CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

There is a vast hand-wringing literature bemoaning the present state of the social sciences. Let me state at the outset that this is a posture that I do not share. A great many areas of social research are robust and charting new ideas and directions. In its very diversity, social science in the United States encompasses both innovation and imagination. Rather than attempt to review all fields and all purposes, I will devote this limited space to a less global topic, but one that is arguably more manageable in essay form. In the midst of growth, a few areas of social science are undergoing decay and, yes, even decadence. For these I intend to offer a foot soldier's view, rather than the usual bird's-eye perspective that starts with ideological disputations among the social sciences and ends in metaphysical suppositions. It is a view derived from my lifetime in both the publishing and the academic trenches, and my chairmanship since its inception in 1998 of a small foundation for social policy.

Let us start with the "voting behavior" of social scientists. By voting behavior I mean dues-paying membership in professional associations by those who identify themselves with their specific techniques and goals of research in specific fields. Here we see a remarkable transformation over the past century. From approximately 1890 to 1920 five academic disciplines were established that defined graduate study in the social sciences for most of the century. These were anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, and economics. Each of these fields was initially characterized by high levels of generalization: theory construction, wide-ranging albeit imprecise observation and ethnography, and above all a sense of historical and philosophical antecedents. Indeed, the social sciences took both history and philosophy into exciting new areas using relatively modest tools of research to settle old scores, such as how civilizations rise, thrive, and decline, or more modestly, why high crimes and misdemeanors seem closely linked to class, race, nation, and family breakdown.

From roughly 1920 to 1960, largely as a result of external factors such as advanced forms of warfare, emerging totalitarian systems, mass state-sponsored murders, guerrilla insurgency, economic upheavals and instability, and the rise of developing areas to political independence, the social sciences were transformed. The fault lines shifted from an emphasis upon history and philosophy, or conditions antecedent to change, to a series of concerns about the immediate present. This was often called policy research. Social science developed ad hoc responses to social transformations. There was a shift from departments to programs, from schools to research agencies, and from constructing large theory to positive channeling. Sophisticated theory was augmented, and in some instances replaced, by solid methodology. The role of power groups, economic classes, political parties, and voluntary associations became central in this shift in awareness from big civilizations to little communities—and to efforts to make them better.

From 1960 to 2000, yet another great transformation took place, a dizzying series of professional changes that unalterably changed the landscape of social research in advanced nations, especially the United States and Europe. What began as a set of practical extensions of the older core group of social sciences, that is, specialized projects and programs, blossomed into full-scaled new disciplines. We experienced the emergence of communications studies, social linguistics, demography, urban studies, health and hospital administration, operations research, management sciences, and criminology and penology, to cite the most obvious. Under the impact of computer technologies, logic and method were married. Game theory, crisis intervention, risk analysis, chaos study, rational choice, evaluation research, and statistical analysis as an end in itself, all emerged as new ways to examine old issues. In addition, area studies, drawing its talent pool largely from social, geographical, and historical disciplines, exploded into a new cluster of independent organizations. A corollary to organizational diversification is the multiplication of outlets for research. In a single new area, criminology, the following journals were started in the past quarter century: Social Justice, Trends in Organized Crime, Punishment and Society, Theoretical Criminology, Social and Legal Studies, Law & Social Inquiry, Online Journal of Justice Studies, Critical Criminology, and Crime, Law and Social Change. And this is by no means an exhaustive list. Criminal Justice Abstracts provides an exhaustive list. The same situation holds in areas such as gender studies. More than two hundred journals are abstracted in Women's Studies Abstracts. The Sage Publications brochures list fourteen journals in communications studies—and this represents the offerings of a single publisher!

In contrast, there are well over 120 journals dedicated to sociology in the English language. Even if one includes institutional and student members of the 12,000 or so members of the American Sociological Association, this fact is a clear indication of balkanization within rather than integration of the field. Again, Sociological Abstracts offers a relatively complete listing in this single area. The presence of such a plethora of periodicals may indicate the values of diversity, but I suspect that this condition is less an intentional function of scientific need than the absence of a shared set of commonly adhered-to scientific standards or social goals.

