Abstract
At the heart of the discipline of history lies revision. The desire for a revised analysis of the past is fuelled by the discovery of new evidence, or new means of establishing its validity, the resurrection of forgotten individuals and events, the developments of fresh theoretical perspectives on the nature of economic and social causality. In sociology such ‘revisionary’ debates are common in debates about the meaning of contemporary events, but less common when it comes to accounts of the history of the discipline itself. This is a bit odd in that sociology and social research have, from their very inception, not only been strongly rooted in the major social transformations and tragedies marking the last century, they have also often seen themselves as contributors to such change. Social scientists have cared strongly about what happens to the world and the society in which they live. They have shown this care through acting as ideologues, fact finders, political critics, citizen advocates, educators, journalists and politicians, sometimes spectacularly successfully and at other times only to disappear without further notice from the annals of discipline history. From a dedicated historian’s perspective, however, the successful is often in need of closer scrutiny, lest it is overblown, and lost individuals and concerns may be in need of saving from the condescension of later generations. I will in this review discuss three recent books that jointly indicate the need for greater attention to be paid to the history of sociology and its methods of working. Separately they give an indication of the varied ways in which such a history can be forwarded to make the art of doing sociology a more enlightened one. The first is the Austrian sociologist Christian Fleck’s history of the development of empirical research: A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences: Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Social Research, a book to remind us how sociological heroes are made and unmade by not only wars, migration, university politics and research grants, but also by each other in the making and unmaking of particular versions of history. The second is Ann Oakley’s biography of Barbara Wootton, at one time Britain’s most famous public sociologist and one of the architects of the British welfare state, yet today largely forgotten amongst academic sociologists: A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century. The last book included in this review, Andrew Sayer’s Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life, should not be counted as a book in the history of sociology as such, but in its attempts to address the question of why human beings, including sociologists, care it presents a broad conception of sociological history in need of a challenge from historians of sociology ready to use sharper tools in its pursuit.
In a teaching culture dominated by impact and outcome measures, the tools of social research increasingly tend to be seen merely as part of skills training and detached from their lively and often intriguing intellectual history. In his scholarly work, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences, Fleck reports on his ongoing, largely archival, research project on the development of social scientific research from the beginning of the 20th Century, a period characterised by the transatlantic transfer of money, people and institutions. This was a process, he argues, that has to be seen as one of mutual enrichment between the USA and Europe that profoundly influenced the creation of what, from the 1950s, is largely taken for granted in sociological research practice. Greater ease of travel brought increased researcher mobility, initially through individual and institutional grants and later as a result of enforced escape and migration with the rise of fascism in Europe. Though the exchange of ideas cannot be as precisely measured as the increased speed of travel – and Fleck is in search of more objective measures of intellectual change – there is nevertheless, as he shows, a great deal of largely untapped archival material available to sustain historical analysis of some degree of sociological generality. Fleck argues that narratives about intellectual ‘heroes’ do little to help us understand how institutions come into being and change, and it is institutions after all that frame the shaping of both disciplinary boundaries and practices and individual career trajectories and reputations.
The large American philanthropic organisations, especially the Rockefeller Foundation with its conception of social science as relevant to the improvement of community life, were important agents in the transformation of sociology from individual armchair philosophy to an empirical project-based discipline. But they were doing this with the help of major European scholars such as Lazarsfeld, Hirshman, Horkheimer and Adorno, each of whom brought their own innovative styles and research techniques to the projects they became involved with. As large bureaucratic organisations at the centre of major intellectual networks, these foundations also provide a richer and more systematic source of evidence about both people and ideas than either university or private collections, evidence tapped in a scholarly way by Fleck. Archival material has the advantage of having been written at the time with its authors not biased by questions pursued later. There are limitations in the use of such material, and Fleck provides an interesting methodological discussion of these. For many social scientists caught up either in the turmoil of forced migration or in the horrors of war little archival material remains.
The first part of Fleck’s book gives an overview of the shift of science as a whole to the United States over the early course of the 20th Century, a shift that unfolded at the same time as Europe shifted towards dictatorship. The second part is devoted to variants of science sponsorship and the complex reaction of American foundations to the handing-over of power to the Nazis, which left individual social scientists persecuted and departments of social science denuded of talent. Chapter 4 is devoted to an impressive collective biography, a ‘prosopography’, of German-speaking social scientists based on data available for about 800 individuals and their varied trajectories in Germany, Austria and the USA, with special emphasis on the differences between those who emigrated and those who stayed in their home country. The comparison points to the significance for earlier researcher mobility of poor domestic university expansion in the German-speaking countries for junior researchers, both Jews and non-Jews. Immigrants to the USA flourished in its more open and expanding university system, a more receptive context for creative individual talent.
