Sociology and the Demystification of the Modern World 0710078587

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Sociology and the demystification of the modern world

International Library of Sociology Founded by Karl Mannheim Editor: John Rex, University of Warwick

I

Arbor Scientiae

Arbor Vitae

A catalogue of the books available in the International Library of Sociology and other series of Social Science books published by

Routledge & Kegan Paul will be found at the end of this volume.

Sociology and the demystification of the modern world

John Rex Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick

Routledge & Kegan Paul London and Boston

First published in 1974 by Routledge & Kevan Paul Ltd Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane, London EC4V 5EL and 9 Park Street,

Boston, Mass. 02/08, USA Set in Times Roman, leaded

and Printed in Great .Britain by Unwire Brothers Limited

The Gresham Press 01d Woking, Surrey

©

John Rex 1974

No port of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission frorre the publisher, except for the quotation passages in criticism

of brief

so 7100 7858 7 Library

of Congress Catalog Card No.

73-93637

Dedicated to Saint Augustine and Franz Fanon, both of whom worked in North Africa and faced up in different ways to the fact of living in collapsing empires

Contents

page Preface

Part one

1 2 3 4

Part two

ix

The problem of social knowledge

Sociology, demystification and Com]Tioll sense The givens of sociological analysis Actors' theories and sociologists' constructs Ideal types, structure and quantitative aspects of sociology

3 23 36 52

Basic problems of theory building

5 Social structures, the building blocks of history 6 Some major problems of social structure

69 84

7 Structures, system and conflict

99

Part three First, second and third worlds 8 The Western capitalist complex: corporations

and classes 9

117

The Western capitalist complex: the engineering

of consent 10 The second world: central economic planning and political mobilisation 11 The third world and the institutions of

colonialism

133 147 161 vii

_

CONTENTS

Part four Social structures and moral perspectives

12 The moral disintegration of the enlightened world. 13 The revolution of the third world and the new dark ages 14 Public issues and private troubles 15 The vocation of a sociologist in a collapsing civilisation 16 Some utopian perspectives for a distant future

viii

179

193

208 22 239

Bibliography

254

Index

263

Preface

This book is written out of a deep conviction that sociology is a subject whose insights should be available to the great mass of the people in order that they should be able to use it to liberate themselves from the mystification of social reality which is continuously provided for them by those in our society who exercise power and influence. This is not to say that doing sociology is an entirely simple business. It does involve some very difficult philos ophical questions, particularly in the theory of knowledge. Whatever doubts the philosophers may have had in the past about their capacity to know the physical world, these arc as nothing compared with those which arise in connection with knowledge of the social world. Precisely because of this uncertainty, however, it is possible for ideal ogical

distortions to pass as truth. On the other hand, professional sociologists in the last few years have got so bogged down in having philosophical doubts that they rarely rise to the level on which they can say much that isn't trivial. This book's perspective is based upon a recognition that a great

many sociologists simply take the value assumptions of the powerful .For granted and devote themselves to policy-oriented research. Such policy-oriented research, however, usually involves a manipulative attitude towards people. We, therefore, suggest that it is the positive duty of the sociologist, qua sociologist, not to commit himself to policy-oriented research, at least before he makes a prior analysis

of the actual policies being pursued by the powerful. Still more fundamentally, writing in the second half of the twentieth century, we are able to see how foolhardy and misleading were the assumptions of the Enlightenment about industrial society. Just as it is important for sociologists not to take governments at their word when they say they are pursuing a particular policy, so also it is important that they should dissociate themselves from the

