What turned American sociology into a discipline of trivia-pursuing statisticians and pettifogging methodologists, divorced from the concerns of either policymakers or the wider public? On the face of it, should “the science of society” not be the most publicly relevant of all the social sciences? Alas, it just ain't so. On the one hand, unlike prominent economists and political scientists, American sociologists are almost never invited to join the councils of government. On the other hand, unlike their German or French counterparts, American sociologists rarely function as effective critical public intellectuals, offering principled opposition to contemporary American power structures. Instead, the discipline has largely withdrawn into intellectual solipsism, producing turgid quantitative studies read only by other sociologists.
How the discipline arrived at this sorry state of affairs is the animating question of David Paul Haney's The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States. Haney argues that this inward turn of American sociology took place in the decade following World War II, and was driven by an almost desperate desire of the discipline's leaders to achieve “scientific” status. Led by Talcott Parsons at Harvard and Robert K. Merton at Columbia, the two dominant intellectuals at the two dominant departments of the period, the drive to turn sociology into a science was, according to Haney, informed a positivist and elitist view of what constituted “science.” Rejecting ethnographic approaches that attempted to address broad social or political questions, Parsons, Merton and their followers demanded that the discipline achieve methodological “rigor” in the form of repeatable, quantitative, small-scale studies that would over time accumulate to support “middle-range” theories. At the same time, since scientific sociology was to be a “professionally autonomous” enterprise “independent from external influences and demands,” its mode of communication was explicitly designed to exclude laypersons, journalists, activists, and political officeholders, mainly by promoting a jargon-ridden style of writing (38–39, 14). Between their small-bore topical inquiries and their willfully obscurantist “language of exclusion” (58), Haney suggests, the marginalization of American sociology from both policy and public discourse was all but inevitable.
As intellectual history, Haney's book is most valuable for showing that it did not have to turn out this way. Haney's flawed heroes are scholars like C. Wright Mills, William Whyte, David Riesman, Pitirim Sorokin, and Alvin Gouldner, who in diverse ways both critiqued the scientistic pretensions of the Parsonian–Mertonian project and went out of their way to write for a wider public concerning crucial postwar social issues such as racial inequality, the deadening life of the suburbs, consumerism, and totalitarianism – all topics that Haney claims mainstream sociologists largely ignored. Haney's narrative thus underscores a historiographic point with disconcerting implications for professional sociologists: on the one hand, for those seeking a broad understanding the postwar United States, the postwar sociologists most worth reading are not the ones central to the coeval evolution of the discipline; conversely, the sociologists central to the evolution of the discipline are not the ones a social or cultural historian would read to get a sense of what the postwar period was like.
Given the availability of these alternative and seemingly superior modes of sociological inquiry, the question is why American sociology chose to follow the siren calls of quantitative methodologies and middle-range theories – a quest that continues unabated to this day. Curiously, Haney's answer to this question centers on the influence of the so-called “mass-society” thesis. According to Haney, the mainstream of American sociology, and above all Parsons and Merton, believed that modern society produced anomic and alienated individuals who were incapable of rational participation in democratic politics and were easy prey for demagogues. The sociological turn to quantification and middle-range theories, in Haney's view (quoting the views of contemporaries such as Sorokin or Robert Lynd), was an attempt to create a platform for the social engineering of a troubled modern America.
Problems of periodization and interpretation bedevil this explanation. In terms of periodization, the desire to turn sociology into a quantitative science dates from the origins of the discipline, and was particularly marked during the progressive era, as scholars such as Robert Bannister, Thomas Haskell, and Mary Furner have demonstrated. Moreover, the scientistic instinct in the social sciences was hardly restricted to sociology, but was just as pronounced in political science, and even more so in economics. It is also questionable how much this renewed push for quantification and middle-range theory can be laid at the doorstep of anxieties about mass society. Although from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s many American intellectuals felt uneasy about modern politics, both at home and abroad, and about what this might imply about modernity more generally, this was not a perspective that Parsons ever subscribed to, and it was one that Merton had abandoned by the mid-1950s. By then, Parsons had emerged as one of the greatest optimists about modernity, quite sharply at odds with the saturnine musings of the Frankfurt school and the New York intellectuals. Haney is not wrong to claim that many postwar American sociologists believed that a scientific sociology could provide the basis for engineering away the problems associated with modernity, but this in itself does not seem to me an adequate explanation for the broad disciplinary turn to quantification and middle-range theorizing.
Much more important, it seems to me, is a point that Haney only touches on briefly, namely that these methodological innovations were in the first place a form of social practice based on a quite explicit vision of sociologists as technocratic philosopher–kings. Quantification in the service of progressive theoretical development, if successful, would provide sociologists with a legitimate basis for making interventions into public affairs, while at the same time insulating the discipline from critique by the public, whether elites or hoi polloi. By making it impossible for politicians or the wider public to argue with the conclusions of the sociologists, quantification and middle-range theory would legitimate the unidirectional flow of advice and authority from sociologists to politicians and policymakers. Hence the ironic and even tragic conclusion: the Parsonian–Mertonian sociological method, instead of producing unimpeachably authoritative judgments on matters of public import, became a trap that immured the profession within a maze of publicly irrelevant self-referentiality. This is the deepest lesson of Haney's book: that Parsons, Merton and their followers expressed themselves in a stilted, crookbacked prose was not simply the result of poor literary craftsmanship, but in fact was essential to their aim of creating a hermetic intellectual world for themselves.