In his later chapters, presented at a lower level of aggregation, Fleck focuses on a couple of influential research projects where emigrated German-speaking social researchers played a leading role: the Princeton Radio Project, the launch pad for Lazarsfeld, and the large Studies in Prejudice project, funded by the American Jewish Committee, on whose so far largely neglected archival material this part of the book is based, the most important outcome of which was The Authoritarian Personality on which Adorno and the emigrated Frankfurt School worked. The history of this, argues Fleck, has to date been exclusively written on the basis of limited and self-selected material available at the Horkheimer-Pollock-Archiv in Frankfurt. Fleck sees large-scale project and team work in social science research as a particularly American innovation, not entirely correct perhaps in terms of the long British and Scandinavian history of government and philanthropic research commissions which supported welfare state developments. In this section individual personal stories do emerge which throw some light on the murky ways in which sociological reputations are made and unmade by strong-willed intellectuals in competition over careers, power and fame. It is hard not to conclude that Lazarsfeld, whose methodological inventions were many in the development of survey, interview and panel techniques, indicators and indices, opinion polling, use of expert witnesses, mass media research and so on, has been poorly treated by his contemporaries and descendants assigning his creative approaches to social research to the dustbin of ‘administrative’ and ‘mindless’ data crunching. With their focus on individual intellectual lives at work, these chapters should be compulsory readings for those who regard research methods as an unfortunate detraction from the ‘proper’ business of critical theorising.
Ann Oakley’s biography of Barbara Wootton is an ambitious attempt to interweave a personal story of a politically committed public life with that of the evolving political and economic landscape of British welfare state developments since the First World War and the use, and abuse, of social scientific analysis and research within this process. Like many social scientists of her time, Wootton became a social democrat preoccupied throughout her life with questions about how to combine democracy with evidence-based centralised planning for the purposes of a more equitable distribution of the fruits of economic productivity. What makes this biography an important contribution to sociology is not only the impressive detail of its scholarly as well as humanistic and ethical approach to personal evidence, but also its careful attention to methodological issues inherent in ‘doing a life’ with its many ‘fateful moments’ shaped by a combination of personal drive and social and political constellations. The critical attention it pays to Wootton’s many publications and research reports makes this biography a contribution to the history of ideas as well as to a history of the development of social research in political practice. The fact that the subject of this engrossingly written and highly moving story is an extraordinarily productive woman at one time very close to political power, but now largely forgotten in the annals of social science history (including that of feminism), points to the close yet fickle relationship between persons and ideas in the eyes of both politicians and academics. Wootton’s achievements were as many as they were diverse. She was the first woman to give university lectures at Cambridge, but as a woman barred from gaining her degree from there. Her creative contributions to the establishment of the welfare state, criminal justice reform, the abolition of capital punishment and corporal punishment in schools, the establishment of CND as well as the BSA and the movement for human rights were based around sustained critiques of the deficits in economic theory and free-market capitalism, of theories of crime and punishment and the methods of systematic policy-relevant social research. She was a member of four royal commissions, became Governor of the BBC, was the first woman life peer and the first woman Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords. Yet, concludes Oakley, through her august career she remained an independent radical and refused to be taken in by abstract theory or professional arrogance.
In her work, Wootton saw no essential disjunction between searching and critical evidence-based analysis and the networking and negotiating processes required for acting on it. This is after all what most famous economists spend much of their time doing. Many of the projects she was involved in had real outcomes in legislative policy changes. Like Lazarsfeld’s methodological innovation, much of her work became ‘stock in trade’ and thus disappeared from view. As a public woman she never developed an academic network of her own, a university department or postgraduate students furthering her legacy. Oakley consistently shows that from her youth and despite a large number of honorary doctorates, Wootton’s status in the eyes of male academics remained one of being a ‘critical bother’ rather than a thinker in her own right. But all the rather shocking sexism laid bare in this book does not by itself fully account for her failure in the end to remain in the public eye. Her project, the development of a fair and successfully working welfare state, a more just and peaceable society, ceased being a credible one for the theoretical ‘hard hats’ in economics, sociology or the media, whether coming from the left or the right. The values of social care that she, and many of the subjects of Fleck’s story, tried rationally to further lost both political and academic status, a loss to which the next text directs itself.
