Sociology is, without a shadow of a doubt, a Left-wing field of study as of now. But that doesn’t mean conservatives have to be unarmed in the intellectual battle.
For nearly 40 years, the field of sociology has been dominated by Left-leaning academics. There are a variety of reasons for this, ranging from the influence of Left-wing philosophers on their students from the 1960s onward, to the concentration of power by certain academics in notable institutions such as the American Economics Association. Yet, despite the fact that intellectuals on the Left have gained prestige in various academic fields, the leading subject they’ve gravitated towards continues to be the field of sociology.
In one study, Jon Shields, an associate professor at Claremont McKenna College, uncovered the astonishing statistic that only 12 out of every 6,000 sociologists identify as conservative. Disparities of such magnitude rarely happen by sheer chance, and no single explanation of the issue has been uncovered. However, one thing is certain: as conservative influence in the field of sociology has declined, so has academic rigor.
Many are unaware that there was a time when the field of sociology was accepting of conservative ideas. One need look no further than the legacy left behind by great thinkers such as Robert Nisbet and Alexis de Tocqueville, both of whom paved the way for the development of modern-day conservatism. We can get significant insight on how sociology became an exclusively Left field from the late Irving Louis Horowitz, who served as a professor of sociology at Rutgers while authoring The Decomposition of Sociology. In his book, Horowitz makes the case that sociology has lost its way and that too much emphasis is placed on social disparities, victim casting, and the mass overhaul of economic systems. Horowitz states:
While an earlier pre-World War II generation sought to minimize any notion that sociology had anything to do with socialism, a latter-day post-World War II generation sought to make quite explicit that the two… did come together in the need for a society in which exaggerated (if not all) forms of inequality and differentiation in all forms of power relations are malevolent and… should be opposed on sociological grounds.
Horowitz concludes that such an underlying worldview in the field resulted in “a whole new category of sociology called victimology.” This is where modern-day victimhood culture comes from, according to Horowitz. He feared that sociologists would slowly undergo a metamorphosis resulting in Left-wing activists disguising themselves as legitimate researchers.
Unfortunately, this is precisely what happened. Even worse, this was done with no regard for basic logical principles, which becomes evident when examining many of the unsustainable standards of the new academic Left. Horowitz brings this to light when pointing out the fact that sociologists, in an effort to enact social change, fall prey to an infinite regress fallacy. According to Horowitz:
The most serious theoretical dilemma [is] that issues of stratification have the capacity for… infinite regress. Even if one presumes perfect harmony… on racial boundaries, even if sexual differentials in salaries are resolves, the demand structure for further leveling is inexorable: linguistic inequalities, religious boundaries, biological distinctions between the tall and the short, the heavy and the thin, just scratch the surface.
Plainly speaking, Left-wing sociologists desire equality but have no idea when satisfactory levels of equality are achieved. Absolute equality between two groups simply means that the goalpost must be shifted toward something new–an even more radical form of equality.
Such ideas have no limits and lend themselves to bizarre logical conclusions. Horowitz believed that moral relativism was an inevitable outcome of the pseudo-logical framework of modern sociology. He states:
The new moral relativists have informed their readers that in the wonderful world without norms there can be no deviance… By mystifying the relationships between those who commit crimes… and those who are victimized by criminals, crime is liquidated as readily as deviance.
Horowitz accurately predicted the viewpoint that criminals are the “actual victims” of a broken system long before the soundbites of today’s progressive activists were ever uttered. Social deconstructionism isn’t limited to the criminal justice system, either. Goals by progressive sociologists include radical equality between the sexes, classes, and even attacking the institution of marriage.
This leaves modern conservatives with a perplexing question: will sociology ever be inclusive of conservative ideas again? Some might argue that it is a lost cause. Others might insist that conservative academics should replace progressive ones. But how could this happen unless free-thinking conservatives were forced to become sociologists simply for the sake of equalizing intellectual outcomes? Given these issues, it seems as though the path forward from here remains a mystery.
One thing is remarkably clear, however: Horowitz was correct in his observation. Sociology is, without a shadow of a doubt, a Left-wing field of study as of now. But that doesn’t mean conservatives have to be unarmed in the intellectual battle. Perhaps, in grieving over academic one-sidedness in sociology, conservatives will feel called to pursue the social sciences. Horowitz states at one point in his book that “advocacy has become the very cause of social research.” Instead of trying to rid social science of its advocacy, Right-leaning academics can enter the field of sociology to provide counterpoints for the sake of preserving intellectual rigor. If this happens, perhaps some hope remains for the future of sociology.
This essay was first published here in June 2021.
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Maybe the better question is whether we ought to let sociology slither on the vine and die. To my mind sociology has provided nothing of value unless one considers being appropriated as a “scientific tool” refashioned as a cudgel for the left. We have the sociology that we need in Christ: love God and second lover your neighbor as yourself. That we don’t live up to the great commandment isn’t proof that we need more laws based on “science”….it’s proof that we’re fallen. And no law will change that.
