De-intellectualizing American sociology

The origins of international sociology

We are accustomed to thinking of sociology in terms of the winners – the Durkheims and Webers – whom we represent as the founders of sociology, not in terms of the losers, the Herbert Spencers, the L.T. Hobhouses and the René Worms who preceded them or were their rivals. But this is an error with consequences for Wickham’s challenge. Before it was academic, sociology was non-academic sociology (see Harley, this volume). Academic sociology was made possible by and built on the successes and public acceptance of non-academic sociology and in some important respects was continuous with non-academic sociology. And non-academic sociology was indeed successful with the audience in question. Moreover, there was, in the 19th century, no audience lashed to the academic machinery of degrees, positions, grants and so forth. This kind of sociology could succeed only by engaging some sort of general public. And it did.

The success of Herbert Spencer was fundamental, as was the topic he engaged. Darwinism challenged the religious conception of man in a way that also challenged the key political ideas of the time. Human cooperation, socialism, ethics and all hope for social reform had to be reconsidered in the light of the idea of the struggle for existence and the idea of survival of the fittest. Spencer, an academic outsider excluded from Oxford and Cambridge because he was a non-conformist, was both an early admirer of Darwin and an expositor. But his most striking contribution was to set the agenda for the discussion of the social consequences of Darwinism and his application of these ideas to the problem of social and cultural evolution itself. This topic, which intersected with the socialism and cooperativism of the time, proved to be an extraordinarily fertile field for discussion.

These writers found an audience. Spencer was of course a publishing phenomenon: his books, sold in sets covering the whole of natural, social and ethical evolution, were bought avidly throughout the world. Peter Kropotkin wrote famous books, studied animals, generalized to human society and social life. A whole ‘library’ or book series of writings on this kind of topic and related topics was created by René Worms, and many texts were translated into French. Worms also published the still functioning Revue internationale de sociologie, the oldest sociological journal, beginning in 1893, also published originally by the Bibliothèque sociologique internationale. The Bibliothèque published ‘classics’, such as volumes of the writings of Mikhail Bakunin (1895–1913) and Peter Kropotkin (1892, 1913), who was extensively involved in arguments against non-cooperative interpretations of Darwin, as well as contemporary works. ¹ The French versions of these texts were widely read throughout what was still a largely francophone intellectual world.

The list of works published by the Bibliothèque reflects the concerns that were the common core of international sociology on which all of the early sociologists drew. These concerns have morphed into others, some of which were visible at the time, such as the question of the extent to which human society could be changed by design, and what means would be needed to change it. And the core problem of Darwinism and socialism was preceded by what Wickham has elsewhere (2007, 2010) shown to be central to European thought, the problem of social peace. These texts anticipate the great political conflicts of the 20th century between ‘planning’ and the market, between liberalism and communism, with their extensive bodies of intellectual and ideological support. But they also look forward to the possibility of world peace, the role of moral and spiritual development in the evolution of society and so forth.

This is where sociology as a discipline began: not with the establishment of chairs and national societies, but as a forum for public discussion around the problem of the fundamental nature of society. And international sociology as it then existed, at the turn of the century and before, was a surprisingly vibrant and self-aware community, successful both in institution building and in establishing personal relations. The IIS (l’Institut International de Sociologie) was an odd organization, to be sure – it recruited eminent figures to its ranks by invitation and sought to legitimate itself and its subject matter in that way. But, despite its elitist trappings, it was an inclusive, intellectually open organization, as the intellectual community itself was. Worms was a legal bureaucrat rather than a professor. He had no academic turf to protect and no reason to exclude or delegitimate those who sought to participate in this discussion. Indeed, the remarkable feature of this body was its pluralism, and the extent to which it accommodated and turned into civilized discussion the great political issues of the age.

In contrast, Durkheim and the Durkheimians loathed Worms, were bitterly hostile to and dismissive of their French rivals, and imperialistic toward any domain they could claim for ‘sociology’ as they understood it. Worms’ supporter Guillaume L. Duprat was later to write of the ‘autorité despotique’ exercised by Durkheim, his ‘ancien maître’, and Mauss, his ‘ancien camarade’, over French sociology, and those who were ‘victime de l’intolérance très spécifique des Durkheim, Mauss, Halbwachs, Lévy-Bruhl, etc.’. ² There was something at stake for them that was not at stake for Worms – the Durkheimians sought to control academic appointments and secure them for themselves.

