© Immanuel Wallerstein 1998. (Iwaller@binghamton.edu)
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III. The Perspectives
I should like to deal with the promise of social science in terms of three prospects which seem to me both possible and desirable for the twenty-first century: the epistemological reunification of the so-called two cultures, that of science and the humanities; the organizational reunification and redivision of the social sciences; and the assumption by social science of centrality in the world of knowledge.
What conclusions can we draw from my analysis of the culture of sociology and the challenges it has been facing? First of all, quite simply, the ultra-specialization that sociology, and indeed all the other social sciences, have been suffering has been both inevitable and self-destructive.[41] We must nonetheless continue to struggle against it, in the hope of creating some reasonable balance between depth and breadth of knowledge, between the microscopic and the synthetic vision. Secondly, as Smelser has put it so well recently, there are no "sociologically naive actors."[42] But do we have sociologically well-informed actors? That is, are our actors rational? And what world do our actors know?
It seems to me that the social facts with which we deal are social in two senses: they are shared perceptions of reality, shared more or less by some medium-large group but with different shadings for every individual viewer. And they are socially constructed perceptions. But let us be clear. It is not the analyst whose social construction of the world is of interest. It is that of the collectivity of actors who have created social reality by their cumulated actions. The world is as it is because of all that has preceded this moment. What the analyst is trying to discern is how the collectivity has constructed the world, using of course his own socially-constructed vision.
The arrow of time is thus ineluctable, but also unpredictable, since there are always bifurcations before us, the outcome of which is inherently indeterminate. Furthermore, although there is but one arrow of time, there are multiple times. We cannot afford to neglect either the structural longue durée or the cyclical rhythms of the historical system we are analyzing. Time is far more than chronometry and chronology. Time is also duration, cycles, and disjunction.
A real world does exist, indubitably. If it doesn't exist, we don't exist, and that is absurd. If we don't believe this, we should not be in the business of studying the social world. Solipsists cannot talk even to themselves, since we are all changing at each instant, and therefore, if one adopts the standpoint of a solipsist, our own views of yesterday are as irrelevant to our created visions of today as are the views of others. Solipsism is the greatest of all forms of hubris, greater even than objectivism. It is the belief that our ratiocinations create what we perceive and that we thereby perceive what exists, that which we have created.
But, on the other hand, it is also true that we can only know the world through our vision of it, a collective social vision no doubt, but a human vision nonetheless. This is obviously as true of our vision of the physical world as it is of our vision of the social world. In that sense, we all depend on the glasses with which we engage in this perception, the organizing myths (yes, the grand narratives) that McNeill (1986) calls "mythistory," without which we are helpless to say anything. It follows from these constraints that there are no concepts that are not plural; that all universals are partial; and that there exists a plurality of universals. And it also follows that all verbs that we use must be written in the past tense. The present is over before we can pronounce it, and all statements need to be located in their historical context. The nomothetic temptation is every bit as dangerous as the idiographic temptation, and constitutes a pitfall into which the culture of sociology has more frequently led too many of us.
Yes, we are at the end of certainties. But what does this mean in practice? In the history of thought, we have been constantly offered certainty. The theologians offered us certainties as seen by prophets, priests, and canonized texts. The philosophers offered us certainties as rationally deduced or induced or intuited by them. And the modern scientists offered us certainties as verified empirically by them using criteria they invented. All of them have claimed that their truths were validated visibly in the real world, but that these visible proofs were merely the outward and limited expression of deeper, more hidden truths for whose secrets and discovery they were the indicated intermediaries.