I’m stunned by the statistic on conservatives in the field of sociology! One wonders whether conservatives are weeded out in the admissions process or if students are evangelized into the Church of the Left during their studies. I suspect it’s both.
Recognizing that there is no hope for institutions such as sociology is the start of wisdom and clarity of vision. Sociology is completely corrupted. The natural and logical conclusion is simply to cast it aside and build something better. Attempts to engage with it or try to make it “inclusive” will fail as all such attempts have been failing for decades. When your strategy has been failing for this long it is high time for a new one.
As a former graduate student in sociology in the 90s as social constructionism of gender was taking over the field, I decided to change course and pursue nursing instead. I’m glad I did, I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere in the field as it is now.
Most of Epstein’s so-called “philanthropy” was directed to the financing and promotion of transhumanism. The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation pledged $30 million to Harvard University to establish the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and also bankrolled the OpenCog project which develops software “designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence.” Apart from his support for the cybernetic approach to transhumanism, Epstein was also fascinated with the possibility of creating the “superman” via the path of eugenics. He hoped to help in a practical way with plans to “seed the human race with his DNA” by impregnating up to twenty women at a time at a proposed “baby ranch” at his compound in New Mexico.
I think we’re overlooking the small number of excellent conservative-leaning sociologists: Seymour Martin Lipset, Peter Berger, James Davison Hunter, Christian Smith…. But more important, I do have a real question: to what degree is the very definition of society that sociologists work with prejudiced in favor of cultural relativism? E.g., a system “of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms,” to quote Clifford Geertz’s famous definition, “by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” Or Edward Tylor: “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” I’m genuinely interested in a response to my question!
Hello: Well, 18 months have gone by, and no-one has yet responded to your question! If you are still interested, here are my two cents. (Full disclosure: I’m not conservative — in fact, I’m a life-long Democratic party voter — but I teach social theory and demand that my students take seriously the conservative tradition). The citations from Geertz and Tylor are actually definitions of culture, not society. Indeed, the relativist viewpoint is fundamental to cultural anthropology. Early on, the discipline defined itself in opposition to reigning 19th Century hierarchies that located European civilization at the “advanced” summit and small-scale indigenous groups at the “primitive” bottom. The earliest ethnographers discovered that the indigenous communities were just as complex, and supported the same level of artistic, religious and general cognitive development, as France or England. Hence, relativism is intrinsic to the field. Sociology, by contrast, focused on the massive transformations within European society itself (industrialization, the rise of nation-states, and so on). From the start, sociology aimed at collective self-understanding, critique, and amelioration of the West. In that sense, sociology is actually not relativist. It had a strong impulse to evaluate (and excoriate) ] at the start that continues to today. . …. So it’s a complicated story of disciplines and their origins.
Correction: There are at least 13 conservative sociologists out of 6,000, as I also fall into that statistically anomalous category. I’ve been teaching a variety of sociology courses at the university level for over twenty years at several colleges, and have always made a concerted effort to fairly and accurately present the required material. Additionally, all relevant sides of debatable issues are presented, with dissenting viewpoints being welcomed and thoughtfully discussed. However, it has proven difficult for a host of reasons, including the textbooks’ haphazardous tactic of strategically stating theories as fact, coupled with the ever- changing definitions of terms that conveniently align with those “facts” in a blatant attempt to further a political and ideological agenda.
Please add two more conservative sociologists to the short list. My college thesis advisor was Robert A. Nisbet at UC Riverside. My wife and I are both sociologists. We met at Brandeis University as graduate students in the sociology department in the Sixties. We wanted to work together and decided against academic careers. Nevertheless, we vigorously developed our ideas. Our linked doctoral dissertations presented an unusual new approach to sociology, modeled on the work of Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel-prize-winning ethologist who studied animals in their natural habitat. Since animals (other than humans) do not speak in complex language, the focus of observation had to be on movement and movement patterns. My wife Lenore Monello Schloming developed a typology of movement patterns found in all vertebrate species: flocking (everyone together: anonymous herds, flocks, crowds); fighting (everyone apart: solitary territorial individuals: some species); friendship (together with some, apart from others: small nomadic packs with personal bonds: humans, wolves, etc.). The course of human history is regressive in terms of social relationships. We Homo sapiens achieved our modern bodies and brains when we lived in tight-knit small nomadic packs and developed a bow-and-arrow hunting-gathering culture in the African wilderness, based on a sexual division of labor. With agriculture and surplus food, we developed into villages, towns, and small cities, with permanent homes and territories and non-food-producing craftsmen, a craft division of labor. With yet more technological development, we industrialized into many specialized factories and bureaucracies, each worker producing one partial work-object in large quantities that must combine to produce one specialized product, with the resulting abundance of products traded in impersonal mass markets in a global industrial division of labor. Broadly, we go from decentralization to centralization, the topic of my dissertation. Seventy years ago, some sociologists lamented the loss of the extended family. Today, none seem concerned that we are losing even the nuclear family, as everyone slips into anonymous, faddish crowds. Our website: http://www.WildtoCivilized.com.
Skip Schloming