Alan Wolfe's Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation
Stout, Jeffrey
WHOSE KEEPER? SOCIAL SCIENCE AND MORAL OBLIGATION, by Alan Wolfe. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1989. 371 pp. $25.00 Adam Smith became professor of moral...
...Yet Wolfe seems largely 408 • DISSENT Books unaware of the long and rich tradition of constructivism in which he is participating, and he does little to clarify the sociological version of the theory he prefers...
...There are hard choices ahead, gains as well as losses to contemplate, and no higher ground available for the discontented...
...Social theory has therefore undergone a corresponding division of intellectual labor...
...Wolfe is saying that the market and the state have been living off of civil society from the beginning...
...This idea seems to apply in some areas of life...
...Wolfe's ambitions for the social sciences are rather grandiose...
...The book for which he is now most famous, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, came later...
...Philosophical alternatives to his theory, when considered at all, are treated dismissively...
...Neither professional philosophers, theologians, novelists, nor political leaders, he says, are capable of providing us with the sort of understanding of our common life that Smith provided for his contemporaries...
...410 • DISSENT...
...This task cannot be accomplished with borrowed tools...
...One thing Wolfe does not practice, in short, is moral philosophy...
...Civil society requires defense...
...In both cases, Wolfe concentrates on what is happening to the way certain obligations are being discharged—especially care of children, the elderly, and the needy...
...It deserves to be understood on its own terms, not on the terms of theorists intent upon conquering it for their own disciplines...
...Wolfe offers a similarly revealing discussion of the political scientist Lawrence Mead...
...Wolfe does not...
...Modern societies have distinct, differentiated parts: the market, the state, and civil society...
...Wolfe's book does not attempt a detailed reexamination of Smith, and it would be unfair to dwell on the weaknesses of his interpretation of eighteenth-century thought...
...He marshals data from many sources to show how families, communities, and voluntary associations have been transformed, often for the worse, as obligations have in recent decades been shifted to market or state and reinterpreted in terms of rights...
...He wants to take Smith back from the right-wing economists and claim him as an exemplar for sociology as a kind of moral philosophy...
...His book includes no rigorous reflection on how best to conceive of the moral life...
...Meanwhile, the welfare state confers increasingly disproportionate benefits on the middle class...
...Under social circumstances like ours, an interpretation of our situation supplied by the social sciences is destined to remain one among many, carrying no more authority than that of the philosopher or the novelist...
...He does not, however, leave his fellow sociologists unscathed...
...His examination of America did not markedly lessen that suspicion, but his examination of Scandinavia gave him new worries about state-oriented solutions to the same problems...
...Sociologists, it seems, are often too busy imitating the approaches of neighboring disciplines to work out an approach uniquely suited to their proper subject matter, civil society...
...Wolfe takes his tools to two sites...
...They, according to Wolfe, are the true "theater of moral debate in modern society...
...Selfinterest and politically enforced obligation are not, Wolfe insists, the only motivations at work in the human breast...
...What is the difference between applying a moral rule, an activity Wolfe approves of, and appealing to a principle, an activity he frowns upon...
...He would like to recover the moral tradition to which Smith's political economy belonged...
...The responsibility falls, therefore, to the social sciences...
...The threat to civil society appears every bit as real in the one case as in the other...
...It would be unrealistic to hope for more...
...Lacking a sense of obligation, they will be bound to wreak havoc not only in their families or SUMMER • 1990 • 409 Books their friendships but in the economic and political orders as well...
...Smith, who helped found the social sciences, "was by trade a professor of moral philosophy...
...His moral philosophy was designed to give a place not only to commerce, where self-interest reigns, but also to republican politics and civil society...
...His conceptual tools may not be carefully wrought, but he uses them to good effect...
...It therefore follows, they believe, that it ought to apply in all...
...His followers, though themselves often unwilling to admit it, have the same calling...
...Our society just doesn't have a single SUMMER • 1990 • 407 Books moral philosophy, and it is as unlikely to get one from sociologists as from anyone else...
...But he gives few hints about how this attitude should express itself politically or about how we might defend civil society once we understand the forces placing it at risk...