A*

ix

PREFACE

hysterical optimism of the Enlightenment about the new world which came into being in the wake of the political and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Furthermore, there is no reason why sociologists should Siinply declare themselves radical because they have adopted the counterassumptions of revolutionary ideologies. The perspective of this book is that the processes which were set in train by the industrial and political revolutions of the nineteenth century have now got more or less completely out of hand and that there is every prospect of the world heading for a new Dark Age. This may not as yet be obvious for the inhabitants of the ailment countries. lt certainly is for the majority of the peoples of the world who live Continuously on the verge of externally inspired neo-colonial civil wars. Both the advanced industrial countries and the countries of the third world, however, appear to be exhibiting signs of structural strain and these structural strains are translated for individual people into what Mills called 'private troubles'. The whole humane purpose of sociology is to take these 'private troubles' seriously by tracing them to their roots, even if this means being criticised for not dealing with immediate problems of suffering. Naturally, it has not been possible within a short book such as this to deal with all the problems which are indicated in the chapter headings. Indeed, we would not claim to have dealt with any of their in any land of a comprehensive way. What we have done, however, in the tradition of Max Weber, is to give an ideal typical account of the main structural problems of the first, second, and third world which it is hoped above all might serve as an agenda for study, as a seeding bed for programmes of comparative, historical, and sociological research. Since part of the thesis of this book is that the universities of the First world are themselves breaking up as places for serious and detached academic study, it is not surprising that I have to admit

that the normal programme of teaching, seminars, discussion with colleagues, and so on, has not contributed much to the ideas set forth here. To say this is not to show ingratitude to one's colleagues, it is to note a symptom of the social decay which surrounds us. Occasions for serious academic discussion and argument rarely arise

in an atmosphere of negotiation and administration. I have, however, been privileged to work with a group of sociologists at Vlfarwick

with a variety of theoretical insights, taking account of which has helped to give me my own bearings. Another part of the thesis of this book concerns the tensions imposed upon life by the fact of privatisation in the isolated conjugal family. Sociologically speaking, this is a deprivation which we all suFller. For my part, however, it has been possible to write this book X

PREFACE

only because, within the context of my own isolated conj ugal family, I have been able to subject the argument to the scrutiny and criticism of Margaret Rex, who, when it comes to it, seems to me to have an intuitive understanding of the issues which I am discussing which is rare amongst academic sociologists. Through her also I have been able to locate myself socially in a working-class community which, through the courage with which it faces poverty and exploitation, succeeds in preserving some of the most fundamental values of civilisation, despite et general degradations brought about by capitalism, bureaueratisation, and classification. To my father-inlaw and mother-in-law, Frank and Edith Biggs, I, therefore, owe a very special debt. With all the obstacles to communication which do exist, I was

exceptionally fortunate at the time that I wrote this book in manuscript, to find in Olive Heaton a secretary of rare competence who could read my script and guess my meanings with a sensitivity which I found quite overwhelming. Without her, the production of this book might very well have been delayed for a very long time. To this I would add that the book and indeed my academic life itself owe more than I can say to our departmental secretary Lesley Crone.

xi

one

The problem of social knowledge

1 Sociology, demystification and common sense

We are sociologists, most of us, because somehow and somewhere we detect that sociology has a morally significant role to play for our personal selves and the world in which we live. We know this and we keep on doing sociology because we have the sense of encountering a truer vision of reality with the aid of sociological concepts than by any other means, whether extra-scientific means or the means provided by any of the other human studies. Yet the precise way in which sociology has moral significance for us is difficult to define and most of the attempts which are made to describe it are cheapjack ones, symptoms of the pathetic inadequacy of routinised intellectual activity in our times, rather than useful attempts to make more conscious what it is that we do. The most common views of the sociologist's role are, in fact,

almost complete opposites of one another. The first is that science can save us and that it is by the application of scientific rather than other forms of thinking to human affairs that happiness, world-

mastery and liberation will be achieved. The second is that sociology which abstains from value-judgment and which seeks value-freedom is lost, so that a sociologist must be seen as having the capacity and the duty to declare not merely what must be but what should be, even though, by a strangely circular argument, it is supposed that the sociolo.gist's value-judgments should have the authority of science. The first view is the view of that version of the European Enlightenment from which sociology pre-eminently sprang, namely the French version represented, above all, in the positivism of Comte. Now, in fact, it is hard for the modern student to read Comte at all because our age so completely lacks sympathy with his. Not merely do we question the ecstatic acceptance of the achievements of technology which he shared with Saint Simon, but we cannot accept 3

