certainly a label that almost all sociologists from Durkheim's time to at least 1970 would have embraced.[7] I would like therefore to restate Durkheim's argument as Axiom No. 1 of the culture of sociology: There exist social groups which have explicable, rational structures. Formulated in this simple way, I believe that there have been few sociologists who did not presume its validity.
The problem with what I am calling Axiom No. 1 is not the existence of these groups, but their lack of internal unity. This is where Marx comes in. He seeks to answer the question, how is it that social groups which are supposedly a unity (the meaning after all of "group") in fact have internal struggles? We all know his answer. It is the sentence that opens the first section of the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Marx & Engels, 1948, 9).[8] Of course, Marx was not so naive as to assume that the overt rhetoric of conflict, the explanations of the reasons for the conflict, were necessarily to be taken at face value or were in any sense correct, correct that is from the point of view of the analyst.[9] The rest of Marx's oeuvre is constituted by the elaboration of the historiography of the class struggle, the analysis of the mechanisms of functioning of the capitalist system, and the political conclusions one should draw from this framework of analysis. All this together constitutes Marxism, properly speaking, which is of course a doctrine and an analytic viewpoint that has been subject to great controversy within and outside the sociological community.
I do not propose to discuss either the merits of Marxism or the arguments of its opponents. I merely want to ask why it was that Parsons's attempt to exclude Marx from the picture failed so miserably, despite the Cold War, and despite indeed the political preferences of the majority of the world's sociologists. It seems to me that Marx was discussing something so obviously central to social life that it simply could not be ignored, namely, social conflict.
Marx had a particular explanation of social conflict to be sure, one which centered about the fact that people had different relations to the means of production, some owning them and others not, some controlling their use and others not. It has been very fashionable for some time to argue that Marx was wrong about this, that the class struggle is not the only, or even the primary, source of social conflict. There have been various substitutes offered: status-groups, political affinity groups, gender, race. The list goes on. Once again, I shall not immediately discuss the validity of these alternatives to class, but confine myself to the observation that every substitute for "class" presumes the centrality of struggle, and merely juggles the list of combatants. Is there anyone who has refuted Marx by saying, this is all nonsense, since there are no social conflicts?
Take so central an activity to the practice of sociologists as the opinion survey. What is it we do? We usually constitute what is called a representative sample, and we pose to this sample a series of questions about something. Normally, we presume that we will get a range of answers to these questions, although we may not have a clear idea in advance of what the range will turn out to be. If we thought everyone would answer the questions identically, there would be little point in doing the survey. When we get the answers to these questions, what is we do next? We correlate the answers with a set of basic variables, such as socio-economic status, occupation, sex, age, education, etc. Why do we do this? It is because we assume that often, even usually, each variable contains a continuum of persons along a certain dimension, and that the wage workers and the businessmen, men and women, the young and the old, etc. will tend to give different answers to the questions. If we didn't presume social variation (and most frequently the emphasis has in fact been on variation in socioeconomic status), we wouldn't be engaged in this enterprise. The step from variation to conflict is not a long one, and generally speaking those people who try to deny that variation leads to conflict are suspected of seeking to disregard an obvious reality for purely ideological reasons.
So there we are. We are all Marxists, in the diluted form of what I shall term Axiom No. 2 of the culture of sociology: All social groups contain subgroups that are ranked in a hierarchy, and are in conflict with each other. Is this a dilution of Marxism? Of course it is, indeed a serious dilution. Is this however a premise of most sociologists? Of course it is as well.
Can we stop here? No, we can't. Having decided that social groups are real and that we can explain their mode of operation (Axiom No. 1), and having decided that they harbor within them repeated conflicts (Axiom No. 2), we face an obvious question: Why do not all societies simply blow up, or split apart, or destroy themselves in some other way? It seems clear that, although such explosions do indeed happen from time to time, they do not seem to happen most of the time. There does seem to be a semblance of "order" in social life, despite Axiom No. 2. Here is where Weber comes in. For Weber has an explanation for the existence of order despite conflict.
We regularly identify Weber as the anti-Marx, one insisting on cultural as opposed to economic explanations, insisting on bureaucratization rather than accumulation as the central driving force of the modern world. But the key concept of Weber that serves to limit the impact of Marx, or at least to modify it seriously, is legitimacy. What does Weber say about legitimacy? Weber is concerned with the basis of authority. Why, he asks, do subjects obey those who give commands? There are various obvious reasons, such as custom and material calculation of advantage. But Weber says they are not enough to explain the commonness of obedience. He adds a third, crucial factor, the "belief in legitimacy" (Weber, 1968, 213).[10] At this point, Weber delineates his three pure types of authority or legitimate domination: legitimacy based on rational grounds, legitimacy based on traditional grounds, and legitimacy based on charismatic grounds. But since, for Weber, traditional authority is the structure of the past and not of modernity, and since charisma, however important a role it plays in historical reality and in Weberian analysis, is essentially a transitional phenomenon, always being eventually "routinized," we are left with "rational-legal authority" as the "specifically modern type of administration" (Weber, 1968, 217).
The picture Weber offers us is that authority is administered by a staff, a bureaucracy, that is "disinterested," in the sense that it has no parti pris either vis-a-vis the subjects or vis-a-vis the state. The bureaucracy is said to be "impartial," that is, making its decisions according to the law, which is why this kind of authority is called rational-legal by Weber. To be sure, Weber admits that, in practice, the situation is a bit more complicated.[11] Nonetheless, if we now simplify Weber, we have a reasonable explanation for the fact that states are usually orderly, that is, that the authorities are usually accepted and obeyed, more or less, or to a certain extent. We shall call this Axiom No. 3, which can be stated as follows: To the extent that groups/states contain their conflicts, it is in large part because lower-ranked subgroups accord legitimacy to the authority structure of the group on the grounds that this permits the group to survive, and the subgroups see long-term advantage in the group's survival.
