the poverty of social scientific culture

According to the New York Times, the cultural explanation of poverty (i.e., the “culture of poverty”) is back in. The Times confirms this fact with a quote from an essay by Mario Small, David Harding and Michèle Lamont: ‘“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,’ the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.” Searching the globe for further confirmation, we are informed, based on the golden chestnut of the censorship imposed by “political correctness,” that: “We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.’ We are then offered a presumably un-PC and deeply thought definition of culture: “‘Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as ‘shared understandings.’” Best understood: but for whom, social scientists?

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The problem is these particular scholars of poverty (excluding Lamont) don't know what "culture" is from a scientific point of view, aren’t “current” with the ways contemporary scholarship on culture has developed, and end up reproducing folk knowledge derived from a folk category (as Bourdieu might say) rather than anything approximating social scientific knowledge. What’s equally ridiculous is that complaints about “the poor” have been couched in moral terms since the 17th century: they drink too much, fuck too much, have too many babies, are godless, and so on. The same moralistic language was behind the “welfare reform” of 1996, which presumably “ended the welfare state as we know it” (Bill Clinton's goal). The aim of that legislation was to “reduce illegitimacy.” People didn't wait for Rob Sampson, or Saint Daniel Moynihan and the benighted Oscar Lewis (who actually emphasizes social structure), to produce a cultural explanation of poverty. Meanwhile a "full employment policy" that was in discussion during the 1940s never got off the ground because, well, gubmint shouldn't compete with the free market. Oh well: maybe those politicos and their social scientific epigones are the ones with an impoverished culture of civic duty, not to mention a culture of intellectual poverty.

deforming theory

In an article published in the ASA's theory section newsletter in August 2005, Stephen Sanderson proposed several measures of theoretical reform. Unlike Swift's, Sanderson's "modest proposal" to reform "theoretical work in sociology" is a response to a pseudo-crisis of the author's own imagination. In form, Sanderson begins immodestly, launching into an unsubstantiated claim for a crisis in the subfield of theory, which includes the enumeration of excessive behaviors among those who work in "social theory" or "classical theory," who may or may not also be prone to the unforgivable error of taking an "anti-scientific" standpoint or incorporating "non-theorists" into the domain of theory work in sociology.

One sign of crisis announced by Sanderson (presumably in order of significance) is "an excessive concern with the classical theorists." Durkheim, a hoary classical theorist, stipulated theory's role in the science of society as (1) defining the sociological object -- social facts -- prior to research and (2) defining the relationships between these social facts. Weber, the builder of ideal types, unfolds an exemplary explanatory framework in the magnificent first chapter of Economy and Society. On both sides of the Rhine, the Durkheimians (lest Sanderson forget the rich studies of Durkheim, Mauss, and Hubert were build upon existing empirical literature from the ethnological field) and Weber were very concerned with the relationship of theory to empirical reality. Hence, Sanderson's argument regarding the "work of the masters" that "it's time to take what is of value, discard the rest, and move on to build new theories that can be tested empirically" simply fails the test of reality; the reality of the actual empirical orientation of the work of Durkheim and Weber.

Another sign of crisis: "An excessive concern with 'chic' European theorists." Things become more unreal when Sanderson suggest that the interest in contemporary European social thought is a matter of fashion. It may be the case that in the heartland of the United States, all things British, French, and German are so exotic that interest in them is suspect of being a superficial attraction. However, in the rest of the civilized world, thinkers like Habermas, Bourdieu, and Giddens are treated as significant contributors to frames of social analysis. To take an empirical measurement of this claim -- in order to satisfy the bias of Sanderson -- one can consult the Social Sciences Citation Index. But, of course, the counter-argument is possible that quantity does not equal quality; however, such a counter-argument, derived from the vantage point of "scientificity," smacks of rank subjectivism, and therefore is a self-negating, performative contradiction.

Another peculiar sign of crisis -- and perhaps the most telling sign of Sanderson's projection -- is a purported "extreme politicization" of theory that has occurred with the emergence of such areas of thought as feminist theory, neo-Marxism, queer theory, and whiteness studies. In fact, Sanderson's own proposal is an act of politicization of the subfield of theory. The scene of a frustrated three year old, who stubbornly and futilely taunts a superior playmate, is enacted at the end of Sanderson's piece, when he says to his erstwhile colleagues in social and classical theory: "go somewhere else to ply your trade and leave the rest of us alone to ply ours."

Based on the principle of hermeneutic generosity, one could understand Sanderson's discomfort with social theory and classical theory as a consequence of misunderstanding, misreading, or lack of reading. Or perhaps European social thought and social theory simply does not play well in the intellectual periphery of the USA.