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Sociology: A Disinvitation? by Peter Berger
Sociology: A Disinvitation? by Peter Berger
Peter L. Berger
therapy, so at least at describing some of the symptomatic failings. And I shall do it in light of four important
developments that have taken place since the Second
World War. Each of these developments completely
surprised most, if not all sociologists. What is more,
even after these developments had come sharply into
view, sociologists found themselves unable to explain
them or to make sense of them within a frame of
sociological theory. Given the importance of these
developments, the failure of sociology to either predict, or at least to apprehend, them indicates that something is seriously wrong here.
Case one: In the late 1960s and early 1970s a
cultural and political upheaval took place in the major
Western industrial societies. It was a total surprise.
Looked at through the spectacles of conventional sociology, it posed a tantalizing question: How could it
be that some of the most privileged people on earth,
indeed in history, turned violently against the very
society that had made them thus privileged? If one
turns to American sociology, as it was taught then and
still is in numerous college courses, one finds the
proposition that people become more conservative as
they become more affluent. This proposition may have
been quite valid up to the aforementioned event. It
certainly was not valid as the politico-cultural cataclysm occurred, and it is no longer valid today. On the
contrary, both in politics and in culture the "progressive" movements have been socially located in the
affluent upper middle classthe New Left and the
New Politics, the anti-war movements, feminism, environmentalism and the Greens, and so on. Conversely,
the newer conservative movementswhether led by
Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, or Helmut Kohl
foimd their constituencies in the lower middle and
working classes, dragging along a reluctant older conservative establishment. In the United States (very
similar reactions occurred in Britain and what was then
West Germany) old-style country-club Republicans
held their noses while they shook the hands and kissed
the babies of back-country evangelicals, culturally outraged ethnics, anti-abortion activists, and various other
unmentionable social types. Conversely, radical middle-class intellectuals found themselves in bed, politically if not culturally, not with the "working masses"
with whom their ideology identified, but with alleged
representatives of the underclass and other marginal
groupings.
I vividly recall a scene in the Brooklyn neighborhood where we lived from the mid-1960s to the late
1970s. The neighborhood was in the process of rapid
gentrification (we were part of the process), changing
from ethnic working class to professional upper middle class. On one street almost every house displayed
what were then the politically correct peace placards
in the windows"U.S. out of Vietnam," "Make love,
not war," "Save the whales," and the like. With one
exception: One house sported messages such as "Support our troops in \^etnam," "Support your local police" and "Register Communists, not guns." In this
house lived an elderly invalid, a widowed veteran. One
day, this man was evicted. Marshalls cime and put his
belongings on the street. Then they put him on the
street, sitting in his wheelchair, wearing an American
Legion cap. Some buddies of his drove up and took
him away, and then his belongings were carted off to
somewhere. The very next week new people moved
into the house. Promptly, the peace signs went up in all
the windows.
Second case: One of the fundamental transformations in the contemporary world has been the rapid
economic ascendancy of Japan and other East Asian
countries. What is happening here is not just an economic miracle of enormous proportions, occurring at
breathtaking speed, but the first instance of successful
modernization in a non-Western cultural context that
should be of special interest to sociologists. As I have
argued for some time, here is a second case of capitalist
modernity, obviously of great interest in and of itself,
but of even greater interest from the standpoint of a
theory of modem society. Put simply, Japan is important for our understanding, not so much of it, but of
ourselves. Again, no one expected this. If any of its
proponents had been asked in the 1950s, the time when
so-called modernization theory developed, which
Asian country was most likely to succeed in terms of
economic development, chances are the answer would
have been the Philippines, now the one economic
disaster in the capitalist sector of the region. At a
conference that took place at the time and which some
participants still recall uncomfortably, there was widespread agreement that Confucianism was one of the
most formidable obstacles to development in Korea
and in the Chinese societies. Today, this cultural heritage is commonly cited as one of the causes of the East
Asian economic success stories.
Modernization theory faltered in the wake of the late
sixties, when it was widely derogated as an ideology
of Western imperialism. Leftist sociologists meanwhile were busy giving birth to so-called dependency
theory, according to which capitalism necessarily perpetuates underdevelopment; the solution, of course,
was to be socialism. There is a bizarre synchronicity
between empirical and theoretical developments. Just
as capitalist East Asia was bursting into astonishing
economic growth and prosperity while all the socialist
societies, from Indochina to the Caribbean, were sinking into hopeless stagnation, more and more sociologists were proclaiming their allegiance to a theory
according to which the opposite was bound to occur.
One of the funniest events I attended a few years ago
was a conference in Taiwan, home of one of the great
economic miracles of the modem age. It was a conference about Taiwan and how to understand it. For
reasons that were never quite clear, most American
academics invited were dependency theorists who had
previously done work on Latin America. They tried
valiantly to fit what they could see happening all
around them in Taiwan into their theory. The great
theoretical achievement of the conference was the
concept of "dependent development" which supposedly accounted for the Taiwan case. That neo-Marxists
with no previous field experience outside Latin America should find this notion plausible may be understandable. Harder to credit was that several Taiwanese
social scientists in attendance nodded approvingly as
this orientalist translation of dependencia was trotted
out before them. A possible explanation is this: While
dependency theory has been massively falsified in
terms of the world economy, it may have some predictive value in terms of world culture; the intellectuals
of the "first world" with greatly superior resources and
patronage at their disposal, do indeed have a "comprador class" in less developed countries.
