Peter Emmerson

 5.2 Let’s get back to science

The problem of ideals discussed in this essay is a corollary of the work of Norbert Elias, who as far as I can see, has taken our understanding of questions in relation to what we can know in general, and what we can expect from science further than anyone else. It is my impression that most other writers have unfortunately missed the point. This is especially the case with those people who, so bereft at the latest defeat of idealism, left grieving over the corpse of the absolute truth of Marxism, have transmogrified into postmodernists: such people were more political activists than social scientists anyway. By contrast, if they had listened to Elias they could have continued to develop the sociological enterprise proper, founded by the likes of Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and unlike Parsons, taken it to the next more scientific ‘reality congruent’ level.

By the mid-1960s the structural-functionalist model, synonymous with the American sociologist Parsons, had almost achieved the level of dominance required for it to be given the status of what Thomas Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. Elias however was not convinced, having detected the haunting voice of Homo clausus in Parsons’ arguments. For example, one of Parsons’ most important concepts is the notion of system. System implies some structure that is governed by a fixed set of rules that bring about order, continuity and resistance to change – in What is Sociology? Elias says: ‘[t]hink of concepts like norm and value, structure and function, social class or social system. The very concept of society has this character of an isolated object in a state of rest’: 113. I think Elias has a point. Parsons’ work freezes the life out of the people it seeks to understand, thereby distorting the feverish, noisy, chatty experience of the world I inhabit, in favour of a refrigerated, sterile, noiseless and orderly model of human activity in which institutionalized automata drift elliptically around the social system like a planet round the sun, kept in equilibrium by ‘functional invariants’. The sheer dynamism of an ordinary day is missing because structural determinants are privileged over people.

Since this time Parsonianism has gone the way of Marxism and in the process has turned down the level of certainty firing through sociological networks, forcing the truth-finders in sociology to look elsewhere for ideas to explain their predicament. The collapse of theoretical authority has been associated with the development of a series of almost warring factions within sociology, redolent of the experiences described so vividly by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in relation to the formation and collapse of messianic movements: see When Prophecy Fails. As the apostles of doom (ex-Marxists/functionalists) gradually begin to understand how foolish they have been in over-committing to the faith, they experience cognitive dissonance – feelings of conflict and deep unease flood their thoughts about their belief and involvement in the enterprise. At first these feelings are mitigated by an attempt to shore up their growing level of doubt by looking outside the membership and recruiting new support. Many sociologists reacted to the theoretical crisis in confidence by looking for support by recruiting the ideas of high status non-sociological truth-finders such as philosophers and mathematicians. Their plight was made more salient by the election of a more authoritarian Conservative government in the early 1980s which portrayed sociologists for the most part as subversive parasites in need of a dose of reality: the newly confident established business figurations headed by Margaret Thatcher, moved the reduced funding to more useful sociology.

One aspect of these changes has seen the growth of interest in mathematical idealism, to feed the informational, number crunching needs of ‘government by audit’. By reducing taxes and interrelatedly central financial support for public services in the 1980s, the Conservative governing figurations had to put controls in place to limit the potential for a decline in the output and quality of services provided. Whilst this was disguised in all sorts of ways to make the auditing pill more palatable, it was essentially a surveillance device; Ofsted being an educational example.

Another idealistic reaction to the cognitive dissonance experienced by many post-1960s sociologists has been a resurgence of interest in the work of a whole set of relativist philosophers. Probably the most significant example has seen the importation of French structuralist and post-structuralist philosophers such as Michel Foucault into sociology, an act of re-colonization by the old enemy. Other notable inclusions into the sociological canon are Heidegger and Benjamin.

I think Festinger’s model explains quite well the behaviour of some sociologists who in the wake of the collapse of confidence in Parsonianism and Marxism and the attack from the neo-capitalist followers of Adam Smith, shored up their relative uncertainty by recruiting new members to the discipline in order to regain control. Whilst I have very fond memories of two of the most eminent and influential sociologists of modern times, Zygmunt Bauman and Tony Giddens, who have always been warm and generous to me, I feel they have been too willing to listen to outsiders from cultural and literary philosophy, rather than contemplate the problem from within. Why couldn’t they listen to Elias? Cognitive dissonance, or even anomie, are very powerful forces. However, it is arguable that much of the trauma about the impending failure of sociology during the crisis of the 1970s could have been assuaged and a damaging insurgency from the old guard of truth-finders, the philosophers, possibly avoided. The messiahs, Marx and Parsons, could have been put aside by their apostles, or the apostles left behind, in favour of a less idealistic programme of research focused on figurational processes.

Elias was a trained scientist, having studied medicine as an undergraduate, who understood Comte’s message about the historical nature of knowledge, and the scientific character of sociology. However, Elias was more aware of the problems this legacy involves, in particular, the need to thoroughly sociologize the material inherited by sociologists, heavily contaminated as it is by mystical and philosophical influences. Such a project requires a more ‘reality congruent’ approach and the recognition that social experience is dynamic: it is necessary to replace old, static concepts inherited from predecessors with new more sociological, scientific concepts that are fit for the purpose of understanding social processes. For Elias all things are social, partly because of the significance of language in our lives, as Comte pointed out. Our knowledge comes to us from the previous generation, who taught us how to speak and what was important. However, unlike Comte, Elias recognized to a greater extent the significance of dynamics for an understanding of social life. So, as with natural scientists who produced a whole set of new concepts such as force, velocity and gravity; sociologists need a language that will facilitate scientific access to their material, an example being ‘figuration’.