The history written by the winners has taken as true the Durkheimians’ own claims of their superiority over their rivals. And this much is true: Durkheimian thought won out in the French academy, contributed to the ‘standard social science model’, and was taken as a model of sociological thought by later professional sociologists, such as Columbia sociology during the 1950s, where Suicide (1951 [1897]) was taught as a model text and was celebrated as a source of professionalized empirical research. But if we place the Durkheimians back into the context of the period before the Second World War, they appear less ‘modern’ and not very different from their contemporaries. Durkheim was no less concerned than his rivals with evolution, at least social evolution, and ethics and the possible ethical implications of sociology. Nor was he less concerned with the possibility and conditions of socialism, the viability of political forms such as syndicalism, and so forth. His successor, Celestin Bouglé, taught sociology as the history of socialist doctrine, and applied the lessons of Durkheimian sociology to ethical enlightenment (Bouglé, 1926). Where they differed from their contemporaries was in their militant exclusiveness and their concern with academic power.

Power and enmity

The history of sociology from this period until the great enrollment collapse of the 1970s and 1980s reproduced this scenario of professionalization and exclusion in wave after wave. In many of its moments, professionalization – which always took the form either of social exclusion, attempted exclusion or declassing – was done in the name of ‘science’. The larger story could at one point have been given a positive spin: the story of the professionalization of a field out of amateurism. The ‘science’ story cannot be given a positive spin. Reading back to the expectations of past sociologists – usually the same past sociologists who were giving the boot in the face to their ‘unprofessional’ rivals – shows the almost insane delusions of grandeur in which they were engulfed (Isaac, 2010). One need only to read the footnote in Parsons’ Structure of Social Action with pages of equations purporting to explain the structure of social action (1968 [1937]: 77–84), or his 1945 insistence that the reduction of the social system to a set of differential equations was closer than anyone thought, to realize how deluded they were (1951 [1945]). We need not rehash the rise and fall of the various ‘science’ ideals in sociology (Turner, 1992). It will suffice to note that ‘science’ has now largely vanished from the self-conception of sociologists. The vast aspirations to science once taken seriously are now confined to a few cliques. But the science story, together with the (failed) Whig history of professionalization of which it is a part, is only half of the story of enmity and power.

The other half is the project of exclusion. And this side was an unalloyed ‘success’. Part of this story is also familiar. At various stages in the professionalization process, formerly welcome allies of sociology or forms of sociology were pushed out of the discipline. In the early 1930s the American Sociological Society lost many non-academic members by changing the dues structure. The new professionalized order of the late 1920s, which forced this move, was led by the students of Franklin Giddings, such as W.F. Ogburn and F.S. Chapin. They and their idea of the profession were in turn superseded by the students of Merton and Lazarsfeld, and by the followers of Parsons. At each stage the discourse narrowed, by design. In Britain, the long running but largely non-academic Sociological Society folded after the rival British Sociological Association was founded. The International Sociological Association sought to establish a more professionalized model of sociology, and refused to cooperate with the fascist-tainted IIS, but largely took over its model for an international congress of sociology societies as its own. Within each national discipline, definitions of proper professionalism narrowed.

The turning point is conventionally treated as 1945. The difference between pre-war ‘theory’ and what came after is very marked. Before 1945, among the ‘theorists’ of conventional sociology, meaning those other than Parsons and later Merton, there was a great deal of diversity in theory and although there was debate there was tolerance, and there was little sense that the diversity of viewpoints was a problem, much less a disease that needed a drastic cure. The culminating theory texts of the period were Barnes and Becker’s Contemporary Social Theory (1971 [1940]), preceded by their vast history, Social Thought from Lore to Science (1961 [1938]). These were works that reveled in diversity, and recorded it as objectively as possible. Don Martindale’s theory text of 1960, The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory, did the same: Martindale was a product of the environment at the University of Wisconsin created by Becker.