SOCIOLOGY, DEMYSTIFICATION AND COMMON SENSE

that a science of human affairs can tell us what we should do, wherein personal happiness lies or how we should organise our society politically. Yet scientism of a Comtean kind is a suppressed assumption of the vast bulk of contemporary sociology. Either it seeks simply to describe the facts of a social situation as though they were simply external things to be manipulated, rather than the product of human choice and striving, or they suggest that all human affairs are in some way subject to the operation of social laws. Moreover, even

where sociologists are themselves too sophisticated to accept these positions, they are conscious that this is the expectation which the world has of them, and that fulfillment of this expectation is a condition of their being permitted to practise their discipline with public support. Though one might Feel, therefore, th.at positivism in the Comtean tradition barely requires any further refutation, it is unfortunately the case that this particular battle has still to be fought. We must therefore insist that, while sociology is concerned to explore the constraints laid on our behaviour by other persons, by norms, and by 'legitimate' and "illegitimate" power, we are not simply concerned

as sociologists to expose empirical regularities nor scientific and theoretical necessities in social life. We are faced with a much more complex subject matter which involves a dialectical interplay between human striving and social constraint- We need to do justice, that is

to say, both to phenomenal and noumenal man. Twentieth-century barbarism involving the destruction of human life on an unprecedented scale in world wars and colonial wars, the practice of genocide and torture, the crude recurrence of financial and political corruption in public life, and the irresponsible destruc-

tion and consumption of natural resources to a point at which the survival of mankind for more than a few more generations cannot

be guaranteed, has clearly demonstrated that the promise of a seientilically managed social order was not to be fulfilled. Not

surprisingly, therefore the cry has been raised that, far from sociology abstaining from value-judgments in order that it should gain the benefit of insight into scientific necessity, it must at all costs make these value-judgments, because value-freedom means simply that the sociologist would be consigned to a mere technician's role, working at the behest of politicians not subject to any moral restraint. Curiously, the view that sociology must in a rather simplistic sense be value-free, has been attributed by Gouldner in his famous 'Anti-Minotaur' essay (1973, p. 3) to Max Weber, whose own position was very much more complex than this (of. Tenbruck, 1959 and Dave in Sahay, l97I), but that need not concern us here. What is at stake is th.e assertion that sociologists should make value-

judgments and not simply confirm the facts in a value-neutral way. 4

SOCIOLOGY, DEMYSTIFICATION AND COMMON SENSE

There is indeed. a sense in which such a view is permissible a d useful. This is the sense in which it is advanced by Myrdal in his famous appendix on 'F cts a d Val atio s i Soci l by' (1944 a d 1958) which is a logical extension of Weber's own position (1949, p. Sl). According to this view, sociology always looks at facts from a particular point of view or rather looks at the question of the necessity of an event with an implicit question, 'necessary from what point of view ?' But all that this does is to separate out the quest n of value-judgment from the question of scientific understanding, analysis and prediction, and the grounds for value-judgment are not seen as having some kind of scientific validity. What has surely to he resisted is that the sociologist or any natural or social scientist has some special claim to be able to impose his value-judgments on his analysis. This is a claim which has as little validity as its opposite, namely that a scientist should derive his value-judgments from the facts. In both cases the door is opened to political advocacy and propaganda, which sociology can and should avoid. In the one case, political judgments or even prejudices may be given a kind of spurious scientific validity. In the other, they claim no validity at all, other than that of direct moral intuition. A more beguiling, and in some ways more dangerous, version of this doctrine is which advocates policy-oriented research. According to this view sociologists should not live in an ivory tower making discoveries for their own benefit, they should earn their keep by addressing themselves to practical problems. Unfortunately this view gives no answer at all to the question of why particular situations are problematic, or from what point of view. Still worse, the point of view may be concealed and the pretence maintained that the problem is one to which all men of goodwill would wish to address themselves. Thus, in recent British studies of race relations, >

when colonial migration made race relations an explosive political issue, many sociologists addressed themselves to the issues which appeared problematic from the point of view of the government but claimed to be speaking from some shared abstract moral point of' view. The work Colour and Citizenship (Rose, 1969), which some claimed to be a British version of Myrdal's classic An American Dilemma, was a remarkable example of writing in this vein.. Clearly, what a sociologist would have to do in this instance would be to discover and expose the policy aims of the government and other participant actors and to evaluate situations from the point of view of those various policy aims. in such a procedure, the actual policy aims might be found to be at variance with the most frequently confessed aims or, even more likely, the actions of government might be found to be at odds with its professed aims (Rex, l 97'3b)_ In this case, all too often the Policy-oriented researcher might

