Abstract
If sociology any longer allowed itself Grand Old Men, Ken Roberts would surely be one. Recently retired from his Chair at Liverpool, he uses this innocuously titled book to summarize a lifetime’s commitment to the discipline, pulling together what he thinks of surviving worth in it and pointing a way forward for it in a concise statement of what makes sociology distinctive.
Roberts was a student at the London School of Economics, academic birthplace of British sociology, as the subject became part of the standard university offer throughout Western Europe and North America, addressing and involving the baby-boomer generation. Together with the subject they so substantially contributed to, this generation now senses an ending as the social-democratic contract which they first embodied – that each generation should become better off than its parents – can no longer be sustained. This academic generation also contributed to the second of three ‘transformations’, which, together with ‘divisions’ (since historical transformations are not experienced uniformly), have remained sociology’s core subject matter, according to Roberts. This ‘core’ was, he argues, inherited from the European Enlightenment’s confrontation with the first of these successive modernizations arising from industrialization. Hence the unabashed centrality in this account of ‘dead white men’ who ‘remain fixtures on all sociology syllabuses, because the trends that each of them highlighted – the growth of capitalism, the division of labour, urbanization and rationalization – have still not been reversed or ended’ (p. 25). However, post-1945 sociologists addressed and added to a second transformation of their societies into social market economies, welfare states and social democracies. Now, of course, we engage with the third and latest social transformation for which, from its various labels, Roberts choses ‘post-industrialisation’ as ‘the one with which no one is likely to quarrel’ (p. 36). (Such accommodations do not prevent occasional rebarbative asides, such as the brief designation of ‘Michel Foucault, a Frenchman’, p. 104!)
Following the expansion of tertiary/higher education to at least 50 per cent in most post-industrial societies, Roberts sees the middle class experiencing further restructuring with graduates from ‘top’ universities entering directly into professional and management trainee posts while other graduates enter intermediate level jobs. Roberts argues that class analysis is as vital as ever to understand how this is changing society and sociology and, as in his 2001 Class in Modern Britain (updated in 2011 to Class in Contemporary Britain), follows the revamped official eight class scheme but urges more study of ‘the upper or ruling class’, to whom he devotes a whole chapter in Class in Modern Britain, since this is, as he says there, ‘the smallest … best organized … and most class conscious class’.
Those other classic divisions by gender and ethnicity are also emphasized as sociology has become feminized – at least in the majority of its students – and has also attracted many ethnic minority/global majority students. The key change here is not post-industrialization but post-colonization, reflected, as Roberts remarks, in the retitling of many courses on ethnic relations to migration studies, thus decoupling race from migration – at least in Europe. However, he rejects the mediating subaltern position since sociology’s ‘mission’ is to speak out so as to challenge and disturb comforting convention.
This has been sociology’s attraction to many students but also its threat to government seeking to harness it to policy so that Roberts thinks the subject today has a split personality, partly within, and partly outside such assimilation. He therefore espouses the public sociology exemplified in the intentions but, as he adds, perhaps not yet in the achievements of Michael Burawoy of which feminism and anti-racism in the West can be cited as successful examples. So, the book optimistically concludes, there is no danger that the subject will decompose because, as the general social science:
Sociology is the sole discipline that explores all the associations between the economic, political, social and cultural dimensions of these changes [/transformations]. It alone seeks to distinguish the drivers and beneficiaries from victims and losers. (p. 152)
The same could of course be said for the audit of history but Roberts’ sociology is an historical one whose affirmation is perhaps undermined by the startling last words of the book, appealing for ‘New sociological minds’ because ‘the books and journals contain no answers’ (p. 182). This speaks to an uncertainty regarding sociology’s centrality, because Roberts’ claim is made from within sociology and therefore does not see society contained by – even if alienated from – its environment, in ‘interchange’ with nature, as Marx wrote. So, although Roberts concedes society faces possibly catastrophic climate change, he does not seek the sociological causation of such catastrophe nor the reasons for its denial. Nevertheless, this introduction to sociology affirms the centrality of the discipline and is dedicated to its survival.