The Crisis in Sociology: Problems of Sociological Epistemology

288 Pages·1980·28.158 MB·English

by  Raymond Boudon (auth.)

THE CRISIS IN SOCIOLOGY
Also by Raymond Boudon
THE PERVERSE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL ACTION
THE CRISIS IN
SOCIOLOGY
Problems of Sociological Epistemology
Raymond Boudon
Translated by
Howard H. Davis
La Crise de Ia Sociologie
first published by Librairie Droz S.A. in Switzerland
Copyright 1971 Librairie Droz
English translation © The Macmillan Press Ltd 1980
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1980 978-0-333-23528-7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1980 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Boudon, Raymond
The crisis in sociology
1. Sociology
I. Title
301 HM51
ISBN 978-1-349-03688-2 ISBN 978-1-349-03686-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03686-8
Contents
Foreword vii
1. Introduction: The Crisis in Sociology
PART ONE. THE SOCIOLOGY OF SOCIOLOGY 31
2. Sociology in the Year 2000 33
3. The Three Basic Paradigms of Macrosociology:
Functionalism, Neo-Marxism and Interaction Analysis 39
4. Tarde's 'Psychological Statistics' 62
5. Lazarsfeld's Metasociology 78
PART TWO. SOCIOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY 133
6. Towards a Positive Epistemology 135
7. Theories, theory and Theory 149
8. The Notion of Function 195
PART THREE. QUESTIONS OF METHOD 203
9. The Functions of Formalisation in Sociology 205
10. The French University Crisis: An Essay in
Sociological Diagnosis 227
!Votes 258
Index 277
v
Foreword
With the exception of the first, the articles that follow have appeared
previously in a variety ofj ournals. We would probably not have decided
to publish them in their present form without the friendly encourage
ment of Giovanni Busino, Professor at the University of Lausanne.
Although they provide no more than an outline sketch of a solution,
they do raise a number of general problems which in our view are
important for the future of sociology. Perhaps a catalogue of these
problems will prove useful.
The introductory chapter ('The Crisis in Sociology') seeks to show
the implicit problematic upon which the following articles depend. The
remainder of the book is divided into three sections: the sociology of
sociology, epistemology and methodology. It goes without saying that
the articles assembled under these headings do not pretend to exhaust
the content of these disciplines. In most cases they have no aim other
than to supply examples and simply specify research. One can see,
however, that by their very orientation they suggest a definition of these
disciplines, a definition which may be debatable but one which we
believe also merits discussion.
Most of the articles brought together here were written with journals
or scientific publications in mind. But we have also reproduced an article
('Sociology in the Year 2000' - chapter 2) originally written for a mass
circulation monthly news magazine in a deliberately simplified and
provocative style. Another ('Towards a positive epistemology'- chap
ter 6) was written for a journal on philosophy. Most of the chapters are
reproduced in their original form, so that the reader will have no
difficulty in identifying changes, repetitions and even contradictions
between one article and the next. Only the titles have been altered, so as
to underline the connection between each article and the implicit guiding
problematic: namely, that the primary condition of sociology's progress
and its very existence depend on the sociologist's critical attitude
towards his own language. This is the attitude we have tried to illustrate
here.
Finally, thanks are due to those editors who have kindly authorised
the reproduction of the articles which follow.
VII
1. Introduction: The Crisis
in Sociology
The crisis in the universities and in society at large which has been
affecting the countries of western Europe and North America for a
number of years has been accompanied by a general questioning of
sociology. Many sociologists have spoken and still speak publicly and
privately of the 'crisis in sociology' and rightly so in our opinion.
However, it should be noted that this has little to do with the great
crisis or social change which so affected sociology that it is impossible to
write the history of the discipline without referring to the history of the
societies in which it developed. Rather, as Georges Gurvitch has written
"Sociology is a science which makes sudden jumps or at least fluctuates
with every social crisis of any size."1 Sociology, in other words, is more
or less permanently characterised by a state of latent crisis.
One can look at this situation from two opposing 'ideal' points of
view. The first admits that sociology's dependence on society, being
constitutional, must be inescapable and therefore that it entails an
irreducible epistemological specificity. In contrast, the second maintains
that sociology's state of social dependency and latent crisis follows from
the epistemological peculiarities and weaknesses which characterise it
hie et nunc. In this case its susceptibility to external forces would not be
constitutional but derivative, and therefore provisional. It follows from
this second point of view, which we basically share, that one of the
essential tasks facing contemporary sociology is what can be called an
epistemological self-criticism. Of course, such a self-criticism will be
without interest unless it can supply proof of its scientific effectiveness.
Almost beyond question these two ideal types we have just described
occur in a more or less pure form in the sociological community. The
notion of "critical sociology", which was first developed by the