5

SOCIOLOGY, DEMYSTIFICATION

AND COMMON SENSE

unwittingly be involved joe a double-deceit. First, he might, by pretending that the governmental authorities had the highest ideal aims. simply be involved in doing public relations work on their behalf. Second, given the former pretence, he might feel impelled to attribute blame or causal significance to other less powerful indi-

viduals, whose choices were actually made in contexts set by the powerful. The assumptions of policy-oriented research may thus be stated somewhat as follows: the governing authorities are basically benevolent. Assuming this, we will approach problem areas to see what Obstacles stand in the way of their achieving their goals. It should also be added that these defects may be found in radical research as well as in that which has powerful and respectable spon-

sors. Unfortunately, however, one response of sociologists to policyoriented research has been to set against it radical research on behalf of the powerless, e.g. the working class, the blacks, and the students. We can only say of this that it has the most mischievous consequencesIt should surely be understood by now that there is a. great variety of goals amongst those who claim to speak for the working class, the blacks, and the students, and any intelligent member of the radical inovements which have these social bases would do well to look as open-mindedly and critically at these goals as we have suggested a sociologist should do in looking at the goals of government. This by no means suggests that the use of sociology should lead the radical to abstain from action. It does suggest that he should act with care and precision and not engage in utopian fantasies about what his action is likely to achieve, because it is taken collectively on behalf of 'the forces of progress'. Karl .Mannheim (1954) saw these problems well enough, but he tended to the extreme view that there really was no way out for social science other than to rely upon the political intuition of a free-floating intelligentsia. We would not take that view. We argue here that a truly reflexive sociology is possible, and that a critical sociologist can evolve a method for describing social structures and analysis their function for various social participants, including the uncritical sociologists who describe them from undisclosed policy points of view. We may, of course, be fully reflexive and recognise that our own critical position is not free of taint, but we can and shall argue that a truly critical sociology, which looks at facts about social relations and structures and at policy goals which sustain them, has i*elar'i'vely speaking a greater validity than other theories, because it puts more of its propositions to some kind of empirical test. Disenclutntnient with positivist science which claimed to talk about neutral facts 'out there' in the external world has led some 6

SOCIOLOGY, DEMYSTIFICATION AND COMMON SENSE

sociologists in recent times to go back to Thomas's injunction to see social facts in terms of the participant actors' definition of the situation (Thomas and Znaniecki, 1958), but this has led to the unjustifiable assumption that what are called 'members' meanings descriptions and definitions have as great a validity as any meaning, description or definition which a sociologist might give (see Gar~ tinkel, 1967). In our view, a sociologist who .hypothesises that a certain social structure or pattern of social relations is affecting human behaviour may point to a number of areas in which falsifiers of his propositions might be sought, and it is this capacity which have greater gives him the right to claim that his descriptions particip ating in the validity than those either of "members" actually social relations described or of other participants for whom such. social relations are part of the environment which he seeks to describe. In other words, we accept that there is some validity in the Marxist notion of false consciousness, even though we may disagree with the way in which the Marxist arrives at his conclusion about . falsity (see Rex, l 973a, p. 220). It is understandable that members' meanings should have been rediscovered and celebrated in recent years. It is because the questions 'who is wicked ?', 'who is crinlinal?', 'who is mad ?', have too often been settled in terms of meaning systems imposed by the powers-that-be, and sociologists, questioning these meanings, have gone on radically to show that even taken-for-granted answers to questions like 'who is a woman ?' can be argued about (Garfunkel, 1967). But the opposition here is assumed to be between sociologists ,