Humanistic Sociology Phantom Movement Or Reality

SR No.: 269309
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Thomas Ford Hoult
Publisher: Thomas Ford Hoult
Total Pages: 9
Language: English
Classification: Article
File Size: 799 KB

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58 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL ACTION
Sociology as Pure Science Although sociology proper began with the reformist ideas of Auguste Comte and others, the major thrust in the discipline has been, until very
recently, to make it a pure rather than an applied science. The prevailing · voices asserted that just as physics is to engineering, so should sociology be
to social action. In the words of one pioneer sociologist, Franklin Henry Giddings :
we need men......who will get busy with the adding machine and the logarithms, and give us exact studies, such as we get from the psychological laboratories...... Sociology can be made an exact, quantitative science if we can get industrious men interested in it
(Bernard, 1909:196).
The view expressed by Giddings became so dominant that, by the 1930's, sociologists who spoke about helping others were commonly scorned as simplistic do-gooders afflicted with a social worker mentality. "In a graduate seminar led by a neo-Darwinian professor in the 1920's,” Eldridge Sibley has recalled, "an adult student aroused only amused condescension when he asked, 'What has sociology done to make folks more kindly disposed toward one another?” (1971:14).
Rather, than a “helping discipline," sociology was regarded as "ethically neutral" or "value-free" relative to ideological questions of the day. The practical implications of this view were given expression by the late George Lundberg in a widely quoted passage : '
The services of real social scientists would be as indispensable to Fascists as to Communists and Democrats, just as are the services
of physicists and physicians (1961 :57).
Therefore, Lundberg concluded, the social scientist need not be concerned with the nature of any given political regime; even a fascist government will let an apolitical technician alone, over the long run, because “No regime can get along without this technology” (pp. 57-8). So, the proper political behavior for "real social scientists” is to be useful to the existing power structure even if it is despotic because after all "science has gone forward under a great variety of forms of government” (p.51).
I have emphasized that physical scientists are indispensable to any political regime. Social scientists might well work toward a corresponding status (Lundberg, 1961:57).
The Structural-functional Point of View
The value-free approach to social events has been an important aspect of the structural-functional viewpoint. Some have regarded this view as a theory in its own right; others assert that it is nothing more than a new name for an approach as old as sociology itself (Davis, 1959). In any case, by concentrating on the negative or positive contributions of any social entity to the system of which it is a part, functionalists have usually avoided making moral judgments about, for example, political events. Instead they