The Sociological Tradition, by Robert A. Nisbet
Hausknecht, Murray
For a discipline that is a regular target for bad jokes about its jargon, the superficiality of its concepts, and the pseudo-scientific quality of its research techniques, sociology has...
...But in sociological theory they have been used in a highly distinctive fashion, so that, for example, the notion of Gemeinscha f t-Gesellscha f t represents a distinguishably different perspective from that found in other discussions of the community from Aristotle to Rousseau...
...A nostalgia for the feudal order led the conservative thinkers to see democracy, industrialism, and capitalism as unmitigated evils destroying community, promoting new legitimations of authority, and reordering the traditional status systems...
...rationalization represents a loss as well as a gain...
...Here, I think, is the explanation for some of the cultural ambivalence toward sociology...
...But his theoretical views led Durkheim to insist that a strengthening of "such traits as collective conscience, moral authority, community, and the sacred" is the "only appropriate response to modern conditions...
...and, at a more profound level, any work on the problems of modernization in underdeveloped countries shows the influence of sociological thought on other disciplines...
...In either case, however, enough of the nineteenthcentury heritage remains in contemporary sociology to create a sense of anxiety—therefore, the inevitable jokes...
...The best work in sociology grows out of a "creative paradox...
...That is to say, the perspectives of modern sociology were forged in the nineteenth century as a response to the forces unleashed by the French Revolution and the industrialization of Western Europe...
...tic vision...
...day's world was so accurate that it forces us to adopt their language...
...Or, more precisely, their vision of to...
...In their work "community" or "religion" become analytical concepts...
...If Durkheim's concern for order led him to overlook the significance o conflict for anything but disorganization, he same cannot be said of Simtnel...
...The above-mentioned ideas are not unique, of course, to sociology...
...Some of the theorists do not fit too comfortably into this somewhat Procrustean categorization, but it permits an exploration of significant aspects of their theories...
...The present is valued by Marx only insofar as it is a necessary stage for a future society that hods no terrors for him...
...in one form or another they have been the focus of thought in many disciplines...
...In part, the difference is the result of a self-conscious scientific orientation, and an attempt by most of the theorists to be non-ideological in their intellectual work...
...Occasionally, however, this sympathy leads him astray...
...Yet there is a complex relationship between the sociological tradition and the conservative ideological thought of the nineteenth century...
...On the whole, Nisbet is a very knowledgeable and reliable guide, be cause he is fundamentally in sympathy with the style and temper of the work of most of the men he is writing about...
...Although sociology "falls in its objectives and in the political and scientific values of its principal figures, in the mainstream of modernism, its essential concepts and its implicit perspectives place it much closer, generally speaking, to philosophical conservatism...
...Yet the cutting edge of the new per spective is the result of a scientific orientation wedded to a moral and artis...
...the President busily peruses the latest public opinion surveys...
...He saw the old order held together and animated by a pervasive "prophetic pneuma...
...The sociological thinkers, on the other hand, accepted the passing of feudalism and were committed to the new social order, and perhaps because of this, were able to think about society in a different fashion...
...Nisbet does not recount their "systems...
...In the main these were "alienated" thinkers: "Alienation, cortsidered as a sociological temper, is the antithesis of the idea of progress and of rationalist individualism...
...behind the new ideas were moral responses to the world and a play of imagination...
...And this runs against the American grain...
...These ideas, the core of the sociological tradition, are community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation...
...dition are sceptical of the inevitability of progress and the inevitability of the growth of human potential...
...For a discipline that is a regular target for bad jokes about its jargon, the superficiality of its concepts, and the pseudo-scientific quality of its research techniques, sociology has an astonishingly prominent position in the culture...
...In this sense Marx was less "alienated" and more in tune with the temper of his time than the politically conservative Max Weber...
...Some of this is mere faddism, but in large measure it is an indication of a feeling that somehow sociology has something relevant to say...
...The modern industrial society with its rationallegal order and impersonality in relationships among people represents "the disenchantment of the world...
...In the hands of a Weber or a Durkheim this idea is reshaped to tell us something about the nature of social processes...
...Those who loom largest and occupy most of his attention are Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel...
...From its inception, then, the sociological tradition has taken as its point of departure the problems of modern societies, and that fact gives the discipline its contemporary relevance...
...Breaking the magic spell is necessary if one is to reap the benefits of the modern world, and Weber, no more than the Marx to whom he is often opposed, is willing to forgo these benefits...
...This latter quality can easily be seen in Simmel's analysis of the urban milieu, and it is also present, though not as transparently, in Weber's use of the idea of rationalization...
...So, for example, in discussing the significance of the conceptual distinction between "class" as used in Marxian theory and the Weberian "status group" Nisbet says, "Today, as a sociological concept, class is dead...
...that is, the perspectives that make up the tra...
...rather, in the manner of a historian of ideas, he is interested in the way they have treated certain central themes or "unit-ideas" that were elaborated by later theorists...
...Others were also terrified of the future: de Tocqueville foresaw egalitarianism spawning mass society, and Durkheim feared the progressive breakdown of social organization...
...and Nisbet is well aware of this...
...But the thrust of his work, e.g., Politics as a Vocation, is to warn us against those who wish to enchant us again...
...So bald a statement is an obvious over-simplification...
...rather, a clear-eyed, almost stoical, view of a tragic present...
...A similar emphasis is also to be found in a Bonald or a de Maistre, but Durkheim neither longed for nor advocated a return to a premodern social order...
...In the writings of de Lamennais, Protestantism "represented in its emphasis upon individual faith and its depreciation of ritual and liturgy, a destructive force in European history...
...After all, no "tradition" is all of a piece...
...Anomie," "power structure," "Protestant Ethic," are a regular part of cocktail-party babble while in San Francisco there is a singing group called "Max Weber and the Charismatics...
...the idea of religion becomes an "analytic perspective" rather than simply an object of attack or defense...
...This is not a wholly irrational feeling, for the fundamental ideas at the heart of the best of contemporary sociological thinking "are refractions of exactly the same forces that also produced the outlines of modern liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism...
...The paradox is probably best illustrated by Durkheim, a committed Dreyfusard, haunted by a vision of the breakdown of social order...
...The future that frightened the great theorists is our present...
...There is in Weber, then, a celebration neither of the past nor of the future...
...They pinpointed our dilemmas, and, because they are in "the mainstream of modernism," they speak our language...
...This historical context is the starting point for Robert Nisbet's exploration of the work of the great nineteenth-century theorists...
...Durkheim's awareness of the socially disorganizing effects of nineteenth-century industrialism and capitalism produced a sociological theory that crucially undermined the atomistic and individualistic social theories that served as the ideological underpinnings for capitalism...
...yet the vision and temper of the sociological tradition is one of alienation and disenchantment...
...The present was threatened not only by those who rejected the existing social order, but also by the future the present was giving birth to...
...Yet he is surely correct in stressing the conservative drift of the sociological tradition...
...To adopt a language is to adopt a perspective and a mood...
...It is this sense of a threat to the present from people and ideologies enthralled by visions of the past or a heady optimism about the future that, in part, gives the conser%ative cast to the sociologfcaI tradition...
...it was an "enchanted" world of the spirit...
...Weber is well aware, though, that enchantment too has its benefits...
...Many, including soc'ologists, are still firm believers in the inevitability of progress, while others, if they have ceased to believe in the inevitability of anything, still try to remain committed to the idea that the future need not be a glossy version of the present...
...Many sociologists will find that a death certificate has been issued rather prematurely...
Vol. 14 • May 1967 • No. 3