The opposite pole from this approach to theory was represented by Talcott Parsons. His model was the idea of a science with a single, unified and exclusive ‘conceptual scheme’. This too is a story that has often been told. He was primed for this idea by his exposure to neo-Kantianism in Heidelberg, and had it confirmed during his apprenticeship to his mentor L.J. Henderson at Harvard as part of the famous Pareto circle (Isaac, 2012). The idea was simple: to be a science meant having a single conceptual scheme. To make sociology a science, a scheme needed to be imposed, or revealed. Merton, who was both Parsons’ rival and ally, worked with the same set of concepts, but imagined a different trajectory for the discipline. In his writings in the 1940s Merton was openly contemptuous of the ‘many approaches’ of the past, and of the history of sociological thought, represented at the time by Barnes and Becker, in favor of ‘systematics’ and a strategy of theory construction which would produce ‘a system of logically com-pendent propositions with empirical referents and not merely a collection of unrelated post facto hypotheses or a fractionated account of discrete re-searches’ (Merton, 1941: 282). His later thought was that avoiding the big picture and concentrating on middle-range theorizing would make this possible. The goal, however, was the same: to produce theory that was ‘scientific’ in the sense that it excluded alternatives, much less the grab-bag of ideas that Barnes and Becker recorded.

The effects of this process of closure and exclusion on the topics that sociologists discussed and on their relation to the public were substantial. Two American examples tell the story. In 1938, Charles Ellwood, by then 65 years old and at the end of a long and distinguished career, including the presidency of the ASS and the ISS, published The History of Social Philosophy (seven printings between 1938 and 1948); also published under the title The Story of Social Philosophy in 1938). This book was a profit-maker and was selected by two ‘book of the month’ clubs – the mark of middle-class readership – at the same time that Parsons’ subsidized Structure of Social Action, published a few months later, accumulated dust in Harper’s warehouse. Ellwood’s ‘Story’, which consisted of chapters on social thinkers from the Enlightenment on, with critiques of their thought but an attempt to extract the valuable elements, closed with a conflict, between Lester Ward and William Graham Sumner over the effectiveness of reform, or more broadly the possibility and limits of planning. This appeared at the same time that Karl Mannheim’s book on planning, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1980 [1940]), appeared in Britain. Mannheim’s work was also directed, necessarily, at the public, because there simply were not enough academic sociologists in Britain to support such a volume. It too was a publishing success.

Ellwood’s book was history, of course, and it was theory. It was about a great theme, the malleability of human society and the means and possibilities of directed reform. Ellwood was a product of the enthusiasms for Darwinism and socialism, and one of the first University Chairs in sociology. But he never abandoned these themes. Ellwood favoured ‘education’ as the means of shaping society – Turgot was the hero of the book. But it was also a book about the present, relevant to the debates about the New Deal. But at the end of his life he was a professional irrelevancy, cast to the curb by the professionalizing generation then in power – his book was exactly the kind of theory denounced by Merton in his Systematics paper (1968 [1957]: 1–38).

The second example is Pitirim Sorokin. At the very same time that Parsons was writing his ambitious claims that sociology would soon be producing theory with differential equations, he was conspiring to sideline his Harvard superior. One needs some background to grasp the audacity of Parsons. A failed economist, he attached himself to a Harvard grandee L.J. Henderson and managed not only to continue to be employed at Harvard, in sociology, but to have his magnum opus published with a subsidy from a grant on industrial accidents. The book fell still-born from the press, selling fewer than 1000 copies in 10 years, despite the subsidy, Parsons’ Harvard affiliation and a prestigious imprint. Parsons attached himself to other powerful figures and causes at Harvard; he was the consummate insider. At the same time Sorokin was publishing some of the most successful texts ever written by a sociologist for a public audience: The Crisis of Our Age (1957 [1941]) reprinted numerous times over the next 16 years and still in print, which he followed by Man and Society in Calamity (2010 [1942]), which went through four printings. These now forgotten texts had staying power. At the 1960 meeting of the IIS in Mexico City, Sorokin’s ‘integralism’, the focus of Crisis, was the theme (Marotta and Gregor, 1961: 221).

What were these books about? Crisis was a popularization of Sorokin’s cyclical theory of social evolution that predicted the end and supplanting of the materialism of the present by a turn to some new form of spiritual connection or idealism. These were perennial themes of the pre-academic sociologists, but Sorokin was not alone in continuing to raise them. They were also themes for Mannheim, who advocated the planning of values and looked forward to a new synthesis. And Sorokin’s cyclical theory itself was a piece of sociology, complete with statistical evidence of the historical cycles, evidence that was repeated in Crisis. Man and Society in an Age of Calamity was a further application of these ideas: where Crisis was an account of the impending calamity of the Second World War, the follow-up book was about the effects of calamities on culture. Mannheim, it may be noted, had a collection of wartime essays that paralleled this book (Mannheim, 2004 [1943]). The topic – the way society responds to crises – did not drop from academic discourse immediately, and one could argue that it reappeared in some sense in the debates over the ‘social system’ and functionalism that followed, or in social psychology, for example, in small group research. But it is clear that these essays did not fit well with the emerging model of professional sociological writing, and that the emerging model of professional writing was not going to appeal to the public audiences that Ellwood and Sorokin had reached in the 1930s and early 1940s. In making this connection, Wickham is quite right.

