Whatever Happened to Sociology?

by Peter L. Berger
Copyright (c) 2002 First Things (October 2002).
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.

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 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 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.