Abstract
Dear Editor,
I would like to react to Professor Arthur Alderson’s review of Armageddon or Evolution?: The Scientific Method and Escalating World Problems, in the March 2012 issue of Contemporary Sociology. Although he succeeds in conveying key elements of the book, I believe that he presents a one-sided view implying that it is pop sociology rather than a serious sociological effort to criticize the discipline constructively.
Alderson is completely on target in his view that the book builds on George Lundberg’s 1947 Can Science Save Us? although the book does call for a much broader approach to the scientific method than positivism. Yet I believe that he is far off the mark by rejecting the idea that it builds on the work of C. Wright Mills. Just as Mills’ concept of the sociological imagination calls for an extremely broad approach to the discipline and criticizes narrow specialization (e.g., “grand theory” and “abstracted empiricism”), so do I question what I see as the general failure of our many Sections—now 51, and counting—to follow Mills’ broad vision. Given the enormous complexity of human behavior, without serious efforts to integrate the knowledge throughout our specialized fields combined with those specialized activities, we are violating the scientific ideal of opening up to the range of phenomena relevant to a given research problem.
Alderson’s parody of Armageddon or Evolution? avoids my many references to solid sociology (e.g., Durkheim, Bowles and Gintis, Denzin, Domhoff, Giddens, Gouldner, Knottnerus, Lenski, Lundberg, Marx, Mills, Fred Polak, Scheff, Allan Schnaiberg, Simmel, Sztompka, Vidich and Bensman, Weber, Robin Williams, Dennis Wrong). Instead, he cites non-sociologists that I reference (“Karen Horney, Walt Whitman, Dr. Phil, Paulo Freire, Rudyard Kipling and Gichin Funakoshi”). In addition, he refers to the Sociological Imagination Group (see the website sociological-imagination.com)—with our nine research conferences in the United States and Canada simultaneous with the national ASA meetings, our three volumes collecting thirty papers, and our seven other books—as a “Mills sect.” He suggests, “Phillips draws on The Wizard of Oz for inspiration,” instead of explaining that this metaphor was no more than a device emphasizing the importance of a broad approach to individual behavior. Further, he sees my overall conclusion as no more than “be the change you wish to see,” rather than my emphasis on the importance of a research focus on individual structures no less than social structures as well as on communicating our conclusions to the public at large.
There are indeed problems with Armageddon, problems that I’ve attempted to work on in two subsequent books: Saving Society (2011) and Revolution in the Social Sciences (2012). For example, I failed to explain sufficiently what I see as the enormous importance for social scientists to employ powerful metaphors—just as Mills used metaphors so effectively—to communicate our findings to others and ourselves. And I failed to emphasize the hypothetical nature, based on indirect evidence, of my basic conclusions. Yet I submit that my own work, and that of the Sociological Imagination Group, is nothing less than a very serious effort to confront sociologists with the enormous repercussions of their general failure to integrate their bits and pieces of knowledge, and also is nothing less than a very serious effort to offer an alternative.
Sincerely,