Each set of certainties has prevailed for some times in some places, but none of them everywhere or eternally. Enter the skeptics and nihilists who pointed to this wide array of contradictory truths and derived from the doubts this sowed the proposition that no claimed truth is more valid than any other. But if the universe is in fact intrinsically uncertain, it does not follow that the theological, the philosophical, and the scientific enterprises have no merit, and it surely does not follow that any of them represents merely a gigantic deception. What does follow is that we would be wise to formulate our quests in the light of permanent uncertainty, and look upon this uncertainty not as unfortunate and temporary blindness nor as an insurmountable obstacle to knowledge but rather as an incredible opportunity to imagine, to create, to search.[43] Pluralism becomes at this point not an indulgence of the weak and ignorant but a cornucopia of possibilities for a better universe.[44]
Just this year, a group composed largely of physical scientists published a book they entitled a dictionary of ignorance, arguing that science plays a bigger role in creating zones of ignorance than in creating zones of knowledge. I cite the blurb they placed on the rear of the book:
In the process of science enlarging our field of knowledge, we become aware, paradoxically, that our ignorance grows as well. Each new problem we resolve tends to cause the appearance of new enigmas, such that the processes of research and discoveries renew themselves constantly. The frontiers of knowledge seem to widen ceaselessly, giving birth to previously unsuspected questions. But these new problems are salutary. Creating new challenges to science, they oblige it to advance in a perpetual movement without which, perhaps, its light would be quickly extinguished (Cazenave, 1998).
One of the problems about the creation of new ignorances is that there is no plausible reason to presume that they can be best treated only in or by the narrow domain within which these ignorances were uncovered. The physicist may expose new ignorances which require for their resolution concerns previously designated as biological or philosophical. And this is, as we know, certainly true of the new ignorances sociologists uncover. The protection of one's turf in the face of new ignorances is the worst of scholarly sins, and the greatest possible deterrence to clarity.
It is this issue of turf that underlies the organizational problems of the social sciences. The institutionalization of the nominal divisions of the social sciences is extremely strong today, despite all the genuflection before the rosy glow of "interdisciplinarity." Indeed, I would argue that interdisciplinarity is itself a lure, representing the greatest support possible to the current list of disciplines, by implying that each has some special knowledge which it might be useful to combine with some other special knowledges in order to solve some practical problem.
The fact is that the three great cleavages of nineteenth-century social science: past/present, civilized/others, and state/market/civil society are all three totally indefensible as intellectual markers today. There are no sensible statements one can make in the so-called fields of sociology, economics, or political science that are not historical, and there are no sensible historical analyses one can undertake that do not make use of the so-called generalizations that are in use in the other social sciences. Why then continue to pretend that we are engaged in different tasks?
As for civilized/other, the civilized are not civilized and the other are not other. There are of course specificities but they are legion, and the racist simplifications of the modern world are not only noxious but intellectually disabling. We must learn how to deal with the universal and the particular as a symbiotic pair that will never go away, and which must inform all of our analyses.
And finally the distinction of state/market/civil society is quite simply an implausible one, as any real actor in the real world knows. The market is constructed and constrained by the state and the civil society. The state is a reflection of both the market and the civil society. And the civil society is defined by the state and the market. One cannot separate these three modes of expression of actors' interests, preferences, identities, and wills into closeted arenas about which different groups of people will make scientific statements, ceteris paribus.
I continue, however, to share the Durkheimian premise that psychology and social science are two separate enterprises, and that psychology is closer to, perhaps an intrinsic part, of biology. I note that most psychologists, from the behaviorists to the Freudians, seem to share this view. The group most resistant to this separation is in fact to be found within sociology.
If then none of our existing modes of dividing the social sciences today into separate organizations of knowledge make sense, what shall we do? Those who have studied what is called the sociology of organizations have shown us time and again how resistant organizations are to imposed change, how fiercely and cleverly their leaders act to defend interests that they will not avow but seem very real to those in power. It is difficult to force the pace of transformation. It is perhaps Quixotic even to try. On the other hand, there are processes internal to each of our organizations that are destroying the boundaries without the intrusion of any deliberate reform process. Individual scholars are seeking peers with which to create the small groups and networks they find necessary to do their work. And increasingly such networks are paying no attention whatsoever to disciplinary labels.
Furthermore, as specialization proliferates, those who hold the budgetary purse-strings are growing increasingly restive about the seeming irrationality of the overlaps, especially given the worldwide pressures to reduce rather than increase expenditures on higher education. It is the accountants who may force our pace, and quite possibly in ways that are not intellectually optimal. Thus, it seems to me, it is urgent that the scholars engage in organizational exploration, allowing for wide experimentation and being quite tolerant of each other's efforts, in order to see what kinds of organizational realignments might work best. Perhaps micro-macro should be institutionalized as a mode of organizing groups of scholars. I am not sure. Up to a point, it is in use in the natural sciences already, and in practice (if not in theory), social scientists are using it too. Or perhaps we should be dividing ourselves according to the temporalities of change with which we are dealing - short-term, middle-term, long-term. On none of these dividing lines do I have a fixed view at this point. I feel we should try them out.