What I have been trying to argue is that the culture of sociology, which we all share, but which was strongest in the period of 1945-1970, contains three simple propositions - the reality of social facts, the perennity of social conflict, the existence of mechanisms of legitimation to contain the conflict - which add up to a coherent minimal baseline for the study of social reality. I have tried to indicate the way in which each of the three propositions was derived from one of the three formative thinkers: Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and I claim that is why we repeat the mantra that this trio represents "classical sociology." Once again, I repeat, this set of axioms is not a sophisticated and certainly not an adequate way of perceiving social reality. It is a starting-point, one that most of us have internalized and one that operates largely at the level of unquestioned premises that may be assumed rather than debated. This is what I am calling "the culture of sociology." This is, in my view, our essential heritage. But again I repeat, it is a heritage of a construct that is recent, and if vigorous also fragile.
1. If one looks at one of the very last articles that Weber wrote, "Politics as a Vocation," delivered as a speech in 1918, Weber specifically identifies himself in the second sentence as a "political economist." Further on in the text, however, he refers to work that "sociologists must necessarily undertake." In this latter sentence, one is not sure to what degree he is referring to himself (Weber, 1946, 129, 134).
2. One recent example is by a Canadian sociologist, Ken Morrison: Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought (London: Sage, 1995). Its blurb reads: "Every undergraduate course focuses on Marx, Durkheim and Weber as the base of the classical tradition in sociological theory."
3. On the relative decline of Durkheim, and especially of the Année Sociologique, see Clark (1968, 89-91).
4. To the view that society is based on a substratum of individual consciousnesses, Durkheim responds:
"Yet what is so readily deemed unacceptable for social facts is freely admitted for other domains of nature. Whenever
elements of any kind combine, by virtue of this combination they give rise to new phenomena. One is therefore forced to
conceive of these phenomena as residing, not in the elements, but in the entity formed by the union of these elements....
Let us apply this principle to sociology. If, as is granted to us, this synthesis sui generis, which constitutes every society,
gives rise to new phenomena, different from those which occur in consciousnesses in isolation, one is forced to admit that
these specific facts reside in the society itself that produces them and not in its parts - namely its members" (1982, 38-40).
5. "What is exclusively peculiar to social constraint is that it stems not from the unyieldingness of certain patterns of molecules, but from the prestige with which certain representations are endowed. It is true that habits, whether unique to individuals or hereditary, in certain respects possess this same property. They dominate us and impose beliefs and practices upon us. But they dominate us from within, for they are wholly within each one of us. By contrast, social beliefs and practices act upon us from the outside; thus the ascendancy exerted by the former as compared with the latter is basically very different" (Durkheim, 1982, 44).
6. "Despite the fact that beliefs and social practices permeate us in this way from the outside, it does not follow that we receive them passively and without causing them to undergo modification. In thinking about collective institutions, in assimilating ourselves to them, we individualise them, we more or less impart to them our own personal stamp. Thus in thinking about the world of the senses each one of us colours it in his own way, and different people adapt themselves differently to an identical physical environment. This is why each one of us creates to a certain extent his own morality, his own religion, his own techniques. Every type of social conformity carries with it a whole gamut of individual variations. It is nonetheless true that the sphere of permitted variations is limited. It is non-existent or very small as regards religious and moral phenomena, where deviations may easily become crimes. It is more extensive for all matters relating to economic life. But sooner or later, even in this last case, one encounters a limit that must not be overstepped" (Durkheim, 1982, 47, fn. 6).
7. In his recent discussion of rational choice theory, William J. Goode notes: "Ordinarily, sociologists begin with behavior whose aims and goals seem to be clear enough, and we try to find out which variables explain most of the variance. However, if those variables fail to predict adequately, if for example people choose consistently to act in ways that lower the likelihood that they will achieve what they claim is their material, moral, or esthetic goal, we do not suppose that these people are irrational. Instead, we look at them more closely to locate the 'underlying rationality' of what they are really seeking" (Goode, 1997, 29).
8. In the 1888 Preface added by Engels, he restates the "fundamental proposition which forms [the] nucleus [of the Manifesto]....That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles form a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class - the proletariat - cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class - the bourgeoisie - without at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions, and class struggles" (Marx & Engels, 1948, 6).
9. In discussing what happened in France in the period 1848-1851, Marx says: "And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organizations and their real interests, their conceptions of themselves from their reality (Marx 1963 [1852], 47).
10. "[Custom and material advantage] do not form a sufficiently reliable basis for a given domination. In addition there is normally a further element, the belief in legitimacy. Experience shows that in no instance does domination voluntarily limit itself to material or affectual or ideal motives as a basis for its continuance. In addition every such system attempts to cultivate the belief in its legitimacy. But according to the kind of legitimacy which is claimed, the type of obedience, the kind of administrative staff developed to guarantee it, and the mode of exercising authority, will all differ fundamentally" (Weber, 1968, 213).
11. "In general, it should be kept clearly in mind that the basis of every authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige. The composition of this belief is seldom altogether simple. In the case of 'legal authority,' it is never purely legal. The belief in legality comes to be established and habitual, and this means that it is partly traditional. Violation of the tradition may be fatal to it. Furthermore, it has a charismatic element, at least in the negative sense that persistent and striking lack of success may be sufficient to ruin any government, to undermine its prestige, and to prepare the way for charismatic revolution" (Weber, 1968, 263).
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