The success or failure of each of these fields and methods of social research cannot be addressed in this brief summing up. But to invoke an old Parsonian paradigm, any sense of the universalism of a field seems to have given way to a series of particularisms that resemble closed monads rather than an integrated system. The use of organizational "sections" within the umbrella of the traditional professional associations is a mechanism to satisfy these linkages to the particular association while maintaining some thin semblance of an overall organizational identity. However, it in fact has only further balkanized the theory and practice of the social sciences. Clearly, a single essay cannot review the workings of this pattern of diversification. Rather, my task is far more limited, but nonetheless interesting. My task is to review the cultural contradictions of sociology. More specifically, I want to examine how a single field decomposes, despite its best efforts, because of an unresolved admixture of ideology, culture, and science.

To perform this modest task, I will emphasize only official publications of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) in order to avoid or at least to minimize any charge of bias. My contention is that the contradictions of which I speak, which were first described in my 1993 book, The Decomposition of Sociology, are not matters of personal proclivities or particular people, but of structural deformities within the field.[1]In using language such as "structural deformities" I hope to draw attention to the inherent issues within one discipline, not the character of its personnel. Young people enter the field of sociology with the best intentions, as they do any other field of endeavor. They want to do well for others and right by themselves. They want to perform public service and ensure their own personal security. The problem in sociology today is that these competing goals are extremely difficult to achieve. The capacity of a science to explain events and measure trends is at odds with the aims of its ideology, when it has one. In the words of an advertisement for Social Problems, when the goal is to "get active in the pursuit of social justice," science necessarily takes a back seat.

If seeking truth and doing well were perfectly isomorphic, then the need for critical discourse would be redundant. The problem is that, as in all walks of life, we find that professional aims of social research are often in competition with one another. As in biography, so too in sociology, good people can perform hideous acts, while bad people can engage in actions best described as heroic and even self-sacrificing. In order to engage in analysis, rather than make judgments about political agendas, I have increasingly come to see the tasks of sociology precisely in such larger historical terms. That judgments will be made anyhow is inevitable. But judgment in science should flow from an extrapolation of what we witness taking place in the present rather than a priori judgments of what we wish to see for an indeterminate future.

Those desires registered, it remains the case that the force of ideological thinking is all-pervasive. From Karl Mannheim[2] to Melvin J. Lasky[3] we have a literature that understands that the dynamics of ideology rest on utopian expectations. Ideologies are often fueled by the highest, most worthy ambitions and motives. They are hard to eliminate from social science precisely because such aims are deeply embedded in such noble aspirations. Were ideologies simply a force of evil, they could be readily identified and purged from scientific discourse. By the same token, if science were to offer the solace and the balm of human aspirations at the highest level, all would flock to careers in science without concern for the warm embrace of ideology or utopia. We then would live happily ever after with our data and in pursuit of noble causes, rather like Sir Galahad and Don Quixote combined. Since this is not possible, the dynamics of a field merit attention.

In macroscopic terms a dialectical phenomenon has occurred. The social sciences as a whole have expanded their outreach and increased their numbers. In part they have done so at the expense of the older social science disciplines. These newer disciplines have reached out to entirely new constituencies, from lawyers interested in forensic psychology to doctors in patient recovery. One can take as illustrative what has happened in the American Sociological Association. What were once singular panels at its annual meetings—for example, criminology, urban affairs, demography, public opinion, mass movements—have broken away, forming departments, institutes, and organizations in their own right. A professional literature prepared by a younger cohort of scholars has emerged that does not so much engage in combat with the older disciplines, as simply disregard them—perhaps the unkindest cut of all.

Even more astonishing is that these breakaway segments were established behind the backs of the older disciplines, even as such older disciplines heaped calumny and contempt on new efforts to organize applied research. As a result, those with a commitment to everything from social welfare to civic action found their concerns better expressed by the newer, more pragmatic disciplines. Political demands and social movements were able to translate their collective wishes into funding enlargement and redistribution. Meliorative rather than normative concerns prevailed as the policy consequences of actions penetrated into the realm of academic theories.