What I am very clear about is that we must open ourselves up collectively, and recognize our blinkers. We must read far more widely than we now do, and we must strongly encourage our students to do so. We should recruit our graduate students far more widely than we do, and we must let them play a major role in determining where we can help them grow. And it is crucial for us to learn languages. A scholar who cannot read 3-5 major scholarly languages is severely handicapped. English is surely crucial but English alone means that one has access to at most 50% of what is written, and as the decades go by, the percentage will diminish since the areas of greatest growth in the production of scholars will be increasingly non-English in their written production. Increased reading knowledge of languages goes hand in hand with increased internationalization of our corps of scholars, even if they are not identical. I do not know what kind of restructuring will take place, but I am skeptical that there will ever be a 100th Anniversary of any of the existing international social science associations, at least under the same name.
I have saved for the last what I think is the most fascinating perspective of all, and perhaps the most important. Ever since the so-called divorce between philosophy and science consummated in the late eighteenth century, the social sciences have been the poor relation - neither fish nor fowl, and scorned by both sides in this war of the "two cultures." And the social scientists have internalized this image, feeling they had no fate other than to align themselves either with the scientists or with the humanists. Today the situation has radically changed. In the physical sciences, there is a strong and growing knowledge movement, complexity studies, that talks of the arrow of time, of uncertainties, and believes that human social systems are the most complex of all systems. And in the humanities, there is a strong and growing knowledge movement, cultural studies, that believes that there are no essential esthetic canons, and that cultural products are rooted in their social origins, their social receptions, and their social distortions.
It seems to me clear that complexity studies and cultural studies have moved the natural sciences and the humanities respectively onto the terrain of social science. What had been a centrifugal field of forces in the world of knowledge has become a centripetal one, and social science is now central to knowledge. We are in the process of trying to overcome the "two cultures," of trying to reunite into a single domain the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful. This is cause for rejoicing, but it will be a very difficult row to hoe.
Knowledge, in the face of uncertainties, involves choices - choices by all matter, and of course choices by social actors, among them the scholars. And choices involve decisions about what is substantively rational. We can no longer even pretend that scholars can be neutral, that is, divested of their social reality. But this in no way means that anything goes. It means that we have to weigh carefully all the factors, in all the domains, to try to arrive at optimal decisions. And that in turn means we have to talk to each other, and to do so as equals. Yes, some of us have more specific knowledge about specific areas of concern than others, but no one, and no group, has all the knowledge necessary to make substantively rational decisions, even in relatively limited domains, without taking into account the knowledge of others outside these domains. Yes, no doubt, I would want the most competent brain surgeon, if I needed brain surgery. But competent brain surgery involves some judgments that are juridical, ethical, philosophical, psychological, and sociological as well. And an institution like a hospital needs to bring these wisdoms into a blended substantively rational view. Furthermore, the views of the patient are not irrelevant. It is the brain surgeon more than anyone else who needs to know this, as does the sociologist, or the poet. Skills do not dissolve into some formless void, but skills are always partial and need to be integrated with other partial skills. In the modern world, we have been doing very little of this. And our education does not prepare us sufficiently for this. Once we realize that functional rationality does not exist, then and only then can we begin to achieve substantive rationality.
This is what I believe Prigogine and Stengers mean when they speak of the "reenchantment of the world" (1984).[45] It is not to deny the very important task of "disenchantment," but to insist that we must put the pieces together again. We dismissed final causes too fast. Aristotle was not that foolish. Yes, we need to look at efficient causes, but we need also to look at final causes. The scientists generalized a tactic useful for disentangling themselves from theological and philosophical control systems into a methodological imperative, and this has been disabling.