Frankfurt School and which has now become widespread in its various
guises, is undeniably representative of the first. Here the cognitive values
which govern the very idea of scientific research are actually sub
ordinated to ethical values which condemn as positivist the attempt to
2 The Crisis in Sociology
gain objective knowledge of social phenomena. 2
The second attitude is evidenced indirectly by the proliferation of
epistemological and methodological writing in sociology in recent years.
It must be said that this proliferation is associated with a trend towards
autonomy and institutionalisation which sets sociology clearly apart
from the other social sciences: methodology and epistemology not only
form integral and distinct parts of the university curriculum: they also
provide the subject matter of a growing number of specialised
periodicals. 3
We do not intend to make a sharp distinction between these two
attitudes. For the moment we will simply remind the reader of a
commonplace, something which demographers and economists as well
as sociologists treat as a social fact: No one would deny that population
phenomena, like phenomena which are relevant to the production and
distribution of goods, are vitally important for society: are not
overpopulation and the scarcity of resources among the most dramatic
problems faced by the so-called "developing" countries?
But in spite of this, no one as far as we know proposes to replace the
well-established tradition of economic or demographic research with a
"critical" economics or demography. No one expects these disciplines to
provide immediate solutions to the difficult problems with which they
are concerned. There are other reasons for being convinced that the
knowledge they provide is useful, if not indispensable. Certainly no one
imagines they should limit themselves to an oppositional role.
Our hypothesis, therefore is that conceptions such as "critical
sociology", far from revealing the essence of sociology or the supposed
uniqueness of its object, reflect instead the epistemological uncertainties
of the discipline. In the present state of sociology, these ideas represent
the symptom rather than the cure. Otherwise, how would it be possible
to explain the fact that some social phenomena, like those relating to
population, language or the production and distribution of goods, have
engendered stable research traditions which conform to the general
norms of scientific induction, while others (those with which sociology
deals) remain the objects of a different "genre" of knowledge, to use the
language of Spinoza?
THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL UNCERTAINTIES OF SOCIOLOGY
Let us map out, in a schematic fashion, the epistemological features that
are peculiar to current sociology.
Introduction: The Crisis in Sociology 3
The first of these special features has to do with the very object of
sociology. The contrast with the majority of the other "social sciences"
has been emphasised so often that it hardly needs to be repeated.
The object of economic science can be described without too much
difficulty in terms of a small number of variables which have remained
virtually unaltered since the work of the founding fathers, whether
Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, W alras or Marx himself, until the present
day. The same applies to demography, whose object can be summarised
as the explanation of a small number of circumscribed phenomena:
mortality, marriage rates, etc. The boundaries of a discipline such as
psychology are rather more difficult to define and they are probably
more flexible. But each of its branches, whether pathological psy
chology, the study of learning, or the psychology of child development,
corresponds with an easily recognisable class of phenomena.
Sociology is quite a different case. In one way or another, all
sociologists have tried to define the object of their study: which is
another way of saying that no one has been successful yet. Raymond
Aron writes "Sociology appears to be characterised by a constant search
for itself. On one point and perhaps on only one, all sociologists are
agreed: the difficulty of defining sociology." In fact, not a single
definition proposed by any sociologist has won universal acceptance.
Nobody at present would maintain, as Pareto once did, that sociology is
the study of "non-logical action". As is well known, the Durkheimian
notion of a class of supra-individual phenomena has led similarly to the
almost unanimous rejection of the concept "conscience collective".
These two examples, which are both specific and yet representative,
help to show incidentally that as often as not these attempts to define
sociology are negative. For Pareto, "logical action" or, as we would say
today, "rational behaviour" describes the economic sphere. It follows
that if sociology is defined as the study of non-logical action, it must
occupy the space left over by the economist. Similarly, with Durkheim,
sociology is defined by what is left over from psychology.
In what follows we will try to show that the first of these difficulties is
probably more apparent than real. In the light of these examples and
others we shall give, we believe that it should be understood as the
symptom of a temporary condition and not as an integral feature.
The second peculiarity of sociology is the way in which it wavers
between description and explanation. Of course, the pioneers of
sociology were keen to describe it as a nomothetic science. Unlike the
essentially descriptive sciences of geography or history, its aim was, like
psychology or linguistics, to discover laws. These are black and white