Sociology, 1970-2020

SOCIOLOGY, 1970-2020. The academic field reached a crossroads in 1970. If conflict continued to disturb the leading scholars in the years shortly after World War II, the theories of consensus that reached an apparent apogee in Daniel Bell’s celebration of The End of Ideology (1962) would in turn face stiff challenges ahead. From the late 1960s onward, growing in the final decades of the twentieth century and beyond, a minority of militant social critics offered space for the discussion of leftwing ideas within and outside the classroom. The challenge may have been largely invisible to most sociologists, however, in the accumulation of data and in the sheer growth of a field that seemed to leave less room for critical thinking.

The irony of Daniel Bell’s status in the 1950s and beyond, lost on few within the profession, was that he had been a socialist of sorts in his formative years. His evolving theories echoed the prevailing Cold War sentiment: the major problems of American society, race issues apart, had essentially been solved. “Socialism,” as Bell suggested in a famous essay on American Socialism, had already been realized or transcended with well-paying blue-collar jobs, corporations in the hands of diverse stock-holders, and near-universal consumerism. As his friends, notably Irving Howe, explained to a wide readership, the chief danger to American society, foreign affairs apart, had now shifted from class conflict to a source of cultural anxiety known as “conformism.”

An ostensibly neutral professionalism found other prestigious representatives in the otherwise competing “Grand Theory” of Harvard’s Talcott Parsons and the self-limiting “middle-range” theories espoused by Columbia’s Robert Merton. C. Wright Mills’s challenge to ideological neutralism won a wide readership, but within the discipline, Mills would remain a fringe figure, far closer in spirit to the socialism of public intellectuals such as Erich Fromm, Michael Harrington and Hal Draper than to the emerging centrism of the profession.

Erich Fromm, carrying the torch for an unabashedly socialist humanism, wrote a series of mass-market books Escape from Freedom (1941), Man for Himself (1947), The Art of Loving (1956), The Sane Society (1955), and more) that, remarkably, sold 30 million copies. The fact that Fromm had earned a sociology doctorate in 1922 under Max Weber’s brother Alfred, and that he united perspectives drawn from Marx, Weber, and psychoanalysis, went almost unnoticed in professional sociology. Michael Harrington, a central figure in the greatly reduced Socialist Party and League for Industrial Democracy, exposed in The Other America (1962) the swelling poverty that lay beneath the affluence so many ideologues were celebrating. The affluence, as Harrington observed, was due, where it actually existed, largely to the success of trade unions. Hal Draper, an inveterate Marxist and a librarian at Berkeley, was to be Clark Kerr’s most serious critic and became, in Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (1965), the first and most able chronicler of the emerging student movement.

Sociologists who studied labor in the 1950s had remained close to the original reforming spirit of the Chicago School, but with a major adjustment. Consensus, not conflict, ruled labor studies and prescribed “labor and industrial relations” as a problem-solving profession. Labor success had been achieved, after all.

And then matters changed dramatically, at least among many sociology students and a portion of the younger professoriate. For a field taking contemporary society as its object, the antiwar and liberation struggles of the 1960s could only be traumatic, shaking the discipline to the core. Voices raised and values clashed. Proponents of value-free “normal science” found themselves challenged by advocates of an engaged, insurgent sociology. For a while conflict was not just theoretical, and younger sociologists along with a portion of older ones could be found directly engaged in the social struggles. Francis Fox Piven emerged for many as an ideal, theorist and activist. But with two decades, that too changed. Ultimately, as the echoing tumult of the New Left began to dissipate, most notably after the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, so too did the tumult within much of sociology, if by no means all. Major professional groups like the Socialist Sociologists of various regions brought activists of different generations together regularly for theory and practice. “Development Studies” became for a time, in some places, a location of foreign students to prepare themselves for positions in governments challenging US domination in the world. The study of criminality reset social themes around disproportionate ownership of property and perpetuation of racial inequalities. Race and ethic advocates moved their own candidates upward in the profession, often despite considerable resistance of older sociologists. After 1980 and the shift of American politics rightward, however, these challenges seemed less visible than other developments.

The experience after 1970, in all, proved far too multi-faceted to be neatly classified. But the explosive growth of higher education, just begun in the 1960s, continued without pause until at least the turn of the new century. Thus, academic sociology became a vastly larger institutional reality. The number of sociology PhDs awarded in the half century after 1970 was far greater than in the preceding half century, and the discipline itself grew so rapidly that the American Sociological Association recognized by 2020 roughly fifty subfields. Professional advancement at all levels, Ivy Leagues to the most modest junior colleges, returned to a dominant sentiment.

A great deal of constructive work took place within various subfields, quietly and with little strife, much of it reflecting a spirit of a rapprochement between normal science and social engagement. Especially since the mid-1990s, this development produced empirical research with critical and sometimes radical implications. A significant amount of that research focused on aspects of “intersectionality,” that is, the entwined oppression and resistance of women, people of color, migrant workers, LGBTQ communities, and many others.

In general, the prevailing orientation among sociologists in the new century might be characterized as enlightened progressivism, not unlike that of the early Chicago School. Many of the defining figures of that earlier progressive era, Jane Addams and W.E.B. Du Bois among others, have been taken as exemplars, with a broader array of research methods and a widening circle of subject areas. A roll call of the sociologists who have presided over the American Sociological Association since 1997 provides a telescopic sense of the discipline as a whole, including a handful of outstanding progressives such as Michael Buraway, Frances Fox Piven, Erik Olin Wright and Ruth Milkman. These notable figures and many others, have advanced understanding, often in unexpected and challenging ways. Some have been public figures expressing radical ideas on gender, race and class. But the question posed so aptly by Robert Lynd eight decades ago has remained central for the profession at large: Knowledge for what?

The insurgent spirit in sociology as in the universities at large had become increasingly residual until the appearance of the Black Lives Matter movement and democratic socialist politics of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among others provided sociologists the opportunity to rethink the link between knowledge and change. To this point, in the new century, critical theory and anything like class-struggle Marxism have had only a peripheral presence in the ASA, confined mainly to the Marxists, with perhaps the notable exception of the scholars of crime and incarceration. Sociology conferences continue to raise questions at these levels, but sustained engagement remains elusive.

Sociologists as a group have remained relevant by pursuing middle-range theories with only occasional attempts to synthesize the findings of the many currents in the discipline. Many of the most influential public intellectuals of the recent past have been ersatz sociologists, often of regressive bent: sociobiologists like Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson and their countless successors; behavioral economists, espousing the “liberal paternalism” of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein; journalists like Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks. The enormous success of The New Jim Crow (2010) by the law professor Michelle Alexander pointed in a different direction. Outstanding sociological studies such Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness (2019) and Nancy DiTomaso’s The American Non-Dilemma (2013) provide further models of sociological contributions to ongoing social movements and dialogues.

Feagin, Joe R., Hernán Vera, and Kimberley Ducey. Liberation Sociology, 3rd edition. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2015.