In all faimess, my second case is not quite like the
first, in that there has indeed been a considerable effort
by sociologists to understand the phenomenon, even if
they did not anticipate it. The aforementioned postConfucian hypothesis, though first formulated by nonsociologists, has been the subject of intense and
sophisticated discussion among sociologists both in
the region itself and outside it. The left has obviously
not been able to participate in this for ideological
reasons. But non-leftist sociologists have not been
prominent in the discussion either, except for those
with a specialization in the region. Another formidable
task is one of modifying the concept of modem society,
as it developed from, say. Max Weber to Talcott Parsons, on hand of the insights to be gained from the new
non-Westem modemity.
This is a very "big question" indeed. It is uncongenial to people whose perspective is parochially ethnocentric and who are committed to methods that do not
lend themselves to "big questions." What is called for
is a sociology in the classical vein, grounded in a
knowledge of history, methodologically fiexible, and
imbued with a cosmopolitan spirit endlessly curious
about every manifestation of human life. Needless to
mainline churches went into a fairly steep demographic decline. The evangelical phenomenon served
to underline a more fundamental fact: America differed
from Europe precisely in its religious character.
Beyond the United States, though, the event that
rattled the theory linking modernization to secularity
was the Iranian revolution. Once again, an momentous
event came into view that, theoretically, should not
have occurred at all. Since then, religious upsurges of
every sort has been erupting all over the world. Neotraditionalist, or fundamentalist. Protestantism and
Islam are the two biggest games in town, on a global
scale, but almost every religious tradition in the world
has evinced similar revitalization movements. And
sociologists of every coloration continue to be baffied.
enterprise, bravely led by the old cohorts of dependency theory. May we look forward to yet another
brilliant concept, say of "independent underdevelopment", that will somehow rescue the theory?
The collapse of the Soviet empire and the worldwide crisis of socialism poses an enormous challenge
to sociological understanding of modernity. And it is
not just sociologists on the left who are unprepared to
meet this challenge, who were no more prescient about
these developments than their left-leaning colleagues.
What is called for is a thorough rethinking of the
relation between economic, political and social institutions in a modem society. I am reminded of the old
witticism, sometimes still to be seen on signs in
friendly neighborhood stores, "If you're good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example." For
sociological theory, "bad" examples are just as useful
as "good" ones. The more interesting question is not
why "they" have collapsed, but why "we" have not.
This is a basic theoretical point that much sociologizing has routinely overlooked: The "problem" is not
social disorganization, but social organizationmarriage rather than divorce, law-abidingness rather than
crime, racial harmony rather than racial strife, and so
Leftist journals contain tortured
on. We may safely assume thatin Jan Romein's
attempts to interpret developments
handy phrase the "common human pattem" is faithin Europe and elsewhere.
lessness, violence and hate. These manifestations of
human nature hardly need explanation, except perhaps
by zoologists. What needs explaining is those instances
Those on the left, of course, will share in the general in which, amazingly, societies manage to curb and
confusion (may one call it "cognitive anomie"? ) of civilize these propensities.
others in this ideological community. Leave aside
What do these cases disclose about what ails socithose on the left who, despite everything, thought that ology today? One can point to four symptoms: parothe Soviet Union and its imitators were engaged in a chialism, triviality, rationalism, and ideology. Each
noble experiment. Mistakes were made, and all that, one is crippling. Their combination has been deadly. If
but there was still the assumption that even a flawed one looks at the opus of the great classical sociologists,
socialism carried more hope than a capitalist system with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim in the lead, one
alleged to be hopelessly corrupt. But even those on the is reminded of Wesley's dictum, "The world is my
left who had long ago shed all illusions about the Soviet parish." Few sociologists could say this today, and
experiment were endlessly scanning the horizons for those who do very often betray an embarrassing lack
the "true socialism" that had to come, sometime, be- of historical depth.
cause the logic of history willed it. It was not just a
At issue is much more than a bias in favor of some
matter of le cceur a la gauche; it was the mind that was sort of sophisticated cosmopolitanism. One can be an
on the left, in its basic cognitive assumptions. And the excellent physicist without ever having stepped outmost basic assumption of all was that the historical side one's own society; I know that this is not so for a
process moved from capitalism to socialism. How to sociologist. And the reason for this is simple. Modemdeal now with the transition from socialism to capital- ization is the great transforming force in the world
ism? Current leftist journals are full of tortured at- today, but it is not a xmiform, mechanical process. It
tempts to interpret the developments of the last few takes different forms, evokes different reactions. This
years in Europe and elsewhere, most of them attempts is why sociology, the discipline par excellence for
to deny the obvious. I have every expectation that seeking to understand modemity, must of necessity be
sociologists will be whole-hearted participants in this comparative.
appears that they are no more immune than the sociologically untrained to the common misconception that
one can generalize about the world from one's own
little comer.
Finally, the fourth case: This is the momentous
collapse of the Soviet empire, and 'what seems, at least
for now, the worldwide collapse of socialism both as a
reality and as an idea. Even the beginnings of this
world-historical event are very recent, and the consequences are still unfolding with undiminished rapidity.
Thus it would be unfair to blame anyone for not having
at hand a theory to explain it all. It would be equally
unfair to single out sociologists; just about nobody
anticipated this (including regiments of certified sovietologists) and everybody is having great difficulty
grasping it within any theoretical frame that makes
sense. Still, it is worth stating that sociologists, even
those with the relevant regional expertise, were no
better than anyone else in predicting the event nor are
they better in accounting for it. One must wonder how
they will do in the years to come.
18/SOCIETY*
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1992