Let me cite one such case of this profound changeover. Criminology, once a chapter in sociology texts, has become a field that dwarfs in size and outreach the fields that originally nourished it. Instead of a decent symbiotic relationship between older and newer forms of learning, what has emerged is envy and animosity toward the upstarts on the part of the older disciplines. Such reactions are to little avail, since society usually manages to get what it wants from its intellectual classes. Today there are seven important criminology associations in the United States alone with a combined membership of well over 130,000 people. This number is more than ten times the size of the national sociology association. That is more than voting with signature and pocketbook. It is an indication of a profound shift in primary professional allegiances within social science. These newer applied fields receive the funding. These are also the fields providing the social services. Now they are developing theoretical frameworks that will allow them to separate themselves entirely from older fields such as sociology.

At the purely organizational level, the new situation has created a balkanization of data and information within professional life as well as between professions. The need for generalists remains for scholars who are concerned not so much with empirical research and observation as with scanning the current plethora of professions for mechanisms that permit integration and wide-ranging theorizing. But even in the present climate, it has become apparent that researchers within one profession can readily discourse with those of allied professions—sometimes even those remote in character. That has been made possible not by grand schemes but by methodological commonalties and geographical contiguities. There is a sense of procedural integration in how research tools are used and managed rather than theoretical integration in the higher regions of abstract analysis. While this may not be the best of situations, it does permit researchers to make wide-ranging innovations without paying dues to any single social science paradigm or theorem. In an imperfect world, this new explosion in the forms of social science offers great promise for larger breakthroughs over time. In the immediate environment, it prevents dogmatic and doctrinaire views from constricting the pursuit of knowledge. On balance the new conditions of research and theory in social science are an immense step forward from earlier varieties of organizing our understanding of human experience.

In a nutshell, neither the political process nor reactionary know-nothings in general killed classic sociology, but rather a simple evolution in the organization of knowledge, one that reflected changes in American society. Some segments of the older disciplines dug in their heels and saw such trends as the enemy. These incorporated an anti-populist mood—animosity toward popular culture, rejection of the values of material wealth, hatred for suburban lifestyles, and continued assault on real-life evolutionary rather than apocalyptic revolutionary processes to achieve equity. The collapse of communism in Europe between 1989 and 1991 only accentuated the isolation of older disciplines from market economics and social welfare trends in the old and new democratic nations. Environmental concerns quickly hardened into end-of-the-world scenarios in which global enterprises were complicit—global warming and deforestation replaced the older evils of capitalism. What remained constant was the much-anticipated arrival of Armageddon, whether as part of the new "globalization" or the old "capitalism."

Those disciplines that remained acutely aware of changes in the structure of American society over the century—such as economics and political science—have managed to hang onto and even increase their constituencies. They have come to participate and prevail in policy debates at all levels of government. Other fields, like psychology, have had internal fissures between the clinical and the experimental, but that has sharpened their outreach while admittedly also increasing the discipline's internal strains. Those disciplines that became manifestly ideological, such as anthropology and sociology, found themselves at the margins—of politics as well as science. Hobbes comments repeatedly in Leviathan that the end of regimes and rulers is a function of internal disintegration far more frequently than of external intervention. So it may be with several of these older disciplines.

Even those who begrudgingly acknowledge the accuracy of the above interpretation seem reluctant to accept its organizational consequences. Critics of new social science developments speak contemptuously of their positivism, their pragmatism, and their empiricism, which they see as serious weaknesses. Such critics are quick to take refuge in the dark world of subjectivism, ideological irrationality, and sheer prejudice. The net result is a morass of critical writing in which the very notion of science itself is discredited by recourse to anecdotal and blatantly ideological accounts, in which historical and contemporary events are seen not so much as having occurred, but as being "perceived" or "constructed." In their brave new world, all commonly held methodological safeguards and evidentiary appeals to a common body of data are regarded as being in themselves indications of reactionary thought.