Finally, the world of knowledge is an egalitarian world. This has been one of the great contributions of science. Anyone is authorized to challenge the veracity of existing statements of truth, provided that they furnish some empirical evidence for the counter-statement, and offer it to everyone for collective evaluation. But since the scientists refused to be social scientists, they neglected to observe, or even realize, that this virtuous insistence on egalitarianism in science was not possible, was not even credible, in an inegalitarian social world. To be sure, politics arouses fears in scholars, and they seek safely in insulation. Scholars are afraid of the powerful minority, the minority in power. They are afraid of the powerful majority, the majority who might come into power. It will not be easy to create a more egalitarian world. Nonetheless, to achieve the objective that natural science bequeathed the world requires a far more egalitarian social setting that we now have. The struggle for egalitarianism in science and in society are not two separate struggles. They are one and the same, which points once again to the impossibility of separating the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Human arrogance has been humanity's greatest self-imposed limitation. This, it seems to me, is the message of the story of Adam in the Garden of Eden. We were arrogant in claiming to have received and understood the revelation of God, to know the intent of the gods. We were even more arrogant in asserting that we were capable at arriving at eternal truth through the use of human reason, so fallible a tool. And we have been continuously arrogant in seeking to impose on each other, and with such violence and cruelty, our subjective images of the perfect society.
In all these arrogances, we have betrayed first of all ourselves, and closed off our potentials, the possible virtues we might have had, the possible imaginations we might have fostered, the possible cognitions we might have achieved. We live in an uncertain cosmos, whose single greatest merit is the permanence of this uncertainty, because it is this uncertainty that makes possible creativity - cosmic creativity, and with that of course human creativity. We live in an imperfect world, one that will always be imperfect and therefore always harbor injustice. But we are far from helpless before this reality. We can make the world less unjust, we can make it more beautiful, we can increase our cognition of it. We need but to construct it, and in order to construct it we need but to reason with each other and struggle to obtain from each other the special knowledge that each of us has been able to seize. We can labor in the vineyards and bring forth fruit, if only we try.
My close collaborator, Terence Hopkins, wrote me a note in 1980, which I will take as our conclusion: "There's no place left to go but up, and up, and up, which translates into higher and higher and higher intellectual standards. Elegance. Precision. Short compass. Being right. Enduring. That's all."
41. See Deborah Gold (1996, 224): "For the last several decades, sociology has become a discipline of ultra-specialization. Although sociologists may think we are giving our graduate students a broad sociological education, in truth, by example, we encourage students to narrow their areas of expertise. Unfortunately, this parochialism means that many sociologists are unaware of what is current in specializations not their own. If sociology continues this approach, we can hardly expect to inspire a 21st century Talcott Parsons or Robert Merton who could take a broader perspective. Instead, sociologists in the future are likely to configure their areas of expertise even more narrowly." It is worthy of note that this peroration was published in a quite specialized journal, The Gerontologist.
42. "We might even say that the model of sociologically naive actors - as in rational choice and game theoretical models - are misguided for almost all occasions. Our typifications and explanations must involve the continuous interaction of institutionalized expectations, perceptions, interpretations, affects, distortions, and behavior" (Smelser, 1997, 27).
43. "Historian, the one who knows? No, the one who searches" (Febvre, 1950, v).
44. It seems to me that uncertainty is the essential issue Neil Smelser was addressing in his 1997 Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association when he discussed "ambivalence," a term he borrowed from Merton. He discussed it however primarily as a psychological constant in terms of actors' motivations rather than as a structural constant of the physical world. He does however draw a conclusion with which I heartily agree: "We might even suggest that ambivalence forces us to reason even more than preferences do, because conflict may be a stronger motive for thinking than is desire" (1998, 7).
45. "[The concept of the disenchantment of the world] is paradoxically due to the glorification of the earthly world,
henceforth worthy of the kind of intellectual pursuit Aristotle reserved for heaven. Classical science denied becoming,
natural diversity, both considered by Aristotle attributes of the sublunar, inferior world. In this sense, classical science
brought heaven to earth....
The radical change in the outlook of modern science, the transition toward the temporal, the multiple, may be viewed as the
reversal of the movement that brought Aristotle's heaven to earth. Now we are bringing earth to heaven" (Prigogine &
Stengers, 1984, 305-306).
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