...His conception of civil society is still largely defined in negative terms: it is the sphere of associational life that is left over once the economic and the political are subtracted...
...It therefore makes sense to say that in those days Scotland had an operative moral philosophy...
...The social sciences, Wolfe holds, are and should be the operative moral philosophies of modern societies...
...They therefore get less and less support from families, friends, and neighborhoods, and the need for state intervention grows...
...Regrettably, given the author's ambitions for his discipline, this is where the book succeeds least...
...The other is Scandinavia, where the threat comes primarily from the welfare state...
...In looking to religion, philosophy, literature, or politics to find the rules of moral obligation, we look in the wrong place...
...Loneliness and isolation are rampant...
...There are many facts here to make those of us on the left squirm...
...Not that those facts are entirely discouraging...
...Wolfe does not consider the threats symmetrical...
...Wolfe is at his best when showing how the imperialistic aims of the Chicago school economists, in particular, threaten to flatten out the structure of human motivation...
...The central concepts of the theory—such as obligation, rule, moral code, dilemma, and social practice—are only sketchily defined, and Wolfe does not defend his decision to make them central...
...The question is how, if at all, civil society can be strengthened in either setting...
...What they seem to have in common, on his view, is that they all involve a particular kind of rule that individuals use in deliberation, debate, and appraisal of human action...
...Why define moral codes in terms of rules, given the objections to this approach recently articulated by a moral philosopher like Annette Baier...
...But not many ruling classes have been as serious about developing and inculcating a quasi-official moral outlook as Smith's contemporaries were, and few societies today possess either the cultural uniformity or the educational system to make it happen again...
...Civil society, meanwhile, lying like Poland between two hostile armies, has been invaded repeatedly by both sides and today finds itself impoverished, facing an uncertain future...
...Workers and citizens who lack the moral sensibilities that can be supplied only by civil society are likely to feel no real connection with one another...
...The first is the United States, where civil society is threatened mainly by the market...
...The Theory of Moral Sentiments came first, both temporally and logically, in Smith's thinking...
...But it will do some other things that need doing for leftist social thought, and it may well be that trying to follow Smith's example helped Wolfe get them done...
...Both John Rawls, the leading contemporary proponent of constructivism, and Emile Durkheim, to whom Wolfe's theory is directly indebted, come in for severe criticism, but neither one is interpreted with requisite care...
...It is the task of sociology to determine what makes civil society distinctive and thus to discover what we stand to lose if civil society is further invaded by the market's cost-benefit rationality and the welfare state's preoccupation with individual rights...
...The young, the old, the needy, the ill, and the marginal must often be institutionalized to be cared for at all...
...Because the American data are also bracing, the joint effect of the case studies is doubly worrisome...
...Ambivalence, not nostalgia, he says, is the fitting attitude for sociology to take toward modernity...
...Yet Wolfe is surely right in supposing that sociology can make itself more valuable to the culture by reflecting on the moral assumptions it makes, and his criticisms of those assumptions are in some cases highly instructive...
...In an interesting chapter called "Sociology Without Society," he convicts such sociologists as Peter Blau, Morris Janowitz, and Talcott Parsons for relying excessively on "models of moral obligation taken from . . . economics and political science...
...So I suspect that Wolfe's view of the social significance of the social sciences is insufficiently sociological...
...The educational system they instituted was self-consciously designed to inoculate the future leaders of the nation against evangelical enthusiasm, the skepticism of Smith's friend David Hume, and traditionalist moral qualms about the expanding sphere of commerce...
...The political sphere has become the sprawling bureaucratic domain of the welfare state...
...A social order of separate compartments needs separate departments of theorists to supply its selfunderstanding...
...The standard solutions proposed by the right and the left—namely, "more freedom for the market" and "more state intervention" — seem more like symptoms than cures...
...Third, civil society requires defense in practice because the sphere of life within which people acquire a sense of obligation to others cannot shrink beyond a certain point without undermining all forms of associational life...
...Modernity does in certain respects increasingly confirm the claims of economists like Gary Becker and political scientists like Mancur Olson, but only because civil society is in certain respects increasingly dominated or displaced by alien forces...
