________________
HUMANISTIC SOCIOLOGY: PHANTOM MOVEMENT OR REALITY? 63
and burn hundreds of thousands of people; there is no making-do with misleading vocabulary such as "free fire zones" or "water-borne guard posts"; "search and destroy" is not sanitized to "search and clear," nor is bombing termed "reconnaissance in force."* There is no use of "personnel management" to cover employer subversion of worker attempts to improve their lot. There is no "operation this or that" to disguise the possibility of megadeaths from hideous new weaponry. Thus, the scholar who legitimately claims to be a humanist does two things at least: he or she actively declines to help make science a craven hand-maiden for the politics of exploitation; at the same time, she or he uses science as the most effective means for ascertaining what is really going on in the world, in contrast to the misinformation that so many of those in power prefer to have the public believe. In sum, one cannot meaningfully speak of "humanistic social scientists" unless one is describing observers who view sociocultural events accurately as well as systematically, and who are simultaneously possessed by an overwhelming desire to have science used solely for the betterment of humankind in general.
*Such were the common parlance used for ecocidal destruction of Viet Nam and Indo-China by the U.S. military propagandists.-Editor.
References:
Bernard, L.L. 1909 "The teaching of sociology in the United States." The American Journal of Sociology 15 (September): 164-213.
Chamblis, William J. 1973 Sociological Readings in the Conflict Perspective. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
Davis, Kingsley 1959 "The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociology and Anthropology." American Sociological Review 24 (December): 757-772.
Friedrichs, Robert W. 1970 A Sociology of Sociology. New York: The Free Press. Gouldner, Alvin W 1962 "Anti, Minotaur : The Myth of A Value-Free Sociology." Social Problems 9 (Winter): 199-213.
1970 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books.
Horowitz, Irving Louis 1965 The New Sociology: Essays in Social Science and Social Theory in Honor of C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hoult, Thomas Ford 1974 (tentative) Sociology for a New Day. New York: Random House, Inc.
Jacobs, Paul 1972 "The Cabinet of Dr. DOD." New York Review of Books 18 (9 March): 32-34.
Kleinberg, Benjamin S. 1973 American Society in the Post industrial Age: Technocracy, Power, and the End of ideology. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co.