Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology

228 Pages·1992·34.487 MB·English

by  Randall Collins

Randall
Collins
An
Introduction
to Non-Obvious
Sociology
Second Edition

z
SOCIOLOGICAL INSIGHT

SOCIOLOGICAL
INSIGHT
SECOND EDITION
An Introduction to
Non-Obvious Sociology
RANDALL COLLINS
University of California, Riverside
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1992
OxfordUniversityPress
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Copyright 1982, 1992 by Oxford UniversityPress, Inc.
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LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Collins,Randall, 1941-
Sociologicalinsight : anintroductiontonon-obvioussociology/
RandallCollins.—2nded.
p. cm. Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN0-19-507442-4
1. Sociology—Methodology.
2. Sociology—Terminology.
3. Reasoning (Psychology)
4. Religionandsociology. I. Title.
HM51.C594 1992 301'.01-dc20
91-28850
9876
PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica
PREFACE
The aim of any discipline ought to be two things: to be clear
and to be nonobvious.
Real knowledge ought to be communicable. It should be
possible to say it so that it can be understood. And there should
be something to say, something that makes a difference once
you know it, something you didn't already know before.
Sociologyhas a bad reputation on both counts. It is infamous
for abstract jargon. Sociological prose at its worst is considered
virtually impenetrable. And once readers finally do penetrate
the abstractions and the technicalities, all too often they find
there was little being said. Sociologists seem to be saying what
everyone already knows, documenting the obvious facts of our
world, putting new names on the familiar. No wonder, it has
been claimed, sociologists must hide behind a special language
of their own making: if they said what they had to say in plain
English, there would be nothing to it at all.
There is some truth to the allegations. Sociology has been
needlessly obtuse at times, and a good deal of it has tended to
be rather empty. The field keeps branching into new forms of
technical jargon, ranging from the philosophical to the mathe-
matical. Yet people, including some sociologists themselves,
keep wondering if anything is being said.
Nevertheless, I think sociology has taken a bad rap. It may
PREFACE
vi
be to a considerable extent its own fault. The smokescreen of
concepts and definitions, the philosophical debates and the
hyperextended methodologies, have covered up one important
fact: there is a real core in sociology that has made some fairly
significant discoveries. Sociology does know some important
principles of how the world operates. These are not just matters
of conceptualization and definition. They tell us why things
happen in certain ways rather than in others, and they go be-
neath the surface of ordinary belief. The principles had to be
discovered by professional scholars, including some of the major
thinkers of the past; they are by no means obvious.
Since they are not obvious, there is no reason to dress them
up in abstractions and technicalities. They are just as impressive
stated in clear and simple language as they would be cloaked in
an esoteric jargon. It is the test of real knowledge that it can be
translated so that anyintelligent person can see what it is about.
The core of this book is in the first two chapters. We begin
with a central problem that distinguishes sociological analysis
from most other, and more obvious, approaches to the world.
This is the problem of the limits of rationality. It leads to a far
from obvious conclusion: that the human power of reasoning is
based on nonrational foundations, and that human society is
held together not by rational agreements but by deeper emo-
tional processes that produce social bonds of trust among par-
ticular kinds of people. Society is made up of groups. These
groups are often in conflict with each other; but each group can
operate only to the extent that each group is held together. That
requires some nonrational mechanism producing common emo-
tions and ideals.
What is this mechanism that generates social solidarity? The
second chapter searches out the answer by examining another
of sociology's unexpected findings, in this case concerning the
nature of religion. Religion is a prime example of how certain
We
forms of social interaction produce feelings of group ties.
find out something here about what religion actually means in
people's lives, but we also discover something of wider signifi-
PREFACE
vii
cance. The theory of religion presented here is most important
because it opens up a general theory of social rituals. These are
key building-blocks for much of the rest of sociology; for rituals
are little social machines that create groups and attach them to
emotionally significant social symbols.
With these tools in hand, the following four chapters apply
sociological analysis to a scattering of topics. Power and crime
are areas where nonrational processes put a rather sharp limit
on what people can understand and control by following ordi-
nary rational calculations. Nevertheless, both power and crime
have their paradoxical patterns, which we can understand from
the point of view of a nonobvious sociology. The fifth chapter
takes up the interrelated topics of sex, love, and the position of
women in society. Here too we find social symbols on the sur-
face, paradoxical structures in the depths. Here again the in-
sights of a nonobvious sociology help us to see the direction in
which patterns are changing in our own times.
Thefinal chapterbrings sociologyinto the space age. Itshows
that if we are ever going to build a computer with the intelli-
gence of a human being, it will have to be programmed by
sociologists. A real Artificial Intelligence capable of human cre-
ativity will need to have human emotions. The chapter brings
us back full circle to the theories of rationality and rituals with
which we began. If human rationality rests on a nonrational
foundation of social rituals, then a computer can handle sym-
bolism the way humans do only if it too can take part in ritual
interactions.
What follows, then, is an introduction to sociology as a dis-
ciphne that really does have something to say. In it I have
sketched some of the most important arguments of Emile Durk-
heim and Erving Goffman, of Harold Garfinkel and Mancur
Olsen, of Karl Marx and Max Weber, as well as the contempo-
rary sociology of conversation and emotion.
Sociology has been pursuing an intellectual adventure that
has taken us a long way beyond what is revealed by common
sense. It should prove to be an entertaining expansion of our
PREFACE
viii
knowledge of the world. I have suggested a bit of the practical
consequences of sociology as well. These include some of the
more sophisticated ways that sociology points to in dealing with
the issues of organizational power, crime, and sexual discrimi-
nation.
Sociology, of course, is by no means complete. Its theories
are not all worked out; and there are considerable areas of gen-
uine disagreement and much research yet to be done. I have
not tried to cover all the topics and approaches in the field, al-
though the reader will find mention of divergent theories at
various points. Nor have I confined this book to expounding any
one position. What it offers is a brief introduction to some of
sociology's most interesting and elegant ideas. I hope it will
whet the appetite for more.
Riverside, California R.C.
August 1991