The left

Explaining why this change in sociology, which excluded its most popular writers, happened, however, is more complicated than it appears, because the professionalization story becomes confused with another story, the still largely untold story of the intersection of postwar sociology with the left. It is evident that many of the most enthusiastic adherents of the new model of professionalization in the United States had roots in the left, and not infrequently in the Communist Party itself. People whose intellectual outlook was formed by the party and who had not ‘deviated’, or not deviated very far, were prominently represented in the social sciences, but avoided overt expressions of ‘Marxism’, and also avoided the questions associated with Marxist theory itself. This did not mean that their sympathies had changed fundamentally, but their forms of expression had. And often the result was that they cultivated ideas that had nothing to do with Marxism, which they ignored as a source of theoretical inspiration, in favor of the newly emerging ‘theory’ that fitted the latest form of professionalization in sociology. Professionalization, indeed, became a kind of protection, especially after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, when the parties were told to abandon the popular front strategy of the 1930s and support Soviet foreign policy, and in the US after 1945, when the party purged members for ‘Browderism’, the doctrine of peaceful coexistence. But it also meant that the traditional basic questions of sociology, those derived from the Darwin–socialism problem, much less the problem of future culture, were a no-go zone. Conveniently, they were a no-go zone for professional sociology as well: they were not sufficiently empirical, or historical, to advance a professional career and, better yet, could be avoided on the grounds that they did not advance the scientific status of the discipline.

This led to a peculiar bifurcation in sociology (as well as in other disciplines), which became bizarrely problematic in the 1960s. One need only think of the career of C. Wright Mills. He identified himself intellectually as a kind of Marxist, but had nothing to do with the Communist Party, and wrote sociologically informed polemics along with his sociology, and reached wide audiences for both. Robert K. Merton was a sociologist whose basic sympathies intellectually were on the left, and who began his career as a book review editor for Isis, whose specific task was chronicling the left-wing scientists’ movement of the 1930s, and who endorsed, at least in the early 1940s, their main idea that science could come to full fruition only in a post-capitalist society (cf. Turner, 2007b). He wrote repeated recommendation letters for Karl Polanyi, praising The Great Transformation (2001 [1944]). Yet Merton concealed all of this in his public persona and shied away from the big questions, while at the same time writing enthusiastic letters of support for Karl Polanyi’s many applications for foundation funding and conspiring with Parsons and Lazarsfeld against Mills (Summers, 2006: 38).

The conscious attempt to shut down theory

The 1960s and the years immediately after that decade challenged this new model of professionalization, a challenge inspired by thinkers like Mills and more generally by the new leftism of the student movement. The background to the conflicts of the 1960s is well known and much debated. The ridicule heaped on Parsons, Merton and Lazarsfeld by Mills in The Sociological Imagination tells the story (1959). The common elements of Parsons’ and Merton’s approaches were subjected to withering criticism during the 1960s, and the theoretical diversity that Merton and Parsons tried to suppress returned with a vengeance. Theory was hot. And although the impulse to suppress was strong, it was strongly resisted. There was some success, however. The Mertonians were loath to respond to critics, and especially avoided debates on metatheoretical issues. They heaped contempt on their enemies or ignored them. Merton was especially unwilling to respond to criticism publicly (Cole, 2004: 841–2), but seethed and bristled privately, as his letters show, at what he believed to be misrepresentations of his views and even mild criticisms. I well remember one of these important figures, during the late 1970s, giving a talk at the ASA (American Sociological Association) conference, grandly dismissing the critics with this: ‘The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.’ They could afford to behave in this way. They were reasonably successful in excluding the full range of theoretical discussion from the most prestigious journals, while themselves publishing in them. This was what counted for them: hierarchy.

