What, Then, Is Sociology?

August 13th, 2007 Posted in Concepts, What is Sociology?

Sociology is at the third level of mystery. Call it the constant and universal experience of the plural. It comes right after, if not parallel to, our awareness of material and life. When we attempt to describe and understand any more-than-one situation, we are doing sociology.

Plural events are all over the place. The dance of moon and earth, the suns in their galaxies, flocks of geese, bee hives, herds of cattle, a man and his horse, the arrangement of furniture in a room. The togetherness of people traditionally is separated from the rest yet the comparison of hordes of locusts with the tribal hordes invading eastern Europe out of Siberia in the thirteenth century is a vivid image and, aside from whether it is exactly true or not, it gives us an understanding that is precisely sociological.

The adventures of our species alone provide our subject the vast mass of all of our social actions from the distant past to the ultimate future–all of us in the mix. But however intense and memorable to participants and witnesses, most of these actions are destined to pass into a shared amnesia of those alive in the rolling present. In some cockeyed optimistic way these mind boggling evanescent events define our project. We may pick limited sectors for attention but we should be alert to this larger context, the everything plural.

The sociological way is split by the organization of the university. Essentially specialty subjects logically within sociology but centered on long established institutions like politics, economics, family, crime and law are treated as independent. Though each is different and distinctive in its plural being they are all describable by the same social forms and processes.

People who are in large part sociologists in their attitudes and attentions are presumed to be something else and the unity of the sociological project is hampered. Identified sociologists venturing into any of the several institutional spaces and other similar specialties are not considered the same as the brothers and sisters already there under independent titles. Economics and the sociology of economics are separate. Criminology and the sociology of crime are not the same. Political science and the sociology of politics are different ways.

Other subjects conventionally considered outside the bounds of sociology are in some part within the plural arena as well. Medicine, the military, sports, design and fashion, business, engineering all fall within the unity of the plural experience.

I am not proposing a radical reorganization of the social studies (essentially the confusion does not matter, there are enough oats for all the horses) except to establish more exactly the extra-wide range of our subject. I argue a unified sociology. Like a generalist fisherman who is not distracted by the different kinds of fish though recognizing them, the sociologist sees all social types as significant prizes. He casts a wide net and claims the whole catch–nothing ignored, nothing thrown back.

So the specialties. And then the basics. The plural analogue of the atom and the gene. Forms and processes that recur in all social sectors; concepts like the unit act and the group. A useful insight here could redound through the entire range of our subject.

There is also a practical, concrete level of encounter, the instant of immediate experience along with any preparation before and any evaluation after. Here, doing sociology, like speaking prose, is something one does whether he recognizes it or not. My suspicion: that everyone has at least a rule-of-thumb sociology. This, in its various forms, is the ordinary sociology. A most useful outcome for our conscious sociological works would be a sharpening and an increased sophistication of the gangs’ (as in all here) ways.

Optimistic but not foolish. The unity of subject does not mean a unity of content. The basics are divided among different, and frequently competing, conceptual and political orders. The one that I will be offering here is a breakout from the positivist tradition. Maybe the critique of this line is misdirected, maybe a closer approximation of reality lies elsewhere. As we go along I will be borrowing from the others, especially the negative lines. But like a miner underground with a small flickering light I might have as much reality as I can handle. Where I reach will have something to do with from where I started.