Abstract
My title may be misleading. This paper will argue that contemporary sociological theories are not impoverished. On the contrary, it is my observation that contemporary sociological theories are rich and diverse. There are abroad Marxists, functionalists, structuralists, phenomenologists, symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists, conflict theorists, labelling theorists, critical theorists, and so on. That they battle and proliferate strikes this philosopher of the social sciences as healthy, fruitful and exciting.3 As an editor, I never know what is going to flop into my in-tray next. In addition, there are certain maverick figures who are doing incredibly illuminating thinking at the theoretical level, especially Edward Shils, Raymond Aron, Ernest Gellner and Erving Goffman. So, much of my space will be given over to explaining how such richness can be denigrated and the claim of theoretical poverty made.
For all the Idols of the Mind or Profession regnant today the worst is that which Bacon might have placed among his Idols of the Theatre: the belief, first, that there really is something properly called theory in sociology, and second, that the aim of all sociological research should be that of adding to or advancing theory. It is a truth we should never tire of repeating that no genuinely good and seminal work in the history of sociology was written or conceived as a means of advancing theory — grand or small. Each has been written in response to a single, compelling intellectual problem or challenge provided by the immediate intellectual environment. William James did not err in labelling as “tender minded” all systems-builders, whether religious or law, and placing under “tough minded” those who welcome and deal with life in its actual concreteness.
Robert Nisbet, Sociology as an Art Form, New York: O. U. P. 1976, p. 20
This paper was written while I was on sabbatical leave from York University and an Associate of the Center for Humanities, University of Southern California, in receipt of research monies from the Canadian Humanities and Social Science Research Council (no. 451-790154). I am grateful to those institutions. It was read in the lecture series `Philosophy and Sociology: Confrontation and Rapprochement’, University of Dayton, October 9, 1979, and to the Department of Sociology Colloquium, UCLA, November 7, 1979.
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Reference
See John C. McKinney and Edward A. Tiryakian (eds.), Theoretical Sociology, Per- ? ectives and Developments (Appleton Century Crofts, New York, 1970).
I must qualify this generalization by reference to the work of one of my students, Jean E. Saindon. In his Ph. D. dissertation he reports that there is much smoke and very little fire in the running debates between empiricist and idealist (or interpretative) sociology. See his `Epistemological Dogma in Sociological Thought’, Ph. D. Dissertation ( York University, Toronto, 1979 ).
Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1972); and Center and Periphery (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1975). Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought (Basic Books, New York, 1965); Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1967). Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964); Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975); Spectacles and Predicaments (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979); Muslim Society (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981);Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis ( Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1974 ).
s W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice ( Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1966 ).
The dynastic marriage has not been consummated in sociology as it has, e.g. in economics and geography. That should not be a matter of concern, as I shall argue below.
G. C. Archibald, `Method and Appraisal in Economics’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 9 (1979), 305–316.
See my `Nationalism and The Social Sciences’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 1 (1976), 515–528.
This thesis is argued in detail in my Concepts and Society (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1972).
o I do not need a Chomskian innate capacity to learn language (as per his Cartesian Linguistics (Harper and Row, New York, 1966), all I need is a disposition to survive in the environment and hence to `develop’ tools that aid that quest.
See my `Cultural Relativism Again’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 5 (1975), 343–353.
This is Rule A, One, of Anthony Giddens’ New Rules of Sociological Method,(Basic Books New York, 1976), p. 160. The original is in italics.
Whether the position can even be affirmed without self-contradiction, I leave for another occasion. See also Concepts and Society,note 9 above, chapter 5.
Erving Goffman, Asylums (Doubleday Anchor, New York, 1961).
I argued this at length in The Revolution in Anthropology (Humanities Press, New York, 1964; Regnery, Chicago, 1968); and The Story of Social Anthropology,(McGraw-Hill, New York, 1972).
Leon Festinger, H. W. Riecken and Stanley Schacter, When Prophecy Fails (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1956). See also The Revolution in Anthropology,note 16 above, and Bryan Wilson, Magic and the Millennium (London, 1973).
Barbara Goodwin, Social Science and Utopia ( The Harvester Press, Brighton, 1978 ).
See K. R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1963), chapter 1.
See Ernest Gellner, Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973), chapter 4.
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1958); A. R. Louch, Explanation and Human Action (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966); Keith Dixon, Sociological Theory ( Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston, 1973 ).
Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology ( Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1967 ).
This seems to me to happen to the radical programme in the sociology of knowledge. See Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (1981), 173–243.
Consider the disappointment over Headstart that led Moynihan to propose “benign neglect”; over crime and penal problems that led to `labelling theory’; over Project Camelot that led to suspicion of all academic connections to government and so on.
Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (Free Press, Glencoe (Ill.), 1937). See also B. Berelson and G. Steiner, Human Behaviour: An Inventory of Findings ( Harcourt Brace, New York, 1964 ).
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962).
His credentials are scrutinised in Robert Merton, `The Sociology of Science, An Episodic Memoir’, in Robert Merton and Jerry Gaston (eds.), The Sociology of Science in Europe (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1977). Some of my comments are to be found in `Laudan’s Problematic Progress and the Social Sciences’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 9 (1979), 484–97 and my review of Kuhn’s essays, The Essential Tension, in Queen’s Quarterly 87 (1980), 65–8.
J. Agassi, `Scientific Schools and their Success’ in his Science and Society, (D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1981 ).
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Jarvie, I.C. (1983). Realism and the Supposed Poverty of Sociological Theories. In: Cohen, R.S., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Epistemology, Methodology, and the Social Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 71. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1458-7_5
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