But the caravan did not move on. No sooner did these critiques take hold than sociology itself went into crisis, and the crisis was not theoretical. In the United States the number of undergraduate degrees fell by three-quarters. The larger story of the end of the 1960s and the discrediting of the overreaching claims of sociology to be able to solve social problems through ‘social programs’ was certainly part of it: when the reaction to the failings of these programs set in, the credibility of sociology in the United States collapsed, just as it did later in Britain with Margaret Thatcher. But there is also a more specific story to be told within the discipline itself, and especially at the top of American sociology, where a more or less conscious effort was made to shut down theoretical discussion.

What Merton and Parsons and their students could not do was to reproduce themselves. According to the iron law of the academic caste system in American sociology, top departments hired only from a short list of major departments. The major departments that in the past had produced theorists – Harvard, Columbia, California and, more grudgingly, Chicago – no longer did, or no longer produced successes. And this produced a fatal dilemma. Either the post-Merton and post-Parsons generation was going to pass their place in the hierarchy on to a hostile generation or they were going to have to find some other occupants, or they were to exclude theory itself.

Perhaps the telling moment was this. After the death of Alvin Gouldner in 1973, the journal he had created, Theory and Society, was in transition. Gouldner, through his personal presence and reputation, had recruited a distinguished international editorial board and included a quite amazing range of viewpoints. His wife, Janet Gouldner, was in control of the journal, but depended on the core editorial advisors, a much narrower group. A crucial meeting with the publishers and the core editorial board was held, which Janet Gouldner wrote to Merton about, thanking him for his support. In her letter, she showed her grasp of the problem:

One of, my concerns is the place of theory in the future Journal. It may be that the composition of the Senior Editors is such as to place the reception of theory in some jeopardy. I think that we are quite rightly concerned to avoid endless discussions of hermeneutics, but ask yourself how a Theda Skocpol or a Rod Aya or even perhaps a Jerry Karabel would have viewed Al’s Anti-Minotaur piece were it submitted today. Obviously they are all people of quality and one hopes that that frees them to recognize quality where ever it exists, but is it not equally possible that their interests prejudice them? Theda [Skocpol] expressed something like this when we were planning future issues: ‘Now let’s put a real article in there’. ³

The example is telling on multiple levels. Two of the most successful books on sociology for the public, Robert Lynd’s Knowledge for What? (1939) and George Lundberg’s Can Science Save Us? (1947), were about the fact/value distinction, as was Alvin Gouldner’s (1964) famous article critiquing Weber. The success of these books, and the presence of the lengthy methodological appendix in Myrdal’s The American Dilemma, showed that core problems about knowledge of the subject matter of sociology could be presented to the public and discussed in the intellectual press. But Gouldner’s article already reflected the decay of this kind of discussion in the ‘professional’ sociology of the generation of Merton’s students. As Hans-Henrik Bruun was to point out at the time, Gouldner had gotten Weber precisely backwards (2007 [1971]: 74, n89). ⁴

The noose of ‘professionalism’ was thus tightening once again. As Janet Gouldner saw it, the conflict was between risk-taking and creativity on the one side and professional image on the other:

Specifically, I would not like to see the concern to put out a ‘professional journal’ shoulder aside the risk-taking necessary for our creativity. What I have in mind that might be lost, for example, are authors and pieces such as the interview by Gordon Burnside with William Case (8/1), eventually a piece that recalled something of the sixties and was so beautifully written that we wanted to publish it even if it wasn’t Sociology. An increasing concern with our professional image will eliminate space for such pieces because they can’t be justified on professional grounds, despite the fact that they say important things about who we are or were or should want to be. ⁵

Doing this, she realized, required people on the editorial board with a broader vision:

I don’t think that I am being overly sour about professional concerns or the profession; I recognize that it houses both geniuses and foot-soldiers. But without risk-taking, we have lost our identity, and perhaps the source of our creativity. Formerly Al took the risks for us. Who now? ⁶

The burden was on an editorial board that was composed of ‘foot-soldiers’ who would not take those risks, or aggressive professionalizers who were eager to exclude them. She also saw exactly who the greatest threat came from:

It is in this regard that Theda’s emerging concern for professionalism worries me, all the more so as H. Frank seems intent on installing her as the next chief editor in a year or so. Her life will be settled by then, she will want to do it, and she will not say no (unless we say it for her). I am impressed by her in many ways, and she is a more-than-competent Senior Editor. Yet, her ascendency may spell the end of community as we have known it. Here again, I realize that such tension may be productive of an awareness of who we are and whether we really want to be another ASR or AJS. But, I worry. ⁷

Her worry proved to be entirely justified.