...First, sociology needs its own analytical tools because forms of associational life structured around obligations are in crucial respects unlike other forms of life...
...It allows middle-class people to "buy the labor of others who will perform their obligations for them...
...Scandinavian socialism has had its share of successes— in liberating women to enter the marketplace, in extending help to the helpless, in equalizing incomes...
...Such theoretical imperialism reflects and reinforces tragic tendencies within modernity itself...
...His responsibility, along with that of his counterpart at Edinburgh, was to articulate his society's self-understanding, in lectures and published writings, thereby shaping the outlook of the entire student body as well as tutoring the educated public at large...
...Conservative defenders of the capitalist market and socialist defenders of the welfare state will now have to face the evidence that their policies, while clearly yielding benefits in various ways, are also making things worse in others...
...But the rates of crime, suicide, and family disintegration are rising sharply...
...This is not to say, however, that Wolfe fails to discover something morally significant when he engages in his empirical work...
...The harshest effects are felt by those who function poorly in the economic and political systems...
...Why focus on obligations instead of traits of character, or on moral dilemmas instead of the settled dispositions and affections that determine which dilemmas a person is likely to confront...
...25.00 Adam Smith became professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1752...
...Wolfe's moral philosophy is a variety of constructivism, the theory that human beings make the moral rules by which they live...
...Wolfe's claim that his version of constructivism provides an effective response to the charge of relativism receives no detailed explication or defense...
...will not do for us what The Theory of Moral Sentiments did for Smith's Scotland...
...Instead, he sketches the broad outlines of the constructivist ethical theory...
...he thinks Scandinavian socialism has done more good and less harm than American capitalism has...
...Because so many Scandinavians of both sexes are full-time wage earners, with women often doing jobs that used to be done within the family, few people have the time and energy they used to have to forge lasting social bonds with others...
...It thrust a small handful of like-minded moral philosophers into a position of influence and power seldom enjoyed by intellectuals of any sort...
...None of these questions is answered in Whose Keeper...
...He began his case studies deeply suspicious of market-oriented solutions to social problems...
...Economics is the theory of the market, political science the theory of the state, and sociology the theory of civil society...
...Predisposed to see Scandinavian socialism as the great success story of the left, he was chastened by the facts he found, and it is important for those of us who share his biases to confront those facts too...
...It is unlikely that any group of theorists can play a role for us comparable to the one Smith and a few others like him played for eighteenth-century Scotland...
...The moderate Presbyterians for whom Smith spoke found themselves in a powerful position after the union of Scotland and England in 1707...
...Positively, it seems to be the sphere of families, communities, and voluntary associations, but Wolfe does not locate its boundaries precisely or say very clearly why these various entities should be grouped together...
...What makes rules of this kind distinctive, when contrasted with economic rules of efficiency and political rules about rights, is that they pertain to moral obligations...
...So when economists and political scientists try to extend their modes of social analysis beyond the market and the state, respectively, we should not be surprised that they meet with some explanatory success...
...They have an idea about how the world works...
...Wolfe is better at arguing against the use of borrowed tools than he is at fashioning new tools of his own...
...Indeed there are serious dangers, Wolfe thinks, when this division of intellectual labor is not respected, when theorists of one sort try to take over the entirety of social life on behalf of their own discipline...
...This is the point in the argument where some authors simply turn their backs and run, offering only praise for the past, gloom for the present, and doom for the future...
...We should be looking to the social sciences instead...
...As Alan Wolfe points out, Smith was no mere economist and no champion of self-interest as a trustworthy guide for all the spheres of human life...
...If they eventually suck it dry, they too will be threatened...
...What Smith described as the sphere of commerce has developed into the vast empire of the capitalist market...
...Second, sociology is and ought to be a moral philosophy because obligations are its central topic...
...Whose Keeper...
...If we take this view as the key to Wolfe's conception of civil society, the reasoning behind his main theses becomes straightforward...
...He is surely right about that...
...To hold such a professorship in that time and place was to be recognized as a chief spokesperson for enlightened Scottish culture as a whole...
...Wolfe is interested in Smith not as an object of scholarly exposition but as a model...
...Wolfe is a leftist...
Vol. 37 • July 1990 • No. 3
