Whatever happened to ..... Sociology?

In the 1970s you couldn't turn the radio or the television on without a Sociologist popping up. The new concrete universities fell over themselves offering Sociology degrees, thousands of students read the same half-dozen entry level textbooks then available and academic reputations were built on more-radical-than-thou self publicity. Although many did become social workers of one variety or another, many more became civil servants. The discipline was universally left-wing in the UK; the credo of sociology was based on the power of the State and the right of the State to regulate other people's lives based on the sound scientific principles of Sociology. But there was a problem. Real scientists (of whom there were still a few about in the 1970s) denied that it was a science at all, and placed it firmly in the arts / humanities schools. The term 'social science' was therefore coined, meaning stuff that couldn't be verified by independent experimentation, but that claimed scientific credentials nonetheless.


And so it was to a large extent across the Atlantic. UCLA and Sociology went together like pork and beans. Except the Americans produced the curiosity that never survived in Britain; a right-wing sociologist. Robert Nisbet was schooled on Edmund Burke and de Tocqueville rather than Max Weber or Karl Marx. And he had the temerity to write

The greatest single revolution of the last century in the political sphere has been the transfer of effective power over human lives from the constitutionally visible offices of government, the nominally sovereign offices, to the vast network that has been brought into being in the name of protection of the people from their exploiters. It is this kind of power that Justice Brandeis warned against in a decision nearly half a century ago: "Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the governments' purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

In fact, if there's one essay I would urge you to read this year, if you're not already familiar with it, it's Nisbet's 1976 "The New Despotism". Not only does it stand the test of time, but it sets out clearly, succinctly and unambiguously the ideals and the threats that are more significant than ever and that have brought many true Liberals together on 'Orphans of Liberty'. 


As for sociology, it is so equated with the evils of Rousseau, Marx, Central Statism and the tyranny of Welfarism backed by the law (see Booker's various columns) that it's out of tune with both Blue Labour and Blond's Red Tories, both of which movements are communitarian rather than Statist, local rather than central, horizontal rather than vertical in approach.