In his book Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life, Andrew Sayer sets himself the task of doing a major critique of the social sciences and their failure in his view to take on board the fact that the relationship of people, including social scientists, to the world is one of concern. He starts with the observation that a prevailing contemporary dilemma in social research is that values are treated as subjective and synonymous with bias and distortion and should therefore, once acknowledged, be treated as ‘personal’, beyond debate and to be discounted. But such a strategy, on the other hand, suggests to readers of a different value disposition that they might as well look elsewhere when in search of ‘social’ evidence, thus not bothering to engage in the kind of arguments necessary for social research to make a difference. This is made even more complex by the fact that ‘the social’ is in itself rich in values at the level of both the individual and the collective. Sayer presents the thesis that if values can be seen to fall within the scope of reason, particularly practical reasoning in the Aristotelian sense and an integral part of arguments and justifications, there is no need to regard them as contaminating interference.
In the first part of the book, Sayer reviews long-standing arguments in the social sciences about the relationship between facts and values and other similar problematic dualisms within social research. The book then addresses the issues of: practical reasoning and values as an ongoing matter of concrete evaluations and sensitivity to ends rather than narrow ‘rational’ rules and procedures; the universalistic and indispensable concept of a ‘human being’ for whom things matter and whose concerns deserve to be treated with respect whatever social location; and what it means to understand the ethical dimension of life. In my view the most innovative chapter is the one on the concept of ‘dignity’, which Sayers sees as deriving both from what people are and are capable of being, and from what they actually do or are allowed to do. At the core of dignity is its relationship to trust and the quality of social relations in all their forms. This chapter in itself makes an excellent contribution to debates on human rights, for example, but also to the sociology curriculum. There is plenty here to engage students in discussions not only about why we do care, but also why we as social scientists should not be apologetic about it but learn to justify ourselves through persuasive and reasoned arguments. Sayer’s book is to be lauded for returning social theory to fundamental humanistic principles of shared basic needs and concerns for well-being. At the present time of economic crisis and austerity measures, a stronger sociological engagement with basic human cares and concerns is much to be welcomed. But the density of the book makes it, as Sayers himself states, a bit of a ‘dog’s dinner’ given the wide range of philosophical and literary sources on which he draws. As such it is in need of serious philosophical and sociological unpacking beyond the narrow confines of this review.
But this much-needed task does not depend for its success on the belittling of earlier sociological traditions, many of which, as the books by Fleck and Oakley show, were as critical of human practices denying such concerns as that specialist branch of sociology referred to as ‘critical theory’. Critical theory may have become more cautious and inwardly reflexive, but this cannot be said to be true of social research in general either now or in history as it has struggled to make an impact on the development of human affairs. Sayers misrepresents this history in arguing that it has addressed readers more as fellow spectators than as possible co-participants whose recognition and rational responses are of relevance to the validity of what is being described. From the beginnings of social science in general, and sociology in particular, the public at large was the audience with whom it engaged, not just academic specialists, as shown, albeit in a selective way, by both Fleck and Oakley. Sayer gives a misleading picture of social science in history through the use of an over-socialised conception of what ‘we’ as social scientists have done as ‘spectators’, and a politically and nationally free-floating and over generalised conception of ‘modernity’ as explanans of all that is seen to be dehumanising in ‘rationalistic’ research traditions. The historical connection Sayer makes between loosely defined modernity, positivistic social research and the social control systems of the state is highly tenuous and infused with a myriad of weakly evidenced, intellectual responses to a complex history of social science and social research in different nations and at different times in history. German National Socialism, Soviet Communism and British and Nordic Social Democracy were all products of ‘modernity’, each with its own sense of what social science was about and for whose needs it was to care. Profound conflicts about the content and meaning of values cannot be so easily dismissed. If, as Sayer maintains, the justification of values lies in reasoned argument and thoughtfully collected evidence that respect the dignity of social actors, then that should also hold true of the way we deal with underlying valuations in critical intellectual history.
There is, of course, not one true story of the history of sociology, of what makes certain lives worth remembering and others remembered wrongly. There are only more or less well-informed arguments to be had about what, at any one time, mattered most and how the activity of doing social research was understood and carried out. Running through the history of sociology is a deeper inherent polarity than that between the dualisms of facts and values, subjectivity and objectivity, reason and emotion. As in sociology itself there is an inherent tension between the creative and unique individual and the many different characterisations and conflicts under which his or her behaviour and intellectual outputs can be subsumed, and the extent to which his or her particular locations and times can be generalised without losing sight of what mattered to engaged individuals and why. With social science at this time under attack precisely because it does care about what actually happens to human beings, it is more important than ever to learn from earlier activists in the discipline.
Footnotes