Such ideologists end up with tendentious posturing that may seem chic and clever, but is in fact facile and cynical. Typical of this tendency is a book by David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, that concludes with the revelation: "We made no assumption that society has moral boundaries that the prohibition of homosexual activity maintains. Researchers would do well to avoid these gratuitous and frequently misleading assumptions."[4] Another essay, by Ellen Berg writing in the ASA Footnotes, tells us that "feminist theory" is essentially a mechanism for "moving sociology from the 'Malestream,'"—into what one can only imagine with trepidation.[5]

The extraordinarily diverse world of television as it now exists is reduced to "the construction of reality." Ira Glasser, executive director of the ACLU, tells us "television suddenly homogenized everything."[6] Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky make the same point in their book Manufacturing Consent, in which we are informed that "an underlying elite consensus largely structures all facets of the news" indicating "just how propagandistic our mass media are."[7] Mark Fishman extends this premise in Manufacturing the News. Here we find out that bureaucracies "prepackage the news." And that if only news were gathered in politically conscious ways, a "different reality would emerge, one that might challenge the legitimacy of prevailing political structures."[8]

No part of American history or society is left untouched by these ideologists' blatant appeals to a partisan theory of reality. After all, if reality is subjective, then constraints upon imaginary scenarios are readily lifted. Stanley Karnow, usually a sober and sound analyst of international strife, states in In Our Image that "rule of the Philippines made America the great Pacific power that plunged it into World War II."[9] This "colonial relationship" was the cause of the war. This is precisely the argument that Japanese militarists used to justify their attack on Pearl Harbor. Even poor George Washington has not escaped this Alice in Wonderland reversal of cause and effect. In the past depicted as a reluctant leader, who preferred private life to public affairs, Washington is now said to have been "in fact an eager, active and astute politician." To be sure, according to Paul Longmore in The Invention of George Washington, "from the very beginning of the Revolution . . . his fellow Americans substituted him for King George III."[10]

One can multiply a hundredfold such ideological appeals to what amounts to new varieties of muckraking. The amount of subjectivism enlisted in the service of political movements overtly aimed at destabilizing American society seems virtually endless—or better said, limited only by the imagination of the ideologue. Perhaps the sum and substance of such sociology is best summed up by Michael R. Hill, who at least has the decency to state the honest intent of this barrage of the bobble heads: "It is time to turn the tide: ideology first, axiology second, epistemology third."[11] The counter-revolution of post-modernism within at least one of the social sciences became a vehicle for unabashed anti-Americanism as an ideology and subjectivity as a critical literary expression.[12]

It is important to emphasize that flamboyant writing at the intellectual margins by no means characterizes the current state of affairs in social science. Indeed, such writing seems largely indifferent to the process of research and discovery and unaware of the fine prose intended for larger publics as well as the theoretical innovations at the core of many disciplines that equal the achievements of past generations. In some cases, such work exceeds earlier efforts derived from the pantheon of great figures of the past, extending the boundaries of social science by helping us better appreciate relationships and factors that drive our society. What has recently been called the "reformist impulse" in American social science, that is "breaking the yoke of tradition, questioning authority, and celebrating the individual"[13]often serves to provide useful explanations and helpful predictions in human affairs.

In this context, I want to focus on the adversarial culture at the intellectual margins of our field. In the first decade of the twenty-first century we face an out-and-out struggle between the social scientific as a culture and a tradition and new subjectivist ideologies with deep animus for science and its consequences. These misanthropic trends define themselves as unconstrained by rules of evidence or guidelines of experience. They claim to be rooted in higher subjective principles of moral purpose and social justice. The guardians of such trends are more nearly the children of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than of Durkheim and Weber. Their commitment is to history as will and to society as a utopian footnote to the benevolent state, presumably to be well managed by cultivated elites.

Radicalism in periods of failed prophecy often turns rancid, subjective, and irrational. It did so in the 1890s and it again did so in the 1990s. The failure of utopian dreams and ideological visions to materialize does not easily deter the true believer. Such people simply internalize extreme sentiments, making them part of the personality rather than the society. The true believer can either rectify his or her positions, or more likely look at the world as a place that needs further modification in order to maintain the status of the failed beliefs. At such moments, the gulf between normalcy and neurosis becomes transparent. But there is no assurance that reformist paradigms will triumph. The alternative, the search for new modes of abstract theorizing, can be compelling.

