Outspoken Animus

...Lastly, and by the way, sauvage has no such "sensational" connotations in French as "savage" has in English...

...that respected authorities dignify crude moral ideas by bestowing on them the trappings of jargon, and propagate nonsense or vague probabilities by "threatening the reader with mathematics" or promising future results from hitherto sterile quantification...

...What is new about Stanislav An-dreski's lucid and highly charged critique is that the author himself belongs to the union—he is a professor of sociology at the University of Reading—and he trains upon the several social sciences (including economics) an impressive array of information marshalled with great dialectical power...

...His ability to relate the state of the art to current events is unremitting and mostly praiseworthy, but his inability to make these connections from one clear point of view weakens their power to illuminate and lands him in contradictions...

...To demonstrate that the social sciences now deal in sorcery—by which he means incantations and magic on the one side, superstition and gullibility on the other—Andreski takes up representative scholars ranging from Talcott Parsons to Claude Levi-Strauss...

...There is throughout the book a kind of antinomianism that revolves like the beam of a lighthouse, creating darkness and mystery wherever it happens not to shine at the moment...

...Perhaps Andreski's outspoken animus (which outstrips tolerance in the latter third of the book) derives from an irritable restlessness about the contemporary world...

...Among other things, he shows that the modern social sciences proceed by extensive relabeling, resulting in "massive trivialization...

...author, "The House of Intellect" Attacks on sociology and sister ologies are not new, but they have generally come from students of history or literature or the physical sciences who were intellectually offended by the claims and language of the supposed sciences of man...

...It inspects many large and busy rooms within the house of intellect and tries to account for what goes on there in luxury and adulation, apparently untouched by repeated questioning—making the social sciences something like what astrology was to the searching and skeptical mind of the Renaissance...

...Regardless of its flaws, big and little, Social Sciences as Sorcery deserves the thoughtful man's open-minded attention and close reading...

...The top men are after money from the foundations, the young ones are sycophants, and so on...

...The indictment is not confined to these main heads...

...The secondary or preliminary discussions—relating to determinism and free will, epis-temology and quantification, assumptions and deductive reasoning include some of the most interesting and valuable parts of the book...

...At the outset he tells us that nobody named in the book is to be thought of as deliberately practicing stunts or foisting a fraud on the public...

...that the most touted works obscure or muddle past knowledge...

...Some lesser objections are Andreski's use of cliches contrary to fact about Rousseau and Hegel, his attributing to James Mill (instead of Godwin) the hopes Malthus set out to destroy, the singular plural musea, some hasty non sequiturs, and his absurd proposition that until this century all historians devoted themselves exclusively to writing up "the glorious deeds of great men...

...His detailed analyses of their writings point out how far from knowledge and novelty, or again, from intelligibility and observable fact, their oracular deliverances wander...

...of Bacon's principle of scientific research—the conviction that when the proper method has been developed, very mediocre people will be able to apply it and obtain results greater than the minds that produced them...

...The only signs of "progress," Andreski notes, are successive vogues, expressed in the tireless repetition of unnecessary words such as "structure" and "role": Like minnows, the practitioners turn together to follow in their purportedly scientific enterprise currents of opinion generated by outside social and political forces...

...True, Andreski's impetuous soul leads him into pointless anger from time to time, but when his critical spirit regains its poise there is no doubt that he can think to some purpose...

...But the author has another target besides the disciplines themselves, namely the social scientists...

...In almost all the references to groups or types of workers, however, the imputation of bad motives is clear and strong...

...This is a deplorable (law in an otherwise admirable piece of intellectual sanitation, all the more regrettable in that it obscures an important sociological fact: What has happened is the extension to social science (and the humanities, too, God knows...

...For example, how are we to reconcile his complaint about mediocre brains with his suggestion that they subtly convey a crypto-conservative political outlooke—specially after he has so brilliantly argued that "conservative" by itself means nothing to a rational student of society...

...In addition, he lauds as Marx's "best prophecy" the prediction that capitalist ownership would come to be concentrated in a few hands—and hence be easy to dispossess—whereas in reality it is control that has been concentrated, with ownership widely distributed...