This allergy to the big questions continued in the era described by Burawoy and exemplified by Hochschild, and for good reasons, associated with the purposes of public sociology: an organic intellectual writing in support of a social cause or movement is not going to have much concern with the problem of ‘the social’ in an abstract sense. In the case of the organic feminist intellectual, her concern will be with theorizing the oppression that the movement is a movement against, that is to say to theorize with a specific outcome in mind derived from a political analysis of the phenomenon of unacknowledged oppression (such as the dishwashing that women do; cf. Hochschild, 1989), rather than to theorize about some sort of abstract question like the nature of the social. These problems are moved into the category of ideological givens about which questioning is offensive. The ‘oppression’ and the oppressive nature of society are assumed: disputing it would be evidence of insensitivity or worse. The only role of theory in these contexts is the one familiar from Marxist ‘political analysis’: to provide a vocabulary other than the vocabulary of the oppressed and the oppressors in which to reveal and express the hidden fact of oppression. Burwawoy, interestingly, simply omits theory entirely from his scheme of categories of sociological writing, and replaces it with a category of critiques of the profession – something else entirely. A parallel closure occurred in the kinds of writings Skocpol called ‘a real article’. Even in works that were not specifically allied to social movements – although in her own case she was proud to have labor union support – the basic ideological parameters were fixed and unargued. Fundamental questions about ‘society’ were simply irrelevant.

Conclusion: ‘what is society?’ today

So what happened to the topics that academic sociology tried to kill off? What happened to Darwinism and social life as a topic? To the future of culture as a topic? What about ‘the social’ as the object of sociology? Like most issues, these have morphed into different forms. But did they cease to have a public audience? And if there was one, did sociology fail to respond to it and also fail more generally to respond to the needs of the public audience? The second of these questions is difficult to answer, but a kind of answer can best given by considering the books that Herbert Gans listed as best-sellers by living sociologists in his 1997 article ‘Best-sellers by Sociologists: An Exploratory Study’. If we exclude books before 1980, many of which were used largely as textbooks rather than books for the general public, and do not provide evidence of a public audience, the answer is clear: aside from a few relationship help books by Lillian Rubin, all of the bestsellers were either books associated with a race or gender cause, or had a clear ideological agenda. None of them could plausibly be claimed to deal with the questions Wickham thinks have been neglected.

The question of whether the public is interested in such questions, however, gets a different answer. A whole raft of books by non-sociologists that have sold very well deal with the traditional problem of the implications of Darwinism for social life, notably the works of Steven Pinker, such as How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) and The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011). The very abstract problem of what is a social institution and what makes us ‘collective’ – Durkheim’s problem – has been addressed by John Searle in The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and in a follow-up book, Making the Social World (2010). The larger questions of the evolution of civilization are addressed by Francis Fukuyama, in his new The Origins of Political Order (2011), and the social bond is addressed in his Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995). The demand is there. The public responds. And as the new example of Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution (2011) shows, the public also responds to sociologists who rise to the challenge. But these are books that have no place in Burawoy’s scheme, or in the kind of sociology practiced in the major journals. Many of them would offend major affinity constituencies in sociology. Some of these authors would meet with protests were they to appear at a sociology meeting. Professionalization, together with the limits imposed by the sensibilities of those sociologists who have made themselves gatekeepers of political correctness, has strangled this kind of discussion within sociology.

Sociology was once a place where intellectuals found freedom: Giddings, Sorokin, Alfred Schutz and many others who could have pursued careers in their original fields chose sociology because of this freedom. To some extent sociology still welcomes outsiders, though now it is likely to be outsiders with ties to the Women’s Movement. But some of these outsiders have had public impact. Juliet Schor, an economist who is now appointed in a sociology department, is one of the most successful writers for a general audience found in a sociology department. But in general, the freedom of the past is in the past. One is tempted to paraphrase Weber’s comments at the end of The Protestant Ethic (1989 [1930]), about how ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’ imagine themselves to represent the acme of civilization. American sociology is now dominated by professionals with no purpose beyond the grant system, and political naïfs for whom taking offense is the highest political gesture. And they too believe that this is the highest form of political and moral enlightenment. But an allusion to this classic text would be lost on them. The same blindness to the great questions that formerly motivated sociology also blinds them to their own history, and to the possibilities of sociology itself.