Specific forms of struggle belong to the life and times we live with, but the larger considerations remain remarkably stable over time. We should both acknowledge and appreciate that highly qualified social science is indeed being produced and is widely available. We also need to understand that victory does not go assuredly to advocates of rationality without a struggle. The same ferocity, the same determination, the same courage that inspire modern prophets of the subjective will must inspire those who uphold the principles of the objective fact if they are to prevail. In human affairs, victory does not go to better science by default. The history of twentieth-century barbarisms should persuade us that rational knowledge is no guarantor of rational behavior. The role of passion in the forward movement of social science must be acknowledged. The edge, the advantage, resides with the rational only so long as that edge is exercised on the field of intellectual battle—what I have elected to call the trenches of social science.

Ultimately the dilemma for activist sociology, in American activist sociology at least, is that participation in the struggles of the age inevitably ends in a social welfare public policy approach. If sociology rejects the idea of the status quo as a good, or even accepts the idea of moving backwards, say, to a classical liberal solution to problems, it must select from a variety of revolutionary utopias. Hence sociology runs the constant risk of opposition from within—that is, from other visions of utopia—or a welfare model that can elicit public support and government funding.

The second half of the twentieth century was dotted with a plethora of articles and books on poverty and welfare, children and education, health and medical care, communities and their revitalization. All these themes are genuine enough, and the research is authentic enough. But the line between concern for those who are despised and downtrodden and social work as a professional field itself grows blurred, and the vertical line of sources of support for social initiatives becomes unclear. As a result, a field in search of theory and social virtue becomes mired in proclamations of political virtue and programs predicated on crude political expediency.

The source of confusion is that the field of social welfare rests on a distinctly American meliorative sensibility, on the idea that helping people one by one by one can result in a cumulative betterment for humanity. The field of sociology, grounded in thundering European notions of totality, often rests on revolution or reaction, on anything but a quantitative or meliorative approach to social systems and structures. As a result, sociology finds itself in a contradiction. It must deal with specific concerns requiring immediate if partial attention, while operating under the guise of a codebook, which presumes that nothing short of mass rebellion or protest can result in any long-standing benefits to society. Sociology thus has the same dilemma as extremist movements: it promises resolution in the distant future and threatens and is threatened by those who dare assert claims of betterment in the immediate present.

Problems of a macroscopic sort arise steadily. For example, after the terror assaults of September 11, 2001, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was set up as part of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Sociologists were quick to point out, and not without reason, that its guidelines were so broad as to limit civil liberties, allow for invasion of personal privacy, and admit of ethnic or at least religious profiling, in short the usual complaints of federal intervention in the lives of private citizens. Sociologists' concerns reached a peak with resolutions presented in opposition to the March 2003 "foreign intervention" in Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom, on the grounds that it was a "decision taken against the wishes of most of the nations of the world."[14] At the same time, the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) has repeatedly announced new funding prospects for homeland security research in the social and behavioral sciences. It appears that over $800 million for fiscal year 2004 was budgeted for homeland security, and although not much was directly targeted for sociology, the COSSA folks noted that "the social and behavioral sciences cross cut everything in the new Department." Indeed, the same issue of the ASA Footnotes that denounced the war against Iraq happily asserts, "Sociology has a science base for effective communication of risk and crises" and hence is the perfect agency to "design a homeland security alert system."[15] It is painfully superfluous to point out that it is inconsistent to dismiss government policies with a contemptuous wave of the left hand, while at the same time shamelessly soliciting government funds with the right hand. But it is clear that in this instance the profession does not want to leave the arena—and the money—to newer fields in the social sciences.

Outward migration in funding and in organization is precisely what is taking place in the United States. Intellectual twigging is such that even spin-offs from sociology like criminology must now face their own inner rivals. For example, there are groups like ASIS International, self-described as "a global educational organization for security professionals, with more than 33,000 members. Its 2003 annual meetings held in September had as its focus Homeland Security." With a membership roll of roughly three times that of the American Sociological Association and a strong applied orientation that is closer to the ground than a handful of criminology groups, this group clearly has an inside track on government (and increasingly non-governmental) funding resources. Providing security against terrorism is already a big business unto itself. To the deep chagrin and even frustration of older social science professions, society gets what it wants, or at least what its sovereigns think it needs for survival.

Contradiction in both goals and policies for reaching ends-in-view is inherently part of any open society. The problem is that when a single agency or professional group is involved on both sides of the ledger, as both a critic of social welfare and its meliorative consequences and as a seeker of research funding to insure such welfare, the question naturally arises as to just what master a particular discipline serves. The political agenda of a party or a movement is necessarily distinct and often at odds with the scientific credo of professional organizations in social research—but a professional association is not a political movement. We are back precisely to square one, to a consideration of Max Weber's distinction between science and politics as different vocations.[16] Politics and sociology may have equal spiritual claims as a Beruf, as a calling, but they do not have equal merit on the ground as statements of professional responsibilities or personal proclivities.

Were such contradictions within sociology to be acknowledged, as they were by Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and in this connection, socially conscious economists like Joseph Schumpeter,[17] all would be well and good. But it is the stubborn, dogmatic, and ultimately fallacious claims of having transcended the contradictions of the social welfare model on one side and the political policy model on the other that has subjected sociology to an endless cycle of hypocrisy and its practitioners to a steady drumbeat of ridicule and cynicism. The solution is clear enough. If the field of sociology is to regain a measure of respect and self-respect it must recognize its limitations—all too human limitations—and get on with the tasks at hand—however minute or grandiose.

Salvation of a badly decayed field requires the restoration of truth, not persistent allegiance to exaggerated claims, designs, and postures. We must be wary of broadside assaults on social science as such, or there will be no intellectual home to which we can return.[18] The ambition of being a science of society includes analysis of how political beliefs operate in the quotidian lives of a people. As the French sociologist Dominique Schnapper recently reminded us, the "sociological project" is also a claim to be above partisanship and to see the world whole.[19] Such claims are now more violated than observed. At its best, sociology is an honorable vocation and a wide-ranging intellectual engagement. Until the field returns to such first principles, as have other areas of social and behavioral research, the prospects for sociology as a critical discipline within a democratic context are dim. In the absence of serious self-reflection, and in the presence of incursions of partisan ideologies, the steady migration of sociology's best practitioners to other, more fertile fields of social research will continue at its present rate. Contradictions can be resolved. They cannot be evaded, ignored, or blamed on parties and politicians who are in or out of office. The core enemy is and has always been ourselves. That sober recognition has long been overdue.

NOTES

1. Irving Louis Horowitz, The Decomposition of Sociology (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1993).

2. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harvest Books, 1985).

3. Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution: On the Origins of a Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

4. David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 499.

5. Ellen Berg, "Feminist Theory: Moving Sociology from the 'Malestream.'" In Footnotes (ASA) 15:3 (March 1987).

6. Ira Glasser, "Television and the Construction of Reality." ETC: A Review of General Semantics 45:2 (Summer 1988), 161-62.

7. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 306.

8. Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 122.

9. Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1988), 106. (See chapter entitled "Imperial Democracy.")

10. Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 184-185. (See chapter entitled "God Save George Washington! God Damn the King.")

11. Michael R. Hill, "Epistemology, Axiology and Ideology in Sociology," Mid-American Review of Sociology, 9:2 (Spring 1984), 59-77.

12. See Murray J. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 88-89.

13. Lisa Anderson, "The Global Reach of American Social Science," The Chronicle Review (The Chronicle of Higher Education), September 26, 2003, 7-9.

14. "Proposed ASA Statement Against the War on Iraq," Footnotes (ASA), 31:4 (April 2003).

15. Lee Herring, "How Would Sociologists Design a Homeland Security Alert System?" Footnotes (ASA), 31:4 (April 2003).

16. Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation" and "Science as a Vocation" in From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77-156.

17. Joseph Schumpeter, "How Does One Study Social Science?" in Society, 40:3 (March-April 2003), 57-63. Initially delivered as a lecture "Wie studiert man Sozialwissenschaft?" in 1910. Translated by Jerry Z. Muller.

18. See Steven Goldberg, Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books/Prometheus Publishers, 2003), 230. The conflation of the social sciences with sociology and anthropology weakens an otherwise important contribution to the present debates on the status of the field.

19. Dominique Schnapper, "La Sociologie: Vocation et Engagement Intellectuel," Revue Europeenne des Sciences Socialies, 41